I spent my first day on the mountain today. It didn't start out perfectly. My clothes are so many years past their waterproof prime, I'm pretty sure they actually absorb moisture. My rented gear was the wrong size, and the guy at the rental shop put my bindings on the wrong way. But once I got on the mountain, none of that mattered.

Seth and I rode for a few hours. It was that perfect northeast day. Not too crowded. Not too cold. Beautiful white snow pushed around the edges.

We spend most of the time in our heads. Analyzing. Judging. Acting. But, sometimes, if we're lucky, we get these incredibly perfect moments. Moments of presence. Moments that are totally independent of both the past or the future. When you aren't trying. You aren't acting.

In this world of wanting and taking and having and doing, it's nice to just submit to the beautiful silence of just being. That is the gift that the mountain gave me today.

Check this talent out.

blue and yellow from edison on Vimeo.

There's plenty more where that came from.

On the lighter side of things, at least The Onion perpetually makes me laugh.

This site

is totally and

hilariously offensive

Well it's official. The old version of Republican and Democrat no longer apply. It's not about actual issues anymore. It's about blue and red. It's about us and them. It's about Olbermann and O'Reiley.

Why isn't Obama debating Ron Paul or Ralph Nader? Why isn't anybody paying attention to the actual substance (or lack-therof) in this polical campaign?

Don't take it from me. Take it from the son of William F. Buckley.

"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?

"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"

But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect.

Republicans are new Democrats.

When I was in high school, I excelled in math and science. I remember talking to my guidance councilor about my future career options and he suggested I become a math teacher. I became an electrical engineer. Now while this choice certainly wasn't average, there is nothing really extraordinary about it. Plenty of people are electrical engineers. And most of them are probably better at it than I am. But whenever I mention that this is my career of choice I generally get a look of surprise followed by one of the following responses:

"You don't LOOK like an electrical engineer"
"Well you are the prettiest electrical engineer I've ever seen."
"Wow. That must have been really tough. Weren't you like the only girl?"

I do not attribute any of the above statements to sexism, they do point to a kind of gender stereotyping that can be dangerous. Throughout school and my career I have experienced a significant amount of sexism. Most of it was subtle. I always tried to deal with it internally. There were probably times I should have been more vocal, but it IS intimidating being a minority. And you come up with defense mechanisms that may or may not be in your best interest.

Now I have been and Obama supporter since I started paying attention, but I loved Hillary Clinton. I didn't always love the way she ran her campaign. But I loved how intelligent and well spoken she was. I loved the way that she was representing women in politics. I understand why so many women felt so passionately about her. And this may be an unpopular thing to say, but I thought that she had every right to call people out on sexism when she did. I realize that it was part of the political game, but I don’t think that she used the so-called "gender card" lightly. That is something that I could relate to.

That is why it is so excruciating for me to watch this Sarah Palin debacle. She is pretty. She is popular. She is everything that Hillary is not. But that is not what this is about. This is about the future of our country. This is about our environment and our freedom of choice. This is about our jobs and our troops overseas. And John McCain has essentially nominated Paris Hilton as his running-mate. I'm sick. I'm sick of watching the right abuse the "gender card" after crucifying Clinton for even mentioning it. I'm sick of wathing the left refer to her as a "Bimbo". I'm sick of watching Katie Couric cringe while she gets caught up in Palin's nonsense.

Sarah Palin is ignorant. She is small minded. She is uneducated. She CANNOT represent my gender in politics. She CANNOT be the one that young girls and women look up to. This is a huge setback for women in politics. I think that this Slate.com article sums it up pretty well:

"But Palin's gender is at the center of another set of reactions I've been hearing and reading among women who don't support her ticket, filled with ambivalence over how bad she is. Laugh at the Tina Fey parodies that make Palin ridiculous just by quoting her verbatim. And then cry. When Palin tanks, it's good for the country if you want Obama and Biden to win, but it's bad for the future of women in national politics. I'm in this boat, too. Should we feel sorry for Sarah Palin? No. But if she fails miserably, we might be excused for feeling a bit sorry for ourselves.

Palin is the most prominent woman on the political stage at the moment. By taking unprepared hesitancy and lack of preparation to a sentence-stopping level, she's yanking us back to the old assumption that women can't hack it at these heights. We know that's not true—we've just watched Hillary Clinton power through a campaign with a masterful grasp of policy and detail. Clinton lost in part because she was the girl grind. Complex sentences, the names of Supreme Court cases, and bizarre warnings about foreign heads of state invading our airspace weren't her problem. The fear now is that Palin is the anti-Hillary and that her lack of competence threatens to undo what the Democratic primary did for women. Palin won't bust through the ceiling that has Hillary's 18 million cracks in it. She'll give men an excuse to replace it with a new one."

Last night I watched a show on PBS about past presidential debates. It started covering Carter and Ford and went all the way through Bush/Kerry. But the worst part was watching the Bush/Gore debates. Mostly because it was like watching the republicans today. All venom. No Substance. We have had eight years of death, greed and hatred. It has not served us. We are not safer. We are not economically sound. Our dollar is weak. We can't afford health care. The division of wealth grows wider and wider. And despite all the suffering it seems like nobody has learned from the mistakes of the current administration.

My favorite part of the debate was when Jim Lehrer started talking about the budget surplus. Yes you heard me right. I said surplus. The conversation went something like this:

JL: "One of the problems facing the next president is the current budget surplus. Right now there is a $230 Billion surplus and it is estimated that we will have a $4.5 Trillion surplus by the year 2010. What will you do with this surplus?"

AG: "Well Jim, I will put it back into the hands of hard working Americans. I will create programs that support social security, provide health care, address our environmental concerns and I will cut taxes for the middle class."

GWB: "That is ridiculous Al. Here's what I'm going to do. First, I will take that money and start a war that we cannot win based on false pretenses. Then I will give a large chunk of it to Haliburton and other companies that I'm in bed with. Then I will take what's left over, turn it into gold coins and fill up an entire room in my house with them so I can swim around in my money like Scrooge McDuck. Heh heh heh heh heh."

2000: $230 Billion Surplus
2008: $418 Billion Deficit

Thank you G Dubs

I started riding in 2001. My hair was short, I wore a dark gray jacket that was a size or two too big for me, and I stood about 5'2". All geared up, I was mistaken for a little kid more than once. My favorite conversation happened one of my first days out. I was taking a lesson at Smugglers Notch in Jeffersonville, VT. It went something like this:

Instructor: "Hi there. Do you have your parental consent form all filled out for us?"
Me: "No"
Instructor: "Damn. The parents always forget to fill that out. Do you happen to know where your parents are?"
Me: "Yes"
Instructor: "Ok. Good. Where are they?"
Me: "At home in upstate New York."
(pause)
Instructor: "Um, how old are you?"
Me: "23"

Fast forward six years. My first day out in over a year. I'm in Idaho with Seth riding in the best snow I have ever experienced. The day is phenomenal. I am perpetually covered in snow. My bindings are all screwed up. I can't feel my toes. There is nowhere else in the world I would rather be.

My hair is short again, my jacket is a brownish color and it turns out I haven't grown any since the age of 23. Seth and I get off the lift and start the traverse to where all the good snow is. All of a sudden I hear a voice from behind me. It says:

"Hey buddy, coming through on your left"

Then I was passed on my left.

I am going to start wearing pink.

What's up 7YW?

I moved to Vermont in 2001. I was 23 years old and genuinely believed that I had found the place where I would settle down and make my home. Now I'm 29 years old. I still love Vermont, however I have realized that settling down might not be my forte. In the past two years, I have moved 5 times, driven cross country twice, and spent more time breathing airplane germs than I care to recall. Home has become a bit of a foreign concept. But despite the fact that most of my stuff is perpetually in boxes, and I keep having to switch pharmacies, I have never felt more fulfilled. Most recently, I find myself living in Northern California. And while I haven't adapted to the local dialect yet (what the crap does "hella" mean anyway?), I am feeling more at home than I have felt in a long time. Vermont might have some competition.

This weekend my friend Jill and I took off from San Francisco and drove down the coast to visit our good friend Robyn in Santa Barbara. We drove down Rt 1 through Big Sur and got some awesome shots along the way. For your viewing pleasure...

A waterfall into the Pacific

Elephant Seals smell like blubber.

California Condor or Turkey Vulture?

You decide...

Here comes the sun.