Early Season Skiing in the Waning Days of 2017

Since returning home from Denmark and wrapping up the fall semester at the University, I've been focused on skiing. It's been the best start to a ski season that I can remember, with lots of powder days so far. Most of the outings have been just Jen and I getting up to Snowbowl, but we did make one family trip to Elkhorn Hot Springs, followed by a day of skiing at Lost Trail. Both were great, but I especially recommend Elkhorn if you like a rustic experience.

2017 has been action-packed, with a lot of challenges. Looking back on my life, there have been a few years in which 'everything' seems to happen. 1996 was one of those years, filled with family death & drama, college graduation, and marriage. 2017 seems to have been one of those years as well. It'd be nice if the challenges tapered off in 2018, but I'm not going to count on it.

Here are a few mixes of music I've been listening to over the past couple of months:

Rockin' Women

R&B

Ambient/Electronic

Teaching A Short Course at the Danish Technical University

My host Per Christian Hansen in downtown Copenhagen.

This past week, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, teaching a short course - called Computational Uncertainty Quantification for Inverse Problems - to graduate students at the Danish Technical University. I taught the same course at UM this past semester, preparing the slides for the short course as I went. It was a big effort, and I had a few periods of panic and stress worrying about the short course during the fall term. But as a consequence, by the time I left for Denmark last week, I was well-prepared, and so the course went well. It was still an intense week: teaching went from 9-4pm, Monday-to-Friday, and I got a bad cold - probably a culmination of my stressful semester - early in the week. I write this blog post at the beginning of my journey home, sleep deprived and feeling unwell, but also feeling blessed to have such experiences and to be returning to Denmark for 4 months of my sabbatical next fall.

The Math and CS Dept Xmas party. This is what happens at a well-funded university.

Stanley Hot Springs, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

This fall, work has been all-consuming, and I've lost the drive for adventure. So our trip to Stanley Hot Springs last weekend was at Jen's urging. I've heard that the creek crossing 1/4 mile from the springs can be sketchy when the creek is high, and this time we experienced it. The log-shimmy we had to do to cross the creek can be seen in the video below. Everything was coated with a thin sheet of ice. It was nerve wracking, but nothing too terrible. On the way home, we grabbed food at Lochsa Lodge, making for a great day.