On Saturday, around noon, I took my last free run down the ski hill. I went through the treed area called McCormack's Maze.

                 

We had a few inches of fresh snow, which made the woods quite nice - although they were better a couple of weeks ago, with seven inches of fresh.

I took my time down this run, of course, since I knew that it would be my last run of the year. I knew that when I got to the bottom of the run, that I would then ride up Lift 8 and head back towards the base area - I still had another chair to ride, but the rest of my skiing would be traversing back across the face of the mountain. It was a bit of a wistful experience - I knew that it was time to go, and I knew that I was ready to get some rest and to be home in Arizona, but I couldn't generate any real desire to leave Colorado.

Now we're back in Arizona - I'm sitting in the office in Scott$dale, running through a debug session in a bit if Javascript and capturing the traffic in Opnet ACE to find out why it's taking so long to get this database call to return. But only 44 hours ago, I was skiing in the Colorado Rockies. It's a little surreal - sorta reminds me of the song "Lady Marmalade" without all of the vice : ) "Now he's back home doing nine-to-five..." - did all of that really happen?

We're back in New River - the permits are still sitting at the County office ("I'm Hank County, your Kimball Agent") although they have the status of "released" - turns out that they are charging us an extra $1100 for permit changes. I reckon that they need to justify their existence somehow, but I wish they had justified it by maybe taking jobs in the private sector and leaving my fence alone : )

It's a beautiful day in Arizona - and a great time to live here. It is really wonderful. I'm going to focus on how nice it is, rather than comparing it to (say) Durango in the San Juan Mountains.