Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

full moon, eerie clouds
waxing howls tumble over
dead silent mountains

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Living close against a mountain range means that I spend a lot of time looking out into my backyard, ignoring the street and house lights to the east that interfere with an otherwise uninterrupted view. Though I’ve had my living room window view for four years now, I still find myself looking out, looking up, and always seeing something new and spectacular in the sky. Stepping outside to feel it more. Wanting to capture it in a photograph yet knowing that even Hubble photographs can only represent a fraction of the beauty that is experienced in person.

Some moments are only meant as moments. Trying to capture them, to more fully share or relive the moment, is impossible.

You may be wondering why the hell this three-part blog story is called “Park City Whiteout.” Well, this is the finale, and I promise an answer!

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In a somewhat undramatic turn of events, we got in to see Bass Ackwards! It turns out that the theater wasn’t even full. After we were seated and waiting for the film to start, I asked a girl in front of us to take a photo of me and Marie. She did, and I returned the favor. We shared a nice conversation with her and her sister, who turned out to be 2/3 of teenage triplets from Phoenix. Their other sister stayed at home with their dad to go to a dance instead of going with their mom to Park City. Obviously we know who the cool ones are: Sydney and Giselle!

The picture of them is much cuter than the picture of me and Marie. My fault, mostly. And the lady a few rows behind us who was eating in a somewhat ungracious manner.

So finally, at 8:30pm, we were able to see a film at Sundance. Unfortunately, it was not as wonderful as we’d hoped it would be. Marie put it well when she called it self-indulgent. The director was also the co-screenwriter and the main character. He seemed like a nice enough guy during the Q & A, but still.

Though there were elements of the film that were touching and very well-done, there were also elements that dragged on and I felt should have been edited down or out. Bass Ackwards was part of the NEXT series at Sundance, which features films done on a “microbudget” by choice, not necessarily necessity. According to the producer, the microbudget was about $100,000 for them. Considering that the film involved a cross-country journey in a small 1976 Volkswagen van, that seems impressive. And the cinematography was pretty awesome.

However, there was waaaay too much screen time of Linas in a deep v-neck t-shirt. Man boobs I can handle, but Men, please note: combining them with deep v-neck t-shirts is a bad idea. Making that a prominent wardrobe choice when the audience is supposed to like the main character is a terrible idea.

And now… drum roll please… Why this 3-part blog is called Park City Whiteout.

Marie and I left the theater a little after 10pm with an interest in going home. No midnight screenings for us, partially because we’re lame like that but also because it was snowing and we knew the drive home was not going to be perfect. I called Ben, who reported that there was a pretty strong system hitting Salt Lake City and headed east into Park City. Niiiice. This is the last photo I took that night.

We caught another bus that dropped us off a quarter (maybe half?) mile or so from the damn Park & Ride we worked so hard to get into. There was an inch or two of snow on the car, but it was starting to come down a little heavier. Read more…

CLEVER, can I just say that? S’no? Snow? Heh heh…

The excitement of my evening shift for the festival was dominated by the weather. It, uh, sucked. The road that leads into Sundance Canyon was closed for an hour or so shortly before I arrived because of snowfall and dangerous conditions and accidents. Hooray! It was open when I got there, but a cop stationed with flashing lights at the mouth of the canyon, right by the huge “snow tires/chains/4-wheel drive required” sign, stopped me to check. I have a little all-wheel drive Subaru (with relatively new tires, thank the flying spaghetti monster) so I was permitted to pass.

I took it slow and made it safely. The resort was blanketed in snow and totally gorgeous. Night skiing is new this year, so there were a lot of skiiers still on the mountain and clomping out in the parking lot. My cell phone reception sucked almost as much as the weather, possibly due in part to the weather, so I didn’t get to send the cell phone photos I took. But Twitpic is working, so yay for that! I did upload some photos to Flickr.

I didn’t end up watching much of either movie last night, but got to know the new volunteers and re-learned a little about people I worked with last year. I got my white volunteer jacket (which I have NOT yet dirtied), which fits for the most part.

The biggest adventure started after my shift ended at 10:30. I don’t have time to tell it in full right now because I’m supposed to meet my friend Marie and drive up to Park City in a little bit. But I didn’t get home until almost 1:30am. And it involved a little bit of this. Oooo, teaser!

How’s the weather where you live? The past week or so here in Utah has looked like this.

Nice inversion that’s trapping all the pollution inside the valley, huh? It’s pollution that makes me long for the fresh mountain air of summer, when the lake and mountains on the west side of the valley are visible.

Complain though I might, it’s nice to live a very short distance from views like these.

Hey there! So, um. This is my twelfth straight day of blogging. It’s like reverse quitting smoking. (In a way, if you look at it with your eyes crossed.)

Except for this little detail: I am straining right now when it comes to a topic that will be A) interesting to you and B) something I feel like writing about today. I started a different blog post earlier, but I don’t feel like finishing it right now, and I’ve been tired all day and my eyes are dry again, blah blah blah.

Oh! Speaking of dry eyes. And breathing, but sort of not really. When I went out to my car this morning, that’s how I felt. I briefly wondered if maybe I was starting to get sick? There wasn’t any pain in my lungs. It’s just that the air was sort of… chunky? Heavy? A big lightbulb went off in my head when I turned the car on and the local NPR radio personality’s first word to me was “Provo, Utah, blah blah, worst air quality in the nation at a level of 140 followed by Salt Lake City at 122, with L.A. being at 51.”

I don’t know if those numbers are exactly right, but that was not surprising. I’m guessing that those numbers are just for a certain time period, like a day or week or something, because I can’t imagine Provo being more polluted than L.A. all the time. We have this thing the locals call an inversion, which means that because our valley is completely surrounded by mountains, when we have overcast skies and low-hanging clouds it’s basically like a domed arena and all the pollution is trapped inside. And there is a finite amount of beer.

Yeah, icky.

Well, I better publish this before my time is up. Hopefully there will be more quality in tomorrow’s post.

I honestly love snow, and I never want to live anywhere without a “real” winter. However, this winter of 2008/2009 is officially on my shit list.

It started early and has been a very wet winter for Utah—which is GREAT for the mountain snow pack, should it ever actually start to melt and fill the rivers and reservoirs with water. But there has been a little Springtime torture mixed in lately that is driving me NUTS.

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Exhibit A: Sunday, April 12, 2009

I took this photo on Easter and thought, “Oh wow! Spring has finally sprung!”

It had been chilly and rainy in the afternoon but warmed up enough to be simply cool and delightful. Ben and I sat outside and enjoyed the early evening sun until it got too cold.

The past couple weeks have had spotty sun and more day-to-day clouds than I think I’ve ever seen since moving to Utah. I’m just being whiny*, of course. This is still no comparison to Cincinnati’s total of 4 nice days a year.

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Exhibit B: Tuesday, April 14, 2009

It got colder again and rained for a good portion of the day. As I was walking on the university campus with my bold purple umbrella protecting me, I had to try very hard not to smile and laugh and all of the people who weren’t even wearing jackets, let alone carrying umbrellas.

It made me think of a recent episode of Heroes when Angela Petrelli chides Noah for being out in the rain without an umbrella. And then that irritated me because hello, Heroes? Needs to just quit being a telenovela and kill everyone off except Hiro. And then Hiro needs to be badass like Future Hiro in Season 1. Read more…

I want to tell you my exciting stories of Sundance and being a college student again, but it’s about all I can do right now to keep my eyes open. So instead, I give you photos I took a couple days ago. There’s this weather “inversion” that’s hanging over Utah Valley and keeping all the pollution trapped inside, sometimes masquerading as fog but more often it’s a haze that’s clearly visible from higher elevations.

On the plus side, it makes early morning drives very pretty because of all the frost that collects on the trees. The frost disappears mid-morning, leaving the trees a drab winter brown—but then the frost reappears again overnight. It’s fabulously magical and makes it easier to get up on cold winter mornings.

Ben was making liquid bread this evening and had the windows open for ventilation.

“It’s FREEZING in here,” I said after coming home from grocery shopping after work. Ben rolled his eyes and kept on working. I played a little Mario Galaxy (I’m at 23 stars now) until my hands turned into icicles.

“It’s really, really cold in the house,” I said. Ben rolled his eyes again and told me to wait until he was finished. He eventually turned the heat back on and closed the windows. I checked the current temperature for our town on weather.com: 8 degrees. That’s -13.3 degrees Celsius.

“I told you it was cold in here,” I said with an icy stare (literally; I think my eyeballs are still coated with a sheet of ice).

“Oh hey,” I then said. “I should check to see what the weather forecast is for Park City on Wednesday when I’ll be there.”

A high of 13? Fuuuuuuuuck… At least I’ll get a free coat from the Sundance people. I can wear it over my other coat.

Yesterday it was 70 degrees and sunny here in Utah Valley. I walked barefoot on the grass in my yard, then I went for a walk on a Hobble Creek Canyon trail with my dad and his dog and it was simply gorgeous. Oh, mid-March weather, please say you’ll stay this way!

We kept the windows cracked last night to relish the fresh air… but it was definitely too-cold-to-get-up this morning. Yeah, so it dropped down to near freezing last night. This mountain-desert weather throws me sometimes, but I still prefer it to perma-cloudy Cincinnati, with its 45 degrees or 85 degrees with 95% humidity all the time. I do, however, miss the Cleveland snow belt weather, with the 1 to 2-foot dumps of lake-effect snow. Frosty!

It’s cool and sunny right now and quite humid today at 54%. Relatively speaking.