Happy Birthday to me!

We just finished up a great birthday weekend. Friday night, I joined Amanda in San Francisco for a fabulous birthday dinner. We went to the House of Prime Rib, where the only items on the menu were: a small amount of prime rib, a normal amount of prime rib, a lot of prime rib, and fish of the day. I've become somewhat of a primerib snob ever since we started making it ourselves, but all I can say was this was FANTASTIC!

Then, on Saturday morning, we got up at 3:30am to catch a bus to take us to Squaw Valley in Tahoe to go snowboarding. By the time we got to the Sierra mountains, a full fledged winter storm was in effect and the interstate has snow chain restrictions on. So after sitting in the snow for about half an hour, we finished making our way up the mountain. But all day, the snow kept coming down hard and most of the mountain was shut down (the top of the slopes were seeing 100 mph winds). So I spent some time learning how to snowboard and managed to spend more time on my butt then standing up, while Amanda rummaged through the shops the take up what used to be the Olympic Village. About 3:00 we called it a day and headed back to the bus. But the weather hadn't let go of us yet, and our 4 hour drive back turned into 6.5 hours. The next day, I could barely move, but it was all worth it! We do need to go back, as we really weren't able to see the place in the near white out conditions. It was nice skiing for the first time in fresh powder, but we missed out on all the spectacular views.

Amanda's really cool mini-cakes: