Thursday, April 28, 2011

Mountain Madness

During a company book sale last year I picked up a non-fiction book called Into Thin Air.  I hadn't heard of it before; it's written by a reporter who witnessed firsthand the disaster on Mt. Everest in 1996 as the group of climbers he was with were trapped near the summit due to a sudden snow storm.  It would become the deadliest climbing season in the history of Everest.  The back cover had quotes like these:

"Ranks among the great adventure books of all time"

"A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgement..."

"virtually defines excellence in the genre of narrative nonfiction"

So I decided to get it, thinking it might make a good gift.  Wendy had other plans, though:  she'd heard of the book, knew it was really good, and had wanted to read it for a long time.  In addition, she remembered the news stories about the disaster when it happened, and had vivid memories of seeing the survivors being rescued.

On our recent trip to Phoenix, she brought the book along and almost finished it during the 4-hour flight.  "It is utterly absorbing," she said.

I decided to read it on the flight home and it hooked me in.  I didn't finish nearly as fast as Wendy, but I was just as enthralled.  It is a very harrowing read.  Afterwards, we talked about all the amazing things from the book (and there are many).

The most amazing thing I got is just how huge Mt. Everest is.  When we lived in Colorado, we had a great view of Long's Peak, which is 14,259 feet.  If you doubled the size of Long's Peak, it still wouldn't match Everest, which stands at 29,028 feet.

But the author of Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer) had even better ways to express it:

1.  The peak of Mt. Everest is at cruising altitude for some jetliners.
2.  Everest is so high that for most of the year it pierces the jet stream!  This creates a contrail of ice particles steaming off the peak.  Twice each year, during the spring and fall, the jet stream moves north of Everest, and that's when most summit attempts happen.

It dawned on me last week that it's spring now, so there are probably groups climbing the mountain right now and blogging their experience.  Here's one such group I've started following:

http://peakfreaks.com/everestnews2011.htm

Finally, much to my surprise, right after I finished the book, Jon Krakauer appeared in the news again, this time for alleging the book Three Cups of Tea is a fraud.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Spinach Salad

While making breakfast this morning, I looked out the window and discovered we had an inch or two of snow, just enough to cover the grass and coat the trees.  Between the snow and the oatmeal I was eating, this morning had a distinctly winter feel.

A couple of weekends ago Wendy and I went to Phoenix to visit Joy and Cory.  It was the first time either of us had spent any substantial amount of time in Phoenix, so it was cool to get a feel for the area.  My impression is that it looks entirely like an alien world.  The landscape is barren and sun-bleached, with cactus of all different shapes and sizes poking out of the ground.  The vegetation is just vastly different from the Midwest.

We did some cool things while we were there, including visiting the Botanical Gardens and viewing artwork and decorations produced by local artists.  My favorite activity was going to Taliesin West, which served as Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and as a school for aspiring architects.  Wright’s summer home, Taliesin, was in Wisconsin, just west of Madison.  We haven’t been to see it yet, but we both want to now that we’ve seen Taliesin West.

Our flight to Phoenix went smoothly (discounting the extremely talkative retired guy I sat next to), but our flight home was delayed by 3 hours, which was never fully explained, but we overheard the ticket-counter lady saying that if a flight has to be delayed, Southwest likes to delay the Phoenix to Milwaukee flight because it’s a long haul flight with few connections in Milwaukee.  So that’s something to be aware of in the future.  At least they did give each of us a $100 voucher for a future flight.

While we visited Joy and Cory, we had a spinach salad for dinner a couple of nights.  That led to a conversation about something I discovered a few years ago: spinach helps me sleep better.  Even if I’ve been sleeping well, I can still tell that I sleep deeper than usual the night after eating spinach.  But, it has to be fresh spinach: frozen or cooked spinach doesn’t do the trick.

I discovered this effect after I kept reading about people making green smoothies (spinach + fruit blended together) as a way to get lots of leafy green vegetables.  So I decided to give it a shot.  For my first attempt, I went heavy on the spinach and light on the fruit (I think I used spinach, a banana, and ice cubes).  The result, as you might imagine, really wasn’t that good.  But I’d made a big glass of it, so I drank it.  And when I woke up the next morning I could not believe how well I’d slept.  That’s when I made the link.

I tried green smoothies a couple more times and discovered the magic ratio was 2 parts fruit to 1 part spinach.  If you did that, you really couldn’t tell there was any spinach; it tasted just like a fruit smoothie.  But that meant not as much spinach, so the improved-sleep effect wasn’t as great.  Eventually I stopped with the smoothies, deciding that eating a spinach salad was just as easy, tasted just as good, if not better, and as an added bonus I didn’t have to wash the blender when I was done.

The spinach salad we had in Phoenix was delicious: it had spinach, feta, dried cranberries, pecans, onions, and raspberry vinaigrette.  I highly recommend it.