I figure that I’d pay more attention to this site if I updated it more than once a year, and what better way to start than by introducing Exploding Goat. Let me explain. A friend of mine and I recently entered the homebrewing game by purchasing a homebrewing kit. We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we’re stoked. So stoked in fact that we’ve already named our beer “company” and our first 3 brews even though we haven’t started brewing yet.

And we decided to call it Exploding Goat.

You may wonder what exploding goats have to do with beer, but it appeals to the metalhead in myself and, well, Abe is just a disturbed individual. Just kidding.*

Since I like to procrastinate, I spent some time today working on a logo for Exploding Goat breweries, the result of which is below. It reminds me of something a DIY punk band would include in their home-recorded CD-R demo as a sticker. Nevertheless, we now have a logo for our “company” and no beer.

And I’m still stoked.

*Not really

I was able to score tickets to the Whistler premier of the much hyped The Art Of Flight last night. Not quite as metal as the Metal Trailer (below) would have you believe, but it still continues to up the bar of big-budget snowboarding films that That’s It, That’s All set in 2008.

“You’re going to shit yourself Rayner. You’re going to shit yourself from the food, and you’re going to shit yourself when you shred down that mountain.” – Justin Fitzpatrick.

I shat myself this past Wednesday, and it wasn’t from the food. And when we finished the day our guide B2 said “that was nothing.”

A TYPICAL DAY IN GULMARG

When I wake up in the morning I can see my breath. It’s cold and I’m on a budget. The first thing I do is hope that my friend Sandy gets up before me to fire up the bukari, a Kashmiri wood-burning stove that heats up our room. Our room smells like smoke and kerosene because of it. Although we are staying in a hotel its almost like we’re camping. I shower from a bucket, sometimes by candlelight if the power goes out (and it goes out often), wash my clothes by hand and get woken up at 5am and 7am respectively courtesy of the mosque across the street. But we put up with it because a short 10 minute stroll from our hotel is Mt Apharwat.

Tourism has been slow in Gulmarg this year because of a low snowfall. This means that less people are visiting, which is fine by me because a week after I’ve arrived, and since the last storm, we’re still finding untouched spots to shred down. I keep on hearing about storms bringing 4ft (120cms) of snow in one sitting and hope that one will come before I leave in 2 weeks time.

As Sandy says: Gulmarg = Whistler without the scenesters, parks, attitude, gorbies and all that other nonsense. I love this place!

***

Don’t be silly on the hilly – Sign on the road from Jammu to Srinagar.

After whiskey driving risky – Another sign on the road from Jammu to Srinagar.

“We’re about to go uber-bukkake” – Sandy, referring to the bukari

“I was knee deep, and then I was vagina deep” – Emily, referring to her hike before her shred to Drang village.

One of the best times of the year for me is Movember. I always try to up the ante from the previous Movember, and this year was no exception. What better way to celebrate the Mo and raise some funds for charity than to design a t-shirt for the occasion. Easier said than done, so I found, converting 30+ people into mustachioed cartoons. Each person took at least an hour to complete, and what was fun to begin with soon became a chore. Nevertheless I persevered and created an awesome t-shirt that came out great (thanks go out to Top Drawer Graphics in Nanaimo. They are silkscreen masters).

All Mo’s used in the creation of this t-shirt are real.

No Mo’s were harmed in the production of this t-shirt.

I’ve been working on a simple image resizing application that will resize my images, round the corners and place a watermark image in the right-hand corner of the image. I still have a few bugs to work out (for example it won’t resize images taken on my DSLR), but it works for the most part. Some examples of its magic can be found below:

Guy in a gorilla suit chasing after a wheel of cheese. 2009 Cheese Rolling Championships.

The view outside my room.

When my friend Sandy said in passing that he was planning a ski trip to Kashmir, India, and would I like to join him, I pretty much made up my mind that this was going to happen the very next day. I live for this stuff. India was by far my favourite country to travel in when I did my around the world trip in 2005/06, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do it again with a friend. Of course, this being Kashmir, it does come with its fair share of unrest, as recent events have attested. Nevertheless, gnar will be shred and good times will be had.

It’s good to have the travel juices flowing again.

It’s these types of stories that should pop up in newspapers far more frequently:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8455897.stm

A friend asked me recently which ten seconds would I relive if I could in 2009. When I look back over the year, highlights include travelling to Bhutan (completing a 4 day trek and seeing the King play basketball) and Burma (eating brains and riding on a human powered ferris wheel), Movember, rocking a mega-stache (“one part ’83-’88 Hetfield, one part Lemmy from Motorhead, a dash of gnar and filled to the top with awesome”) and “blast[ing] into the stratosphere on my gravity propelled snow rocket after hitting the wind-lip on [Blackcomb] glacier,” getting the biggest air of my life in the process. The one thing that stood out was one sunny morning in March, when I climbed up Spanky’s, strapped on my gravity propelled snow rocket and proceeded to shred the gnar on top of 50cms of fresh powder down Sapphire Bowl. It was the cherry on top of 10 years of snowboarding and 4 seasons in Whistler. Those are the 10(ish) seconds I’d relive in 2009.