Trapped in snow!!!!

To step things back, on Tuesday I had my test-run with the Stanford - South Africa BioMedical Informatics seminar series for which I am the student no the Stanford-end. We have bi-weekly presentations where students speak to an audience in South Africa as well as here at Stanford via teleconferencing. It's a great opportunity for both sides to get a chance to practice a talk and reach a broader audience of peers who are less likely to be "nice" about your work. It almost substitutes a student colloquium where work is presented annually by students (which has now been replaced by a journal club). Unfortunately the hard drive on my MacBook is DEAD so I had to use a borrowed SMI computer which had its own set of issues.

I also had my first lab meeting for Gill Bejerano's lab, as well as my last Wednesday ethics course (this Friday is my last one for the quarter)!!! The lab meeting was pretty good, I think they enjoyed my presentation. We were planning to go to see our collaborators at UCSF on Monday (details to follow), followed by a meeting with Gill and my BMI course. Unfortunately everything ran late, and I was behind at everything (not to mention exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep)! I was totally late to coffee with Marc so we ended up missing class completely talking about things, especially since I had to turn in an abstract that I had to write, which Marc had conveniently composed with Daphne! I was SO stressed, so I was pretty excited about our weekend trip! Friday night Alex had a huge group over for a Captain Morgan party. It was pretty great! Marissa from Arbor Clinic (the student-run clinic for which we are designing the EMR system for in BMI211) showed up. She's a real sweetie. Tons of BMI people were there!

On Saturday we woke up early and left around 8am for Kirkwood (yes that is early for me)! Noah got a chance to read in the car, and Marc got to do some reading (I on the other hand get totally car sick when I read in the car). So we got some skiing in on Saturday, which was great, until the snowfall. The snow was great! This is the first time I've had pretty nice coverage (aside from the fresh day we had with my dad). It was completely different, no patches of brown or green showing through, just great snow! We stopped for some food at the lodge on the back side of the mountain, and used the restrooms. They were basically holes in the ground! I kid you not! And steam was actually coming out of these holes!!!! Rather than a sink there was just hand sanitizer! It was pretty disgusting. I wasn't terribly hungry but I did need to eat a little something, so I split a chili bowl with Ryan which was just about the messiest thing I've ever eaten. Thankfully there was snow EVERYWHERE to help with the cleanup! :)

Marc and I decided to go back to the front after skiing down the backside once. It was getting really cold and super windy by then, so I figured I would just go to the front and warm up with some hot chocolate, and Marc decided to come along. Noah and Ryan went for a hike to catch some fresh snow at the top of the backside. But by the time we got to the bottom of the front side, I had warmed up and was pretty amped, so we ended up skiing a few more runs anyways (until way after 4pm when the lifts normally close). Noah and Ryan checked into the room, and Marc and I just kept going until they shut down the lifts.

We met them down at Bub's Pub where Noah was impressed by the plethora of ladies, but for whatever reason was not approaching a single one. Instead he bought us all a round of the most disgusting thing I've ever had the misfortune of drinking, Wild Turkey. It is a type of whiskey. I decided it should become a competition, and I bought a round of the cheapest tequila in the place, and filled it with whipped cream. I think Noah and Ryan's faces speak for themselves (below).

Noah doesn't look to happy...I guess I win!

Neither does Ryan! I'm sorry!!

I am banished outside for my gross mistreatment of their taste buds! Shouldn't this be a sign that we should be leaving?!

After this, we decided to go back to the room. That's me on the right trying to squeeze in the door with my huge helmet! Don't I look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining?! Noah promptly fell asleep. I tried to get some work done, but there was no internet connection available, and the lodge was closed at this point, so we decided to take a trip to South Lake Tahoe. This was my 3rd time to Kirkwood, but I still had never been to South Lake. With the new GPS I bought Ryan for Valentine's Day we drove there, and spent some time at Harrah's casino, where we were practicing for the following weekend's trip to Las Vegas. I won almost 50 dollars, which was great! But I'm sure overall I'm down.

On our drive back the snow was INCREDIBLE! And I do not mean that in a good way. We were driving and it was nearly impossible to see where we were going. The snow kept swirling around the car like we were driving through a tunnel, and it was mostly impossible to see. The car was DEAD silent. We were just so focused (although Ryan was the only one driving). It was extremely tense. It was definitely a sign, but somehow it still hadn't dawned on me that we could get snowed in!!!! We were just totally excited about how great the snow would be the next day! Ryan even wrote on the back of the car that had collected all that snow DRIVING!!!

The next morning the sky was totally dark and the snow was falling like crazy! The roads were closed, and we were trying to figure out when they would open. The lodge told us they were booked for the evening (so we had nowhere to stay) and that we can get our name on a waitlist. We wrote our names down, and decided there was nothing else to do but ski. We went on a ton of runs down lift 5, we found a nice chute where it wasn't completely freezing to ride down (since it was protected from the snow and wind), but I was getting progressively colder on every run. We called CalTrans every time we rode up, until FINALLY around 2 we got the go ahead!

We quickly ran down, loaded up the car, and headed down the highway.
They were not going to open our normal route, so we had to go up through South Lake and down the 50. We drove up and it was nearly impossible to see. There would be moments of complete white-out, and we would just wait until we could see brake lights in front of us. We made it about 3 miles until we hit a long line of cars just waiting. So we stopped the car and waited...and waited...and waited... About an hour and a half later we started watching a movie, then Noah walked ahead to the front to figure out what was happening. He put on his swim trunks while plows were going by and the car kept snowing over, and other cars couldn't start (look at the picture below, our windows are completely frosted over)!!! What a crazy guy!!! (picture left)

Around 530 all the cars moved! And then promptly stopped again. I predicted this meant they they had announced that the pass would open (where they were doing avalanche control) and that people simply got excited, jumped in their cars, and filled in the spaces where people had turned back. About an hour later we heard that they were going to be guiding through roughly 25 cars at a time (and we were car 43). And at 630, the cars actually moved again! Then about 30 minutes later the plows and CalTrans trucks turned around and headed back toward Kirkwood!!! We were devastated!!! People walked by and assured us they were simply on a shift change and should be back by 730. There was immense snow buildup, and cars were having trouble starting. If you look at the picture below you can see where cars had been before we moved! Not to mention...it is now dark out!

8pm rolled around and we hadn't moved...People were getting impatient and walked to the front and came back disgruntled, telling us a sign said 3am for opening time. We realized at this point we would not get out of Tahoe and we needed to find a hotel room to avoid having to sleep in the car! We found a cheap place and got some food, and I had to inform Gill that I was not going to be able to get out of Tahoe, even after trying for over 8 hours!!!!!!!!!!! This was terrible considering we had a meeting at UCSF at 10am!

I spent the ENTIRE night (I took a 30 minute nap at 8am) working on a good presentation to send to the collaborators. I sent it to Gill, who forwarded it to them, and rescheduled for Wednesday. At 930 am I got in bed to sleep until 11, but Ryan was hoping to get out of South Lake. We called, roads were open (the snow had finally stopped) and we headed down. It was very strange once we got out of the snow. Somehow with all the snowing we had been through it did not dawn on me that once we got to Mountain View it would be back to rain, not snow. Noah was pretty sad!

I was able to have a meeting with our collaborators on Wednesday (I presented to the group again), and they seemed very pleased at the prospect of working with us. I am extremely excited about the work, it should be absolutely great, once I am no longer being ribbed about what happened! I made a decision to 1) never schedule important meetings on Mondays and 2) never leave town when such a meeting is going to happen. I am glad things worked out in the end, and I plan on making it up to everyone 10-fold. It's just unfortunate I am leaving for Vegas on Friday.

On Wednesday night I went to Jessie's Thesis Defense dinner!!! I was so sad I had missed the actual defense in the morning. For whatever reason I thought it would be during the colloquium on Tuesday, but I was wrong!!! It was really fun! A ton of people from her lab and BMI came. We got the whole upstairs floor for her! Maureen's boyfriend and a guy from Jessie's lab look so much like each other, it's uncanny!!!! In all honesty, identical twins sort of freak me out in the first place, but photos of two people who don't know each other laughing at each other because they're so similar...even stranger!!!! They even laugh the same way!!!!!