Our Sierra

Besides being talented, smart and ridiculously good looking, we at Tahoe Quarterly also pride ourselves on our big, generous hearts. Which is why Lis, Nicci and I walked over to the Incline Village fire station to donate blood today. I’m totally kidding—we went for the free donuts.

Anyway, it was a fine enough experience, at first. The nurses were all extremely professional (which I always imagine is hard when you have to ask every person about their drug sharing habits with prostitutes in third world countries). I do, however, prefer blood drives in Pennsylvania, where someone always dresses up as a blood droplet, looking like a giant red Hershey kiss.

It was Lis’s first donation, so Nicci and I waited until she had the needle in her arm to talk about donations-gone-wrong—veins that can’t be found, sadistic nurses, etc.

As the veteran blood donors, Nicci and I finished first, pumping it out quick and painlessly, then walking over to the snack stand to load up on carbs and fluids. Which is where I started feeling kind of funny. Suddenly I wasn’t in my chair anymore, but on the floor staring groggily at the ceiling while two men stuffed pillows under my head.

“So is she the first one to pass out today?” Nicci asked, and I was not proud to hear that I, indeed, was.

Regardless, drained and embarrassed, it felt nice to do a good deed. Luckily, the Tahoe Basin has plenty of other opportunities for those looking to volunteer. There’s the Bear League in Homewood, the Boys & Girls Club in South Lake Tahoe and Kings Beach, Project MANA in Incline Village, and numerous other foundations and community support networks surrounding The Lake. So whether you are helping the poor or unconscious on your back in a fire station while someone named Todd tries to get your blood pressure under control, please enjoy your service, as it makes our community a better place.

Tags: bear league, blood donation, boys and girls club, charity, Community, nonprofit, project mana, volunteer
Posted in: Community, Favorite Tahoe To-Dos, Life at The Lake
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This is my first real winter in Tahoe. It’s great. Alpine Meadows has had terrific snow, and all the lifts have been open—even Sherwood. I just got cross-country skis and I’ve already been sledding. It’s just that… oh my god, is it cold!

I’m originally from Pennsylvania, and we know cold there. But this—this bone-chilling, marrow-freezing, arctic chill is something that no one in their right mind should live in.

I think maybe the problem is that my drafty little house has no heat—just an upstairs fireplace. When I moved here, in June, it didn’t seem like a big deal. But now, when I get home from work, it’s a little different. It is really hard to start a fire while wearing gloves, even harder without gloves when my fingers are too numb to flick the lighter.

We had a mini-crisis the last big snow. (“A 50-year snow,” the experts said. Made me feel special.) It just so happened that we ran out of the firewood our home’s predecessors had left behind, go figure, just as the snow started to fall. Luckily, I called down to the Pizza Shack in Truckee, which often has big trucks full of lumber sitting outside. The guy, Brian, told me that I could have some, about $40 worth of wood. The rest was saved for little old ladies who, like me, forgot to restock and would freeze otherwise.

The snow was nice. Not so much for my fiancé, who is the official shoveler in our home, but for me, who didn’t leave the couch that entire day and most of the next. It’s alright, though; it’s a comfortable couch. I don’t mind waiting there until spring.

Tags: cold, firewood, snow, truckee, winter
Posted in: Big Winter, Exstateriates, Life at The Lake
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The four inches of snow outside my window that I awoke to on September 29 didn’t particularly make me want to lace up my sneakers and run 13.1 miles. But as I rolled out bed that morning, I prepared to do just that. I downed some coffee, dressed (warmly) and got in the car with my fiancé, Jason, and my brother, David, who had flown in from Pennsylvania to run the marathon. We drove to Tahoe City, parked and they walked over to Commons Beach, the starting point of the full marathon, while I loaded a shuttle with other half marathon participants and we were bused to our stop, halfway between Tahoe City and Pope Beach, and dropped off in the cold. We had two hours till the start of our race. Hopping a little to stay warm, the busload of us started trudging up Glen Street, not really sure what to do for the next couple hours. It was freezing outside, and we picked our way up the street, avoiding patches of black ice. As we walked uphill, chilly and slightly disgruntled, a woman came running outside, waving to us. She and her sister were running the half marathon too, she explained. Why don’t we all come inside until the start?

Feeling warmer already, we filed in the house, one by one, at least 20 of us. The woman who brought us in told us that she, her sister and her mother had rented the house for the weekend. The mother, a sweet older woman still in her pajamas made us a fire in the big, open living room. They felt so bad for us, she explained, at the thought of us all standing out in the cold for hours. One sister offered coffee and tea. The other brought around plates of bananas and blueberry bagels. We stretched and talked and laughed and ate. The sisters invited even more people into the home and the mother passed around more food and drinks. A couple of us started playing Balderdash, a board game where everyone makes up ridiculous definitions to ridiculous words, like “scrumpox,” (which actually has a much more innocent meaning than what some of us came up with). The sun slowly came out from behind the clouds.

The time flew by. At 10:30 a.m., we left the house that we had entered two hours earlier, cold and as strangers, now warm and as friends. We crowded the starting line with a couple hundred other people. As the gun went off, I lost them all in the other runners, who were jammed so close together that we jogged only at a jerky trudge until we got down that first hill and away from the melting patches of ice. Throughout the race, up the “Hell Hill,” past Inspiration Point, down the switchbacks and around the historic estates, I’d pass or be passed by the people I had huddled by a fire and drank coffee with that morning. Thirteen miles later, I found Jason and David at the finish line. We got our medals and hobbled to the shuttle that would take us from the Pope Beach end back to the Tahoe City start, and I explained to them the possible definitions for the word “scrumpox.”

Tags: half marathon, running, scrumpox, tahoe
Posted in: Favorite Tahoe To-Dos
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