The "English Gentleman's Room" undergoing renovation.

The "English Gentleman's Room" undergoing renovation.

The Killington Resort opened for skiing and riding for the 2011-2012 season on Saturday morning. It's now Monday, and I have not been able to get near thinking about skiing... what the @#$%!

The race is on at the inn to get everything ready for the arrival of large numbers of winter guests. In addition to snow blowing 8 inches of new snow on Sunday Morning, work has been going full bore at the inn. I am not sure why I feel like we are behind... maybe the hurricane at the end of August diverted time away from getting things done at the inn, but every day is a step closer to getting out for a few runs on the mountain.

Over the last week, a number of projects got started around the inn. Our main web site has begun it's seasonal transition to winter. A new photo gallery has been created for the index page, and the ski package calculator with winter rates for ski packages for this season has been reprogrammed. Work on web sites is never done, so expect to see more changes to birchridge.com in the coming weeks.

Major renovation work is also ongoing to some of the rooms around the inn. With the TV upgrade to HD completed, we have not switched gears to redoing some of the rooms. The big project is in Room 8, the English Gentleman's Room. New carved ceiling moulding was installed at the end of last week. My job this week is to completely repaint the room. Yesterday was dedicated to "spackling" the various imperfections in the walls and ceiling created over time. Today's efforts involve painting the ceiling. Later on in the day, I will begin cutting in the walls with an eye to getting them done tomorrow(hopefully).

Work is also taking place to redesign the internet network at the inn to be better able to serve our inn guests. I have been meeting with Vermont Telephone, the carrier which provides our access point into the internet to add in additional capacity. Next year VTEL will be dropping fiber into the inn as part of a wholesale change to their network. For this winter, we will be adding an addition DSL line for more bandwidth. Of course, it's not quite that simple. To get the 2 DSL lines working together, we will also be adding a load balancing router to be able to take advantage of the increased bandwidth. (Having come out of that businesses 14 years ago) I have the router spec'd and on order. With luck, we will have the network changes completed before Thanksgiving.

And, of course, just when we thought things were under control, we decided after some discussions of alternatives, that it was time to retire my 9 year old Subaru Forester and replace it before the start of winter. The Subaru had served me well, but 9 year old cars do need some maintenance. We decided the money that needed to be spent to get the Subaru ready for winter would be better spent towards a down payment on a new car. So late last week and through out the weekend, I was spending most of my time in Rutland visiting car dealers. After driving 5 different small and mid-sized SUV's (we decided that the new car needed to be All Wheel Drive as Mary's is just Front wheel Drive), we made the change from Subaru to Honda with the acquisition of a new Honda CRV. At least that is out of the way for now. But there is something about that new car smell.

Let it snow!!!