Kombi Sports sent the gear for this year’s team to me on Friday, and I must admit a certain early Christmas-like glee in opening the box and checking everything out. There is again, a serious amount of gear in the box and it really does wonders for my spirits. For the past 7 years (about) they have helped gear our team – and I can honestly not having to think about freezing during the sculpting marathon has helped us reach whatever peaks we’ve reached. I don’t know if any others reading this have ever spent five or nine hours kneeling in a cramped spot in the snow trying to make the leg look like a leg – but technical underlayers and a super-duper pair of gloves makes it all possible.

I do remember what inspired me to call them too – it was the year it was 30 below every day we were sculpting. It was like sculpting a six foot thick chunck of ice – hardly anyone came to see it and three sculpting teams did not finish their pieces – something I have never even heard of before. Well – we managed to finish and we managed to win – but I didn’t feel warm for about a week. The gloves I had were trashed so I went looking for new ones and I was talking to the person at the store and they mentioned Kombo being HQ’ed in Essex Junction – so I wrote them and they sent us some gear the following year and we sent them some pics – and the rest, as they say, is history.

And then there is Gmail… now don’t get me wrong, I like it well enough – but the code to generate new Gmail addresses was cracked a few months ago and I don’t think it has been fixed yet – the amount of spam I was getting from gmail addresses was off the hook in the past month – I had to insert a Captcha on my comment forms. Luckily in WordPress it takes about 3 minutes. I didn’t even have to look at any code!