Bigfoot, a further explanation of Portland, and stealing glory from Jeremy

So, I've had a couple people ask me to explain what happened on the bigfoot hunting adventure, so here it goes.  1.  I forgot my camera.  2.  I broke a ski pole and a cell phone.  3.  We didn't find bigfoot.  That's the short version.  The longer version is that we skiied about 7 miles, 1/2 of which was up hill on icy crap.  The two guys I was with had skins on their skis, I did not.  That means that they could move uphill a lot faster than I could, but through some herring bone duck walking I was able to keep up.  We beat on some trees with a big stick, because that's supposed to be something bigfoots (bigfeet?) do to communicate, but nothing knocked back.  FYI, though, the sound of tree being knocked on in the middle of the night when you're fairly certain you're the only people for miles around is still a kind of freaky noise.  So, after we knocked on trees and hung out on the edge of a cliff after skiing to ridgetop, we decided to ski back down the icy mess we skiied up.  Like I said, the two guys I was with had skins, which also helps them go slower on the way down.  I did not go slow, hence the broken ski pole and cell phone.  I eventually took my skis off and walked the rest of the way back to the truck.  That's about it, we went and snowshoed up to another place at about 3 in the morning, but it was bloody cold, and we gave up and went back to Landon's and had breakfast and coffee.  It was a lot fun though, skiing under a full moon made the broken gear worth it. 
 The Portland trip:  I feel there may be some further explanation needed, after Mom sounded concerned when she asked me "Did you really have a $530 bar tab?"  That included dinener for about 12 people, at a rather fancy resteraunt, so it's not as cool as it may have sounded initially.  Though the dragonfly balloon part is all true.
Stealing glory from Jeremy:  As you probably all know, Jeremy had back surgery on Monday.  I hope he's doing well, we've been trading phone messages for a couple weeks now, I haven't been able to talk to him.  Here goes the glory stealing:  For those of you that remember, about 8 years ago I had to go the hospital in Bend because my heart was beating super fast and my chest hurt whenever I tried to take a breath.  In Bend, they got the heart rate thing under control, then sent me on my way.  Well, the same thing happened Wednesday night, and once they got my heart rate under control (it was 170 at it's highest while I was sitting up in a hospital bed) they thought it would be a good idea to figure out why I felt like I was getting stabbed in the chest with a knife everytime I tried to breathe.  So, a lot of drugs and blood tests and x-rays and echo cardiograms later, they still weren't sure.  The doctor thought I had pericarditis, an inflamation of the lining around my heart that can be caused by being sick (which I was with a 100 degree fever for 5 days prior to the epidsode), but the cardiologist didn't agree with him.  The echo cardiogram guy thought I had endocarditis, an infection of the lining around the heart, but blood tests didn't support it.  The echo did show that my tricuspid valve (the one that had never worked all that well from birth) was probably working less well than usual, leading to my heart being bigger than normal, though they were all confused by my lack of shortness of breath and my ability to keep up with everybody when we're hiking and working at work.  So, the head doctor in Republic, with all his awesome bedside manner, came in said "your tricuspid valve is failing, and the enlargement of your heart will likely lead to heart failure soon, so you should get that fixed."  Then he walked out.  Awesome.  So I've got an appointment with a regular cardiologist next Friday, and another appointment 2 weeks later with a cardiologist that specializes in adults with congenital heart defects.  As such, I'm on light duty at work until I'm cleared by a cardiologist.  Good times.  In reality, my heart has mystified all my cardiologists for years now, they do tests and can't believe  I do as well as I normally do.  And I can't remember what my last echo and x-ray looked like to know if it's radically different than before, or if somebody that isn't used to looking at my heart is like "WTF is going on here?" without any background on how it normally looks.  All that aside, though, I did spend about 24 hours not able to breathe really well with a heart rate of around 170 while I was resting, so I've been exhausted since then.  We'll see what happens when I go to the cardiologist next week.  Hope everybody's doing better than me!  See ya.