two days of snowboarding, and so far i can still walk

yay for me! not kidding, i'm still worried about tomorrow. but i'm taking another lesson, because i figure if i'm going to throw this much money at it, i might as well add another $100 and learn to do it right. plus, the folks at keystone are really nice, and since i've been over-immersed in customer service, i'm willing to pay to endorse that.

i ride like a little old lady. but that's fine with me; my priority is actually to end up not terribly broken. the good thing about having my feet stuck together is that my knees generally point the same way. the bad, of course, is that i generally end up going down the mountain backwards. yay for bunny hills, really. i had a couple of spectacular falls the first day, the kind where you start out falling forward and, a couple of circles later, end up facing downhill on your back. thank god for helmets. and wrist pads. considering how much i'm "investing" in my little mind, it's kind of amazing how much i don't mind falling on my head as long as i'm wearing a helmet. this may yet turn out to be unwise. (but it sure is nice to have something to suck at that isn't anything like dynamic optimization. which i managed a decent grade in, thank you very much.)

and thank GOD for hot tubs. that's pretty much where i spend... umm, all night. except for when it stops to subtly hint that i will soon suffer heart palpitations, etc. whatever. they were definitely made for the dark and the snow. add some whiskey or good ol' fort collins beer and the stars and the neighbor's nicely lit evergreen, and it's pretty much perfection. one might even argue that i'm actually learning to snowboard as an excuse to use the hot tub. tee hee.

i can't post about this without mentioning "fashion" at least a little. because i love it; the kinds of things people wear, and the kinds of stories they try to tell with their mountain clothes, mean that i could spend pretty much all day people watching and be nicely entertained. the best one from today was a guy in a full-out ghostbusters jumpsuit. boarder, of course. pretty awesome. and i love to watch the people advertising how much money they have (bunnies!) and those that let you know they're a serious athletic badass (usually dressed head to toe in north face, but i can't really talk there) and how all of the beginners have shiny new clothes. finally, the quote of the day belongs to my dad: "wow, i looked in the mirror, and it's like i could be in rommel's panzer division, with the helmet and the goggles! 've vill find zis patton, and push him into ze sea!'" and then, of course, he constructed a sentence of all the german words he's ever heard. pretty darn funny. (although possibly it helps that i have hit my head several times in the last six hours).