What I'm doing in January

I haven't posted since Christmas.

The last week of 2016 I was too occupied with eating Christmas cookies to type.  

The beginning of 2017 I was too busy logging my calories in My Fitness Pal and trying to figure out how to stay under calorie budget without keeling over from starvation.  

Now that it's the third week of January and all my healthy resolutions have become broken nuanced, I'm getting around to posting.  

Plus I actually did something interesting.  We went away for our anniversary!  And did something we have never done in 14 years of knowing each other, despite Jason doing it occasionally in his youth:  skiing!

Photos obviously not from skiing.  That would have been harmful to my camera, myself and others.

Common misconception:  If you are from Vermont, you are a skier.  Although I have contradicted this perception many times in conversations, allow me to now divest the general public of this falsehood.  

Yes, I grew up in Vermont.  

Yes, I realize Vermont is a ski destination.  

Yes, I could see Killington from my house.  

No.  I did not ski.  

Primarily because skiing is really really expensive.  And secondarily, because (growing up in Vermont) I regularly heard horror stories of crippling ski accidents.  Now that I think about it, my parents probably made sure I overheard those so I wouldn't be begging for unaffordable lift tickets.  

So, no, I do not ski.  A friend in high school once described me as a "times skier," meaning I describe my ski experience not in number of years I've skied, but number of times I've skied.  I think it's twice.

After high school, not counting one very painful day during college of trying out snowboarding [I think there's a reason snowboarding and waterboarding sound similar], I've never skied.  

Until now!

What better way to celebrate your spouse's unbreakable bond to you than to finally demonstrate this area of embarrassingly awkward inability? 

It was actually really fun.  Jason is gentleman enough to not leave me for a black diamond trail, was liberal with his compliments, and pretended not to see when I disembarked from the ski lift by landing flat on my back like a sacked quarterback.  

And speaking of chairlifts... they scare me.  Possibly more than breaking my leg in eight places à la childhood horror stories, because you might get down the mountain without breaking your leg, but you definitely are going to have to ride the chairlift.

Setting aside the skillful precision it requires to line up correctly to board, and the certain public humiliation that awaits if you can't do it right (in the .6 second you have to do it) and knock over your whole row of ski lift buddies like dominos because you got your pole tip stuck under your ski and panicked....

And setting aside the fact that you're suspended up really high with nothing but your own good sense holding you in the seat, while you grip all your belongings and watch as dropped mittens and poles pass beneath you as dire warnings that your own body could be next to fall (Seriously, how do we live in an age when toasters have to have warnings not to sleep with them while they're on, but ski lifts are allowed?)....

The worst part is the dismount at the end.  The first chairlift we went on this weekend, though, was really gentle.  It set you lightly on a mild little slope.  I felt elated that I got down without falling.

So my confidence was up when we went on the second (different) chairlift.  I should've guessed from the way this one knocked your knees out from under you at the bottom that this wasn't the chairlift for sissies.  

I foolishly assumed the little dismount slopes at the top are standardized.  They're not.   

This lift made you basically skim the top of the slope and then dropped you out of midair, giving you an extra little shove for good measure.  

Dismount #2:  not so smooth.

I wasn't the only one who had trouble, though.  Another time up we rode with a mother and her young son.  She started going over protocol with him as we neared the top.  

"Now, when you get off, don't do pizza pie until you're out of people's way.  Just keep your skis straight until you get away, and then do pizza pie.  If you do pizza pie, you'll knock people over.  Don't do pizza pie.  For the love of all that's holy and good on this green earth, DON'T DO PIZZA PIE!"

He did pizza pie.  

If you think that a 45-pound person can't take out a grown man, think again.  Jason was victimized by the pizza pie skis and ended up in a heap under the lift entangled with a little kid.  

So falling at the top of the chairlift barely counts.  When it counts is when you're sailing down the slope (doing your own desperate pizza pie) and you hit a bump, hear your subconscious brain call "mayday," blink, and then you're on your back, head downhill, sliding inexorably away from one ski and one pole which were lately attached to your person, but you're now peering at them past your toes and thinking how remarkably well your jacket slides over snow.

Happily, Jason was behind me and used his considerably drastically greater skills to stop and help me.  And he didn't even laugh.  

So, we ended the day with no major injuries, having worked up from the "learning area" to "more difficult" trails, avoided harming any small children, were only harmed ourselves by one small child, and had a really fun time together.