More Skiing

Today was day four of skiing at Whistler, and I survived. A few observations in no particular order.

• My feet are cold. Tonight we watched a Big Air slope style competition while standing on the sidelines instead of in the plaza on a big screen. Standing on the sidelines means standing in the snow.

View of the plaza from the sidelines where people stand and their feet don't get as cold, but their view isn't as awesome.

A skier gets pulled up to the jump via snowmobile.

The landing for the Big Air competition

• Weather can change on a dime on a big mountain.

View from a run yesterday

View from the top of the run two runs later

View from the gondola as I downloaded yesterday

View without raindrops

Today, two inches of powder accumulated...during lunch.

• I wish Jack had taken more vacation when I wasn't working. Now that I am working and am not free to travel at will, his interest in traveling with the family has gone up. I am not complaining, just wish he would have thouht of this before I returned to the 9-to-5. My company has a reasonably generous vacation plan, so I am not complaining about that. I just wished he used more of his vacation time when I was around. As much as I like my job, breaks are necessary.
• If I lost some weight, I'd have less mass, and then I'd ski slower without having to work at skiing slower. I am the only person in the world who thinks skiing slower is better than skiing all out in a straight line.
• I feel like an old lady when I ski sometimes. Skiing is a time for weird thoughts. I realized that with this next birthday, I will be the same as my grandma when she became a grandmother. Oy.  Fucking. Vey. I could ask my dad to confirm, but I think I am right. Actually, I don't really want to know. And my mother was not an old grandma. She was a regular age grandma for the time.
• Just when I feel like a grandma and think I am too old for this shit, I go in the lodge and see a bunch of seventy year old men covered in snow who have just gotten off some gnarly run. (Note: I will not be seventy on my next birthday, in case that might be confusing.) How do I know they are doing gnarly runs if they are the in lodge with me? I don't see them on the green runs I am on. There are women that age out there skiing, but far fewer. Why? Are women that age too smart to ski?
• The Boy is sending it. His sports medicine physician night not be too happy, but whatev. He's happy.

You Have Nothing to Prove, and Where Did I Go Right?

I need to remember this the next time I do anything. I have nothing to prove to anyone ever, including myself. Most especially myself.

You are welcome for this hard earned wisdom I learned today.

Yesterday was wet, so wet there was a rainbow.

I am with my family on Spring Break in Whistler. This was not my first choice for vacation, but everyone else wanted to go here, especially the Boy. To me, a big ski vacation is like going to Disneyland--the only reason I would go is because my kids want to go. And my kids have never wanted to see Disneyland or Disney World, so I dodged those bullets. When he was younger, the Boy wanted to see Legoland, the masculine version of Disneyland -- all building materials and no tulle in sight. When Claire-Adele was ten, she wanted to go to London and I was totally hip to that.

I wouldn't be complaining about skiing if I wasn't such a laggard compared to my family. Eight years ago, I was the best skier in my family, as the kids didn't know how to ski and Jack was meh. Jack and I thought skiing would be a great way to get out of the house in the gray and gloomy winters in the Pacific Northwest. Little did I know then my kids would take to skiing like rats to a sewer. Where did I go right?

I am not complaining about going to Whistler for Spring Break. I am complaining about going to Whistler for Spring Break again. Seriously, I'd like to go someplace else for vacation. My friends on Facebook are in Mexico, Iceland, Hawaii, and Palm Springs. Claire-Adele's boyfriend went to Europe. I would like to be in any of those places. I have other friends who are in Ohio, Iowa and Boston for vacation. The midwest is looking good. The friend in Mexico is remarried and I am FB friends with his new wife, which is nice. I was so jealous of her pictures. What I am going to have to do to get a vacation in Mexico where I can sit on the beach and/or poolside while someone brings me cervezas? Get divorced, remarried, and find someone who wants to go to Mexico for vacation? That's a bit extreme, if you ask me.

Not exactly a bluebird day.

Instead of floating in the ocean in Maui, I am burning my thighs, hamstrings and glutes in very wintery weather. This morning, the snow at 6,000 was firm. Lower down in the middle of the afternoon, it was heavy and wet. Very heavy and very wet. And the runs here are long. Very long. Which means unless I stopped and rested, my legs got really tired. Pre-ACL tear, I loved it when my thighs burned when I skied. Post-ACL tear, I freak out when my legs burn.

A few runs after lunch, I left my family on Blackcomb and I went back to Whistler on the Peak-to-Peak. Whistler was blustery. Not regular blustery, but mountain blustery. I decided to try to the snow lower on the mountain, which was--as mentioned before--heavy and wet. The Eskimos must have a name for this shit, but likely not. Or they do now with the global warming. They probably call it something like snow that should melt if it weren't for the vast amount of it keeping it cold itself. My daughter called it mashed potato snow. This was more like mud snow, except it was fast. I hated this snow.

More than I hated this snow, I hated myself for thinking I could get down. At the mid-station, I could have ridden the gondola back down. There was even a nice sign "Tired? Cold? Ride the Gondola down!" Did I listen to the sign? No. I thought if I rested a bit my legs would feel better and I could make it down. So I rested. Nevermind my legs were pooped. Nevermind I asked some old timer on mono-ski what the snow was like, and he said "Just as bad as this here, except worse."

Did I listen to my legs, the sign at the gondola and an expert old guy skier?

No. I did not.

I can make it down, I told myself.

But you want to ski another day, I told myself back.

You did it yesterday and it was a piece of cake, I told myself again. And the snow doesn't look that bad. It could be fine.

Alright, I told myself. I can do this.

Are you sure? There is no shame in taking the gondola down, thought my sensible, sane, conservative self. You've already skied down 2,800 vertical feet. That's enough.

You can handle another 1,000 vertical feet, I told myself. Come on. What are you, some kind of a wuss? Besides, it will be fun.

Fun. Right. I wouldn't talk to my best friend like that, but I talk to myself like that. That is messed up. What is more messed up is that no one else was there pushing me to go down. As much as I'd like to, I cannot blame Jack, Claire-Adele, or the Boy. I brought this whole disaster on myself.

The snow was a mess. When I made it down the first turn, I seriously thought about marching back up. There was one steep spot that wasn't too steep except for the shit condition of the snow. I had to side step down. I had no pride. I was snowplowing part of it. Evan, my physical therapist, would tell me I was good at recruiting other muscles to do the work in my physical therapy, which is not a good thing for physical therapy when you are trying to re-activate your quadriceps. Recruiting other muscles was fantastic today when I was trying to get down the hill.

All of this makes me forget how much fun I have skiing. Skiing is like the little girl with little curl right in the middle of her forehead. When it is good, it is very, very good. But when it is bad, it horrid.

We only have three more days here before we head back to Seattle. Tomorrow, I will listen to my sensible self.

Views from Peak-to-Peak

Testing, Testing -- 1, 2, 3

My family and I got back from Whistler last night. This morning, I flipped the calendar to May and was reminded that my daughter has an AP exam Friday, the SAT Saturday, and two AP exams next week.

What was I thinking by letting her go to Whistler this weekend? Jack had planned this trip early last week. This was not something that had been on our calendar for weeks or months, as our Spring Break trip to New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. If it had been, perhaps I would have looked at the calendar more closely then kiboshed it.

When I ran for School Board, high stakes tests were a major topic, but tests like the SAT and the AP exams are out of bounds for local jurisdictions. One school board can't ban these tests because practically every college looks at them for incoming freshman. I was in favor of moderate testing of students to help close the opportunity gap. Years ago, I was at a fundraiser for educational causes. The sponsoring organization gave the principal of Garfield High School an award for his work. They showed a video of the principal walking around the school, talking about his accomplishments. One of the highlights was a program that taught sophomores to read. I was appalled, not at the program, but at the idea that these kids could so easily have slipped through the cracks by making it to tenth grade unable read. If we need tests for elementary students to make sure they can read so a district can provide the right services to kids to get them up to speed, then I am for it.

Should I have kept my daughter home so she could cram for these tests? She knows how to read and is reasonably accomplished academically. She is a diligent student and has been studying hard in all of her classes. If anything, Jack and I think at times she studies too much. When I asked her last week if she wanted to go on the trip, she didn't vex. She said yes immediately. The Boy said Claire Adele had a major case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Maybe she did.

Did we do the right thing by letting her take a break? When the Boy was in second grade, he qualified for the district's gifted program. A parent asked me what we did to prepare him for the test. I was a little naive about the question and said "I took him to the Varsity for breakfast before the test. He had pancakes and bacon." Taking it easy before the exam served the Boy well.

While I firmly believe in the power of cramming for tests, maybe bringing my daughter along for a ski weekend might have been a good idea. Maybe she needed space to relax after working so hard this year. In twenty years, she'll remember this weekend, not how well she did on the AP exams, unless she bombs the tests so badly she doesn't get into any of her dream colleges. I don't want her life filled with regret. Or, maybe she'll realize she can have a happy, productive life without getting into a competitive college. Jack and I rode the ski lift this weekend with a guy who was about my age who is a helicopter ski guide in the winter and an EMT in the summer. He seemed happy with his lifestyle.

"I see all of my friends who have been working hard at jobs for twenty years," the helicopter ski guide said. "What does it get them?"

Maybe I am being selfish. If we don't take family trips like these now, we may never have the chance again. In sixteen months, Claire Adele will be off at college. There are less than seventy more weekends before she leaves, and many of those are already booked with camp, sports and other events. 

In the end, it isn't my life--it's Claire Adele's. She often puts school work before friends and activities.  Maybe a trip to Canada was the only way to make her not spend the entire weekend cramming. For the rest of her life, she will have choices to make between work and play. I hope for her own sake, she chooses wisely.