Contemplating for too long ruins the shot.  Your first instinct is your best one.  Snap away:

I guess this is kind of a take off on the old cartoons when the smoke would come out of the character’s ears when he was angry.

Except now it isn’t smoke, but a giant Dale Chihuly glass sculpture:

I took what I would consider my first major spill on the skis today.  I mean no broken bones yet, but one of the skis came off.  That’s happened before, but I also got the wind knocked out of me pretty badly and I could feel an ankle twisting as well.  Did I mention my face went into the snow as well?  I thought for sure this was going to be my big fall.  This is what people have warned me about, what I need to watch out for.  What will make me stop loving skiing.

Then something really nice happened.  A man saw me fall and skied over immediately.  He got my lost ski and brought it over.  He could see I was in a little bit of shock, so he helped me up.  He stood there with me until I got my skis back on.  And this took quite a while, or at least it seemed that way.  I got the wind knocked out of me good and proper.

Back down the mountain, I wasn’t feeling right.  I have a rule.  Not feeling right on the skis, stop immediately.  Do not continue skiing.  Just stop and collect yourself and so I did that.  I went down to the lodge and just sat for a little while with my bottle of Gatorade.  As usual I replayed the events in my head to myself.  And I started to feel less bad for myself for the spill.  Here I was, thinking 20 minutes earlier than I had broken some bone and then I just got up and walked away.  Fall down.  Not so terrible.

Anyway, enough life lessons and what skiing has taught me about life.  Let’s talk photos of todays skiing.  Which other than the fall was pretty good:

I’ve recently been listening to the music of a wonderful composer called Dustin O’Halloran.  He wrote the score to the current movie I am obsessed with, called “The Other Dream” about the Lithuanian National Basketball team’s triumph over Russia in the 1992 Olympics.

Now that movie (and Arvydas Sabonis) have nothing to do with this entry.  I just thought that these photos fit well with his piece called “We Move Lightly.”  Check it out on the YouTube, whilst looking at my photos.  If you are into that kind of thing.

The work:

I hope she is right:

Yeah, that was this weekend’s trip.  Notice I didn’t say crazy adventure.  No, I didn’t have to get up at 3am, then sleep on a bus for four hours, ski, ski, ski, ski and then go back on the bus freezing and hungry.  Did I mention also soaked to the skin?  Yeah.  That too.

Nope, the trip to Stowe was in high luxury and style.  I got to sleep until 8am in a bed in a hotel room and get driven to slope, which was 10 minutes away.  After yesterday’s skiing, I got to soak in a hot tub.  After today’s skiing, I got freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.  Should I go on?  Well, no I don’t want to get hate mail.  Needless to say, I have the greatest family ever, who I have infected with this skiing obsession.

The views.  Never do they fail to amaze: