I could use this entry to get up on my photographic high horse about how photography involves all kinds of skill and how just photographing pretty things isn’t photography, but you know what???  You know what???  Today, I just don’t feel like it.

I’m gonna tell a little story then there will be photos and it will be a simple story.  A student in school I work in asked if I wanted to join him and two other people on a little trip to Niagara Falls, a place that nearly everyone I know has visited and I visited once.  When I was five.  My student found some kind of dirt cheap offer to go to the falls.  At first I was a bit unhappy to sacrifice a weekend of skiing, but then I agreed.

It was a kind of a trip that one does as a student, maybe a 20 year old.  Let’s say that sometimes I live like 20 year old and this was one of those times.  I thought we’d be traveling in some giant bus with bathrooms and all the rest of it.  Turns out we were traveling in a van, driven, as luck would have it by another former student of mine.  He was extremely happy to see me when I appeared and I knew we were in good hands.

The drive to the falls seemed interminable, never ending, insanely long.  Well, actually, I read a book for most of it and stared out of the window at places I knew.  We drove through Albany, where I went to college and where I never returned after I went to college.  We drove through Geneseo, where a bunch of my friends went to college.  The country up there is beautiful and I started to wonder, why as a college student I never felt compelled to visit or explore any of these places.

And then we got to the falls.  In a way it was a good completion of a journey and of course the view was stunning.  Just some simple falling water:

There’s been a lot of serious skiing musings up here lately and not enough fun or goofballs for that matter, so I’m going to fix that now.

My life is overpopulated with goofballs, like the ones I’m going to show a picture of below. One is the younger brother of one of my former students.  Teaching him is like teaching a tornado.  Of sharks.  A sharknado if you will.  He also gets his own portion of the class to expound on topics like funeral costs, taxation, tipping, restaurant service.  How is this related to what we are doing int he class??  Yeah.  ITS NOT.

The other student in the photo is a very diligent, very intelligent student who lights up the class.  In other words, a non-sharknado.

Here you are gents, on my blog for the first (and hopefully not) the last time:

This is what I’ve been saying lately when I go down the mountain.  It’s never too late to change your mind.  I’m kind of biting off of a line that Ayrton Senna said in a documentary I watched about him.  I guess its one thing to drive a race car and another thing entirely to ski.

Ski season has been going fairly well.  Actually really well.  I’m much more physically fit that I have been in ages so I’ve been doing some really difficult stuff this season.  The steeper, the more fun for me, I guess.

Yesterday’s trip to Killington was the comedy ski trip of the season.  There is always one.  One fantastic one, one cold one, one melted one, a couple of average ones and one comedy ski trip.  On this one, I got a very weirdly presented bacon, egg and cheese sandwich with much too much bacon sticking out of the sides of my sandwich.  I nearly took a photo.  Then I went to a lot of my favorite trails in Killington, just to find them closed.

Then I went on a lift with a stopover in the middle.  I could have gotten off, but there were a bunch of serious looking ski racer kids on a trail that I could have easily skied on being that a lot of the blacks were closed.  Anyway, while on this weird lift, my ski pole got stuck and broke cleanly in half.  My other ski pole was bent in the process, so I got to ski down and buy new ones for the budget price of $80.  THREE sets of ski poles gone this season.  THREE.  The ski gods apparently have something against me having ski poles.

It was overall a good day at Killington, which is a place that has seen some great skiing out of me.  And some godawful skiing out of me too.  But boy do they bring it with the views:

 

Just a smile.

Nope, no frostbitten kisses from the mountain today.  Just a nice smile from the mountain for a good day of skiing:

Facebook has a really convenient little feature when you can turn your page into a kind of a time machine, where you see what you did a couple of years earlier.  Usually, my page is full of pictures of students or rides on the green line, but today’s was rather remarkable.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my re-learning how to ski, so that means exactly five years ago, I began this crazy journey to becoming a skier.  From that one ski trip, which I went on just to make a couple of extra bucks on the weekend, we’ve gotten this crazy skiing obsession.  Chasing the dragon.  Skiing — cheaper than a drug habit.

Its kind of funny to think of how that one ski trip has turned into over 60 ski trips over the years.  Moreover, the discovery of wonderful places like Stratton, Sugarbush and Stowe that I gladly return to every ski season.  The joyous start to the ski season.  The arrival of the pythons, my Atomic Cloud 9 skis that are put in a spot in my living room on the last day of ski season and then taken skiing again at the start of the next season.  Same deal with my helmet and boot bag.  It never moves.  There has been the endless acquisition of ski gloves, hats, jackets, pants, under clothing, etc.  And outlays of cash for such things….

Moreover, there’s been the great times I’ve had going skiing and the realization that a great community forms around ski resorts.  I’ve had countless hilarious conversations with people on lifts, learned all sorts of things about them and generally realized that when everyone is full of health and endorphins, we’re all doing better.  I’ve formed bonds off the slope too with other people who love this sport as much as I do.  So this is a happy anniversary.

So how did I spend my fifth anniversary on the slopes?  By going to slopes of course.  I went to Stowe today, a wonderful, kind of a chi chi place to ski.  The conditions on the slopes today were magnificent but the temperature just ghastly.  It was -15 F on the slopes today and according to the weather information on the internet, that felt like -37 F.  Now those are just abstract numbers.  How cold is -37?  Cold enough that I got honest to goodness frostbite on my face and toes.  So cold that I could not put my extremely expensive, cold weather ready glove around my ski pole.  Cold enough that I took three breaks while skiing.  Cold enough that at one point, I was the only one on a slope.  Me and the ski patrol that is.  That cold.

Well, who cares.  The frostbite will go away.  But the joy of the rest of it will remain:

I’m going to tell a story.  Scroll down if the prospect of this bores you in any way.  But stay for the story for my fine literary stylings.

Last night I attended a really cool (and cold) event at Fenway Park featuring a giant slope and some really insanely great snowboarders.  They were playing great classic rock and the snowboarders were doing flips and things that I do not even fathom when I’m on the slopes going at the high speeds I travel at.

Sitting there I thought back to how many times I’d visited Fenway Park and the first time I had gone there.  Moreover, I thought about how sometimes you think you’ll visit a place one time and you end up there multiple times.  Other places feel like they will become places you go over and over again and then they just don’t.  You just don’t know overall I guess.

This feeling comes over me a lot in Boston, since I visited this place before I ever lived here.  I even took a train by where I currently live when I was about 18 years old, not knowing that some number of years later, never mind how many, I’d actually live here.

Sitting in the chair last night watching the competition (and nearly freezing to death), I thought of my first visit to the Fenway Park area.  I say “area” because I didn’t even enter the park on my first visit.  Even worse, I didn’t even realize it was there.

Let’s go back a bit.  Yeah, this is a lot of writing, I know.  Stick with me.  There will be a payoff.  When I was about 19 years old, I got it into my mind that I wanted to be a lawyer.  My college had something called a Pre-Law Society, a club where like minded aspiring lawyers like myself could sit around and discuss…. law school applications??  I’m not exactly sure.  They did however plan a trip to Boston to go to some kind of a convention of law schools where you could ask questions of different law schools.  Mostly, the law schools would tell you how small your chances were of getting accepted.

I signed up for this excursion with a couple of my friends from the Pre-Law society.  I use the term “friends” loosely, given that I don’t even remember their names anymore.  I remember one girl who talked the entire ride from upstate New York to Boston about her boyfriend.  Another girl was intent on meeting as many guys as she could that night in Boston.  Thing got off to a rocky start, let’s put it that way.

As soon as we hit Boston, the two party girls (who probably now post photos on their Facebook pages of their kids at bake sales) got ready for an evening out by procuring some kind of beers or alcohol or something.  We headed over to the Avalon club, which was next to the Axis club on Landsdowne street, next to Fenway Park.  It was at that moment that I knew that I would attend twenty baseball games there, one day visit the dug out and the locker rooms, touch the green monster, take groups of unruly teenagers there and watch a Big Air ski competition while there.  I knew all of that at that moment.

Yeah, um no.  I didn’t even realize where we were and that we were next to Fenway Park.  I didn’t even realize where the club was until I looked it up recently to try to remember where I had been on that significant trip to Boston so many years ago.  The trip to the club turned out to be totally lame and the whole trip was just a bust.  I ended up running into five people I knew from high school at the club.  I don’t remember what happened to the party girls.

Its not the world’s greatest story obviously.  It does kind of though play into two things I’ve been thinking about for a while now.  If you had asked that 19 year old, do you think you will ever come back to Fenway Park again, go there 20 times and live down the street eventually, that person would have told you unreservedly “no.”  So you don’t know anything.  The other thing that I remember about that story of coming to Boston was how sort of late teens/early 20s-ish it is.  Those are the ages when you are struggling the worst to find the people you fit with, who you should be friends with and it is so hard.  You end up in all sorts of random places with all kinds of random people you never see again.  The movies portray your 20’s as some kind of glamorous time, but they really aren’t.  They are confusing.  And painful.  The people I was at the Big Air competition with meant a lot more to me than those people from that Pre-Law society, that is for sure.  The Pre-Law Society experience also taught me another powerful lesson.  I didn’t like any of the people in that organization, not even a little bit and I told my dad about it at the time and he said “if the shoe doesn’t fit in the store, it won’t fit at home.”  I never did become a lawyer, but I guess that’s for the best because if I didn’t like those people, I wouldn’t have fit in with my future colleagues in the legal profession, that is for sure.

Now to happier thoughts.  I went to the ski competition with my two now besties.  One of my besties reminds me of tabasco but in human form.  The other is a kind of wise ass Catalan woman who doesn’t take any crap from anyone.  The two perfect people to watch such an event with.  As I sat there watching the event, I kept thinking of how great it was to watch it with these two great people and how great the event itself was.  Sure, it was cold enough to get hypothermia, which I probably got but the best feeling was that I was watching it with two people I really like, not some randoms I got into a van with.

Meandering.  We’re at the end.  Photo time!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The grand living room is too large to photograph with the currently available photography equipment:

Ever get the feeling someone is plotting against you??

Get back to me when you have something worthwhile, puny human: