Every rose has its thorns

This is a little late, but here are some photos from Valentine's Day. (I know, another fluff-filled post; I promise Josh will be publishing some lengthy, thought-provoking post soon).

We decided to take advantage of our employee discounts and use them to soften the blow of a fancy Valentine's meal of elk medallions and sea bass at the lodge on the top of the mountain. On certain holidays, the lifties switch out some of the chairs on the Zephyr lift with small gondolas, and silly people like us choose to ride up the mountain at night (perhaps the gondolas block the wind, but it was still freezing). Apparently, sometimes the nights are clear and beautiful. Well, we got a windy, snow-filled evening for our trip! It was still a great night.

See "Why you should never take a photo with a rose in your mouth" and other fun-filled photos.

Hostess: Let me take a photo of you in front of the fireplace!

Megan: Let's take a photo of us in the gondola with this free rose I got!Josh: Let's take a photo with the rose in our mouths!

Megan: Let me try that again now that I know it still has thorns...

A Day for Photos!

The view from our window again:
After snowing all weekend, it finally cleared up. The drive to work with views of the resort:

See more great shots from today. The drive home:
When they say deer crossing, they mean it! The herd is back:

Snot and Tears

I've been trying to get these for a while but I finally had some solid cryers (yeah 3-4 year olds) and some opportunities to take pictures of them without being stared at...


See the rest...

(For what its worth, I tried to darken the image to offset the flash... but you can still see that massive snot trail out of his right nostril)

(Not so much crying as alternating between whimpering and screaming... but the snot was great!)

(This boy was so troubled by him Mom leaving him that he never really made it outside)

(A little girl that was a gem the rest of the day)

(Her entire reason for crying was I wanted her to eat something, anything really. The present tears were produced by the idea she eat those two pieces of ceral... that she brought!)

Illegal Photo...

not highly illegal but I'm sure this is wrong some how...

See the photo...


How could I resist? A little weird but also kind of ... well almost cute. This is an everyday work experience.

The Wildlife

We got a new digital camera for Christmas, so we've been practicing our Colorado animal portraits. Here are a few:

Bird at Copper Mountain

See more photos

Bird at Copper Mountain, Scarily Close

(a.k.a. Josh playing with digital zoom after deciding the optical zoom wasn't enough. Doesn't it look like a portrait of an old president or something?!?)

Deer, Lots of Deer

(a.k.a. Photo quickly taken from the truck window after a herd of about 50 deer moved into our neighborhood this week.)

Dog at Arapahoe Basin

(Moral: dogs like to ski, too. This was not the only dog left in the parking lot- don't do this to your dog.)

James and the Giant Pacifier

Today I taught a child who kept a pacifier in his mouth the entire day. His name was James, and he was barely 3. He wailed when I tugged at it after putting on his helmet, and, well, it just didn't seem worth the fight. Between the crying, the pacifier, and the baby-slurring, I didn't even realize he was speaking with an English accent until two hours into the day!
Read the rest...
James would attach himself to someone and then not let that person out of his sight. When I learned that he was in my class, I weaned him away from the leg of my predecessor and from then on he was mine. I could not go and get my own lunch without him. I could not get him to go into the men's bathroom without me. What is so ironic, though, is that he was by far the best skier in my Level 2 class.

He got tired before lunch and at the end of the day and, whimpering, would become even more clingy. If I spent more than 3 minutes calming him down, though, I was neglecting to teach my other four 3 and 4-year-olds, so he would wail at the top of the hill, pacifier hanging half out of his mouth, snot running out of his nose, while I took the other kids down the hill between his turns. At the end of the day, he was the third one down the hill. I took his skis off and told him to wait at the bottom with the other two while I got the other kids down for their final run. It was wishful thinking. He followed me a few steps up the hill crying. I told him I had two more trips up and down the bunny hill and I wasn't carrying him. If he wanted to stay with me, he would have to walk up himself. So I turned around and kept going. Sure enough, James followed, still crying, pacifier still hanging there loosely through the open mouth, snot again dripping. He made it halfway up before realizing it was a very long way to the top for such tiny legs. He looked around and noticed a little green flag stuck in the snow. It was one of those flags utilities use to mark underground pipes in your lawn, the ones that were so much fun to pull out when you were a child, and he had been turning around it like an expert not more than 5 minutes prior. He stopped crying. He snatched the flag from the snow, and, standing in the middle of the bunny hill, started waving it high above his head.

Meanwhile, a class of 5 and 6-year-olds were using that flag and its compatriots to practice turning. Their instructor, standing just above James but with his back to him, beckoned a little girl down around the flags- Turn around that one, Maggie. Good! Now around the next flag, Maggie. Good! Now around... (he turned and saw a potentially bad situation)... ummm... the little boy, Maggie. Excellent!

And so it went. I got my other two kids down and James, pacifier and all, was used as a turning device. I see perhaps a career in air traffic controlling?

(A few side notes.
One: Having a 3-year-old child with a pacifier in your class certainly elicits a lot more sympathy from random adults on the ski hill than having a 3-year-old child without one.
Two: One of the other boys in the class said that today was his "bestestest day ever". If he can say that when his instructor was dealing with James, then I would say his instructor was doing alright.
Three: Just for my own defense, I was fairly adept at getting the kid to stop crying, basically by telling him that crying was not an option right now. However, at the aforementioned "tired" times, it was beyond my 3-minute time limit.)

16,600 people

were at Winter Park on Sunday. That is over six times the size of my home town, three aircraft carriers, or about ten New York City short blocks. Wow.

Figgy the Dog

Figgy is our other roomate. Her name has been changed to protect the innocent, preventing any Internet-browsing dog-snatchers from luring such a precious miniature long-haired daschund away...
Read the rest (and see photos)...
However, Figgy The Dog doesn't actually know that she is a dog. She likes to sit on the back of the couch pillows, run to the kitchen when food is being prepared, and curl up in laps (does this sound suspiciously like another common household pet to anyone?). We keep waiting for her to use a litter box.

Back of couch:




Megan's lap:

The view...

...from our bedroom window this morning:

The Culture of Ski Resorts

So when we came here we knew that there was a high male/female ratio and we were told about this by several different people(perhaps warned would be a more accurate desciptor). Today on a chair lift with some other instructors I mentioned something about Meg, using the phrase "my wife." To which one instructor replied, "Finally a man smart enough to bring his own sandwich to a picnic," and then commenced laughing like Kermit the Frog. His cohort then added, "And don't forgot the old axiom here at Winter Park 'You don't lose your girl, you just lose your turn.'"

Ahhh nothing like knowing that my wife will be hit on at any given moment.

Ski Report Thus Far...

Ok, so this journey has two main legs, Asia (a big scary foreign place to come) and skiing in Colorado (a childhood dream... and time to prepare for Asia). And since some people have asked, here are some of the places we've been to so far. We basically function on a four day work week (yes only four for now!) and then take two or three days of the weekend to ski. So far, apart from Winter Park, we've been to:
Read the rest...

Steamboat

(We forgot to take pictures at steamboat, so you get to use your imagination (Mr. Rogers would be proud). But it was fun with lots of tree skiing and some fun chutes to ski down. Note to non-skiers, a chute is a narrow steep space between ledges with just enough snow to make it down and normally at a pitch of 50 degrees or more- quite steep.)

Arapaho Basin

(Me cooking lunch in the parking lot. We've decided we are big fans of resorts that let you ski to the car... they tend to have a nice homey feel)

Copper Mountain

(Taken at the very top of Copper. This part has a very cool alpine feel to it. In fact, in order to get here you take a chair lift to another chair lift to a pommel lift (a metal bar with a circle on the end that you put between your legs) to get to the top... I'd say roughly a 30-45 minute trip.)

Aspen

(Aspen has a gondola that goes all the way to the top, kind of nice but a long trip up. There was 8 inches of powder that day, which was great! But the town of Aspen is a pain and no free place to park... not so great.)

Aspen Highlands

(Meg by an Aspen... seemed fitting. The skiing here was some of the best we've had since we've come out. (still pay-parking only))

Snowmass

(Who knew you could take a picture from a mogul? It didn't really turn out though; maybe that's why people don't do it... hmmmm. Oh, and parking? Yup, ten bucks.)

For some of these days we've been able to use a GPS to track our runs, some I forget to take it. But here is part of what we skied at Aspen Highlands. The far left shows a back bowl that they were blasting with big guns and dynamite in the morning and we skied down in the afternoon. We got to take a snowcat (if a snowmobile and a bulldozer had a love-child...) part of the way up and then hike up a bit further. The bowl is this massive open thing with lots of powder and a nearly 2000 foot descent. It's not super-steep (but close), but if you fall you end up sliding down a long way. Good thing we didn't.

Thus far it's been great skiing, decent snow, great places and the price is unbeatable (free). We hope to go back to some of these places and will eventually pay for some as well (Vail, Breckenridge). But those are for another day.

P.S. We skiied Winter Park Thursday but could use some new snow. So... Friday we took some snowboarding lessons in the morning (a refresher for me and a beginning one for Meg) and then rode together in the afternoon. During that afternoon Meg took a big fall right on her tailbone and now can't really move without wincing... teaching will be fun tomorrow!

Why we are doing this (according to Josh)

Journal Excerpt 2-2-07, Written in "Coffee and Tea", an aptly named coffee/tea bar at Winter Park.

So it was a cold and rainy December night (can you get more cliche than that?), and I'm standing in the back of a big yellow moving truck with only two thoughts running through my head: 1) How in the world did I get so much stuff? I live in less than 300 square feet for Pete's sake... and 2) Why am I doing this again?
Read the rest...

On December 23rd we moved; we packed all of our worldly possessions (at least those worthy to sit in storage for several years) into a truck and left our home of the last several years. We weren't moving for new jobs or new exciting prospects. We weren't moving to further our ambitions or careers. We were moving to take a break from everything and to spend the next nine months traveling, seeing the world and trying to meet some interesting people along the way. We left everything we knew, everything that was comfortable, to go look for something else, but why?

To start we've been talking about doing a big trip of some kind since we've been married, if not before. We have both traveled a decent amount on our own. We traveled while we were dating, and we traveled while we were engaged, and so the idea of a penultimate excursion seemed perfectly natural and fitting for who we are. This dream isn't something that we pined over during exams, reviews, and papers (though it did provide some relief from the work at hand) but was something we had begun passively planning at least since I started grad school. We actually kept a bulletin board in our kitchen with a map of the US on it. It had push pins in the places we would someday go and news clippings to inspire us for our mythical voyage. And while this trip was a dream of ours, that ultimately selfish motive wasn't enough of a reason to go. I guess if we were going to take some time "off", there needed to be something more substantial than "I want to go."

I think another factor in our decision to leave was an attempt to find each other after New York. We got married while Meg was in grad school and immediately before the start of mine, so our marriage (at least in the beginning) was built around the rhythms and routines of school. Staying up till 4:00 AM, having absolutely no money and little patience for each other were par for the course. On top of staying busy at school, we were doing it in one of the busiest cities in the world. We lived stressed lives at school, busy lives in the city, and then came home to such great amenities as our less than 300 square foot apt (for which we paid an amount equal to other people's mortgage on their houses). It's not that we didn't like the city, but just that living there and living the lives we did took its toll. We grew tired, annoyed, and mildly frustrated at things that sometimes seem trivial (reflecting the nature of New York stereotypes) and while we still were ourselves... we just were ourselves a little stressed most of the time. So one of the original reasons for this voyage was to spend time with each other and rediscover ourselves- not the worn-out phrase used by burned-out college students (I have my doubts about finding oneself in a far off land), but in a sense of finally being able to spend some quality time with one another and experience new things with one another. But this wasn't (I think) the most distinct reason why we left because there are other ways to enjoy each other's company that are much easier than taking 9 months and leaving.

Perhaps the most persuasive reason we left was because we wanted to stand for something other than the traditional myths and tales that make up the American social landscape. We live lives marked by 10 days off a year, a continual rat race to get further up the corporate ladder of success, and often we seem to cast our ambitions to the wind in search of comfort, stability, and material goods. Now, I'm not saying that those things are bad or that the American way of life isn't a good thing, but I do get frustrated that it is often viewed as the only thing, at least within broader American culture. Consequently, our choice to leave and to explore is a statement, to ourselves if no one else, that life is what we make of it and that we can do what we want if we choose to do so (realizing, of course, that this is a luxury/privilege that we do not deserve). When we told people we were leaving to go work at a ski resort and then travel, we would often get comments of "I wish I could do that." To which our response was (and is), "You can." We need to choose our lives and choose what is important (sometimes that's a stable job, sometimes that's leaving a stable job) and find joy and contentment in that. So we quit to remind ourselves that life is what we make of it. And so I think that's why we are doing this... at least in my head.

And now to go teach crying Suzie how to ski.

The Place Where We Live

You might be curious about our life out here in the middle of the mountains, so we'll start with some photos. We live with a woman who just moved here a few months ago and bought a 3-bedroom condo with a nice view. It's a few minutes off the main drag but near an employee shuttle stop, saving us some gas. It's a cute little place, as you can see by the photos:

Josh at the door


Can you see the mountains back there??

The first floor is living/dining/kitchen

And this is our room! We are on the lower level with another bedroom, a bathroom (big enough for a tub! Oh, Manhattan apartment, how we don't miss parts of you!), and the washer/dryer (again, what luxury!). Our house-mate's room and bathroom are upstairs.

At Long Last

Ta-Da! As we enter Week 4 of The Adventure, we are finally getting to this blog! First, we didn't have the Internet at our place of residence and then we were just too lazy to start typing (that and the fact that the computer lives on the floor of a cold, empty room-photo forth-coming-didn't help). We decided to keep a blog over the next few months for a couple of reasons:

1. We want to be able to update friends and family as to where exactly we are without having to send out mass emails due to Internet cafe time pressures.
2. We would like to record our activities and our thoughts on those experiences.
3. We had many, many requests since we have so many, many friends...

Now, as for the adventure itself... In brief, Josh and I quit our stable and decent-paying jobs in New York, NY at the end of 2006 to finally do what we had been talking and dreaming about since we got married. Our original excuse for "taking time off" was to get reacquainted with each other after living as two poor grad students in one of the most stressful cities in the world, but it's since grown into a whole lot of other reasons. From January to April, we are working as kids ski instructors in Colorado, using our days off to explore other ski resorts and to recover from days filled with I-want-my-mommy-syndrome and I-can't-get-up-disease. In April, we will be heading to Michigan and Texas for two weddings before flying off to SE Asia and India for about 5 months. Crazy? Yes. Terrifying? You bet. Exciting? Absolutely!