I miss skiing.

I love to ski. But man, do I stink at it. Horrible, really. It's been more than 14 years, my little brother took me skiing on my 18th birthday, and that was the last time. Even back then, I stuck to the green circles (easiest) and the blue squares (medium) but I knew my limits and stayed well away from the black diamonds.

My parents took me skiing a couple times before it really took and I couldn't get off the ground. My feet were big for a kid, so I had to rent skis that were too long for me and I hated it. Sometime around jr. high, my dad took me night skiing, and that was so much better, I actually managed to stay upright except when I threw myself to the ground before hitting the building at the bottom of the hill. I hadn't learned how to turn yet, so I just kept my skis parallel, flew down the mountain, prayed nobody got in my way, threw myself to the ground, then did it all over again. It was fun.

A year or two later, back in Utah, they had a program where you could take ski lessons through the school and you actually got out of school once a week for a month. No kidding, my mom was waiting for a phone call to come to the hospital. I majorly crashed and burned every week. The most memorable time was when I was racing some kids down the hill, and tried to hit the switch back, but was going too fast, so I sailed over the switchback trail, and over the side of the cliff. I probably landed 20-30 feet or so down the side of the mountain. Luckily the powder was soft, and like 10 feet deep. I wasn't hurt. What made me think about this particular instance this evening was because I read a friends blog and she made a comment about wanting to take a nap to avoid things she doesn't want to deal with. Back to the story- so there I am, face down in the snow, one of my skis is who knows where, the other is 6 feet in front of me, with only about a foot of it sticking straight up out of the snow, without moving my body, I glance around for half a second, decide it was more than I wanted to deal with at the moment, lay my face back down in the snow and decide to take a nap.

Unfortunately my flight over the side of the mountain didn't go unnoticed by my fellow skiers, and I can hear them up there at the top of the cliff screaming that I was dead, and they were totally freaking out. Since I can't sleep with all the screaming going on, I lift up my head to tell them "I'm not dead", at which point someone recognizes me and then proceeds to climb down to help me. The nerve. How am I supposed to sleep when people are helping me? Obviously I can't, so I am forced to try and forge my way through snow up to my chest, retrieve my ski (I think she grabbed the other one) then try and climb back up the side of the mountain. - it wasn't a sheer straight up and down cliff, but a definite drop off, and the snow made it nearly impossible, so it took forever to get back up. We nearly missed the bus.

Boy do I miss skiing. I totally regret not having good, close ski resorts here. I can't believe Nick is 11 and has never been. Seriously I feel like he's deprived. Maybe some year, we can take a ski vacation or something, and I can learn to snowboard. I hear that rocks.