Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

The less said about my late, unlamented father, the better.  However, he did give me several things that are really worth having:  access to good school districts, a critical eye for fine detail, and a powerful interest in design, one that borders on the obsessive.  The first was probably an unintentional artifact of his desire to live in affluent homogenized communities.  The second is an artifact of living under the glare of his hyper-critical microscope.  The third is an immersion experience.

He was an architect, and a very good one.  Prize-winning.  Exported to Saudi Arabia to design palaces for princes.  That sort of architect.  His focus was on residential architecture, and thanks to this, a typical childhood Family Outing involved a trip to a building site, where we learned how to envision the building that would soon be there.  Or a trip to a set of model homes, where we were invited to provide our thoughts on what we found there (see: glare of hyper-critical microscope, above).

To this day, it’s impossible for me to enter a space without immediately formulating a set of opinions about the quality of the design in the space and its contents.  Typically, these are strong opinions.  Reason being: there is a lot of truly awful design in the world.  And this isn’t just my opinion.  Check it out.  If you want to, get the book.  I highly recommend it.  It’s an entertaining read – vastly informative, if you have an interest in design – and it will explain exactly why you spend so much of your life cursing one machine or device after another, and feeling like an idiot.

It’s not you.  Really, it’s not.  It’s bad design.  It’s amazing what a difference bad design can make.  Consider the door that has to have a bloody huge sign on it saying “PUSH”. Why should we need instructions to operate a door? It’s not because we’re dumb.  It’s because the design of the door doesn’t map properly to human psychology, causing people to mistakenly believe that it should be pulled instead of pushed.  You wonder why?  The wretched thing has something on the inside of it that looks like a handle, and handles get pulled.  Big flat panels get pushed, because there isn’t anything to grab.  So some brilliant designer gets an artistic award for designing a door that is so confusing because of bad psychological mapping that it has to include directions for use.  A door.  Instructions on how to use a door.

Then we get something like Microsoft, a disaster of design if there ever was one.  Twenty years ago they gave us Windows.  A user interface that was so easy anyone could sit down at a computer and figure out the basics with an hour’s worth of work, after which time, they were Off And Running.  This is good design in action – interfaces that map so well to the individual’s psychological and societal contexts that they render separate instruction largely unnecessary.  This is how it should be done.

And yet, in the strong tradition of never letting something that works go without trying to break it, we get a comprehensive overhaul of the user interface.  Let’s be clear: Windows 7 doesn’t give us anything we didn’t already have.  The stuff you want to do with your operating system?  You can’t do anything now that you couldn’t do three years ago.

Only now?  It’s harder.  Because they took the only really good thing about their system, and they deliberately broke it.  And they broke it in such a way that it’s caused millions of people to lose valuable work time relearning how to do something they already knew.  This, to me, is a catastrophic productivity waste.  I think the government ought to sue Microsoft for damage to the economy, just on the basis of lost productivity from this.  Because not only did they force massive outlays on new, otherwise useless software upgrades, they have taken what was an intensely well-designed user interface…and replaced it with something artistic.  And, not coincidentally, significantly less well designed than what we had before.  I have to stop talking about this now.  The UI redesign of Windows makes my blood boil.  I could go on for days.

My late, unlamented father had Scathing Words for this kind of thing.  He would sneer at it, and say it was Italian.  “Italian” was his catch-phrase for things that were over-designed to emphasize the Artistic Talents of the designer rather than to improve functionality or usability.  I didn’t understand what he meant by this until I visited the MoMA Design Store, which is, in fact, full of Italian design.  From Italy, no less.

As an example of what he meant by this scornful remark, I found this:

This thing is supposed to be a chair. How comfortable are those ball-shaped armrests, I ask you. How long could the average butt or back rest on this Artistic Statement before erupting into the kind of pain that means lots of expensive chiropractic treatments are on the way, I ask you. Would you even know this was a chair, if you saw it in an office somewhere? Bad, bad, bad design.

I was reminded, forcefully, of this a couple of years ago when we stayed at a hotel in Manhattan near the Garment District.  The hotel screamed EuroTrash from the outside.  The furnishings in the lobby – sofas that were upholstered versions of this chair – did not reduce that impression.  And the hotel room?

Italian.

No direct lighting – nothing but mood lighting.  A desk that was 12″ deep, with no lamp, no power outlets for chargers, laptops, etc.  Very sleek, I’ll grant you.  But as a desk?  Completely worthless.  The bed had mood lighting – just the thing if you want to pretend you’re in a porn flick, but absolutely useless if what you want to do is read in bed before you go to sleep.  The only chair in the entire room was a massive massage chair.  The kind I associate with pedicures.  As a thing to tell all your friends you had in a hotel room? Awesome. As a spot to sit while working on a computer?  Go directly to massage therapy, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.  The bathroom was even worse.  The toilet was positioned under a shelf – which is great – except that the shelf didn’t provide enough clearance for the toilet lid.  That’s right.  The lid would, at no time, go up and stay up on its own, because it bumped into the shelf.  Men would have to hold the thing up the entire time they were taking care of Standing Business.  If you needed to sit on the thing, you did so leaning forward with the toilet lid pressing on your back.

The design was simultaneously  pretentious, overbearing, and hopelessly bad.  I hated that room, just because the design was so awful.

Thanks, Dad.  No, I mean it.  If it hadn’t been for you, I would just have known I hated the room but not known why.  Thanks to you, I know I hated it because of the design.

One thing I did not agree with Dear Old Dad on was the subject of Taste.  He was a Modernist.  A Bauhaus kind of guy.  We had Barcelona chairs in the house when I was a kid.  And later, we had the kind of furniture that always made me think of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  He liked clean lines, sharp angles, and highly reflective surfaces.

My taste is wholly different.  At age 6 I was drawing houses and furnishing them (when I wasn’t drawing horses).  The houses were spiked with towers, spires, and dormers.  Occasionally, with falkwerk, that German-style half-timbering.  The furniture was Chippendale and Queen Anne, and Oriental carpets.  I like moderately ornate lines, curves, and bright color and rich textures.  That apple fell pretty far from the tree.  My current residence is pretty far removed from the houses I grew up in – it’s 115 years old, an antique mill-worker row house.  It has minimal gingerbread, but it’s still there.  It has bullseye moldings.  It has lots of wooden floors and throw rugs.  It’s decorated entirely in primary colors, mostly red and blue.  It’s furnished from Pier 1: the combination of wicker furniture and Victorian architecture is irresistible.

I’d say the only point of convergence is our taste in Mission-style anything.  For him, it was a departure, and the salt in the stew.  For me, it’s the ballast in the ship, the thing that tones everything else down.  We disagreed on every other artifact of taste except for Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School.

My taste, I’ve been told, is “good”.  Not cutting edge, not hip, not advanced.  Solid. Comfortable. Inviting. That’s what people usually say, if they say anything on the subject.  It’s true.  Most of my clothes are Eileen Fisher and LL Bean.  Not the new Eileen Fisher, after she went off the deep end in an attempt to cultivate hipster 20-somethings.  But theold Eileen Fisher, when she was mostly concerned with designing comfortable clothes that would flatter anyone who wore them.  And LL Bean – it’s as clean, functional, and well-designed (assuming “functional” is a primary value) as anything you’ll find.

And yet, I have my Moments.  In my earlier years, these took the form of a penchant for Animal Prints.  I wasn’t particular: giraffe, zebra, leopard, tiger, cheetah…you name it.  If it was covered in animal print, I wanted it.  Especially if it involved footwear.  The combination of animal prints and shoes is simply irresistible to me.  Fortunately, at this point, I have pretty much completely covered my Shoe Needs.

And so, my more outlandish tastes have had to find a different outlet.  And, I am happy to say, they have found full expression in my Ski Gear.  Not my attire – that stuff is all entirely functional, and not at all outlandish.  It’s pedestrian, if anything.  The only exception is the hat I wear when I’m not wearing my helmet.  It’s bright red, over 3 feet long, pointed, and has a ridge of white triangles going down the middle that look like dragon spikes.  As the guy in the waxing shop said “it’s intimidating, yet fun.”  But beyond that, the ski things that go on my body are completely conventional.

No. Where my outre side is finding its full expression is in the skis.

I bought my first pair of skis last year.  I belong to an online women’s ski group, the Ski Divas. The Ski Divas are most emphatic on the subject of the need to Try Before You Buy. And quite right they are, too.  It’s astonishing what a difference there is in skis, even skis of the same general type and size.  I looked at my local ski shop, first, but they don’t do demos.  That’s the provenance of the ski shop out at the hill.  My time in the local shop, however, did not prevent me from falling in love with a particular ski.  It was Love At First Sight.  I didn’t know what this ski was for, I didn’t know who this ski was for, I didn’t know anything about it at all, other than that I wanted to wear it because it looked that cool.

No, this is not a reason to buy a ski.  Still isn’t.  Skis must be first about performance and fit.  They must even also be second, maybe even third about performance and fit.

The Ski Divas said so, and they were right.  I left my Puppy Love behind in the shop – and couldn’t even remember what the ski was, I was that uninformed at the point.  But I didn’t forget it.

When I demoed skis, I tried four or five pairs.  Some of them were hard partiers, the kind of friend that will keep you out on a work night until 3am and leave you off at home, drunk as a sailor, to deal with the hangover the next morning. Not my kind of friend.  Some were stay-at-home moms, the kind that are steady and stable and absolutely the person you want to have around if things are not going well or you need chicken soup, but not the kind that are going to deliver excitement.  My kind of friend, but not what I was looking for in a ski.  The final round of demos featured a Volkl Tierra.

This is it (in bad resolution, since it’s last years’ model it was hard to find a good picture):

The general impression of this ski is one of Brownishness.  And Creamishness.  Earth-Toniness.  Not, in short, something that leapt off the wall and presented itself to my eye as offering an exciting look.

This is when I realized that to me, “ski” falls into the same mental category as “shoe”.  I do not wear bland, uninteresting shoes.  I have one pair that gets trotted out when I have to make presentations to some group where I need to come across as not having much of a personality (see: Accounting Professor).  Otherwise, I don’t get boring shoes.  And the look of this ski?  Distinctly…boring.

And I had a sinking feeling about this, all the way up on the lift.  I had a sneaking suspicion that this was going to be My Ski, even though it had the World’s Dullest Graphics.  By the time I skied off the lift, I’d managed to talk myself into thinking of it as Classy and Understated, rather than Dull.  And it’s a good thing, too, because it did, in fact, turn out to be the Perfect Ski for me.  That is, in those conditions, at that level of ability.  And I bought it.  And I still have it, and – when I am skiing on hard snow that is really some form of ice – I don’t want ANY other ski in the world. None could possibly perform better for me on that surface.  And I still make myself think of them as being Classy and Understated – this is helped considerably by the knowledge that this is in reality an extremely aggressive, wickedly fast ski, it is anything but dull, boring, and stodgy.  Appearances Can Be Deceiving.

I skied it like crazy all last winter, because last winter, we were skiing on snow that came out of the sky – which, in New England, means “wet” and “icy”.  I loved that ski, despite its graphics, all year…until I met Spring Skiing (aka: Slush).  It let me down, then.  Said it wasn’t the Right Tool For The Job.

My obsession with design translates to a fascination with purpose-built objects.  The notion of the Right Tool For The Job holds a lot of weight with me.  Assuming we have rational designers, that is.  None of this Italian stuff.  And so, when I found my Tierras sinking me up to the ankles in soft spring snow, I realized I needed something that would float, rather than sink. A nice big fat ski, the better to surf on the slush.  And what is soft and easy to get mired down in like slush?  Powder.  Yes.  I decided I wanted a Powder Ski.

The problem is that Powder Skis are not an item in High Demand in New England (see above: icy snow).  They are in some demand, because the Discriminating Skier wants to ride their own gear when they go out west.  It’s hard to go back to crummy rental equipment when you’re used to performance gear.  So you can buy them here…but you cannot usually demo them.  Or, at least, not last year you couldn’t.

I nerved myself up to buy a pair of skis without trying them first.  I did some research to find out what it is that I wanted from a powder ski, and went off to my local ski shop.  And discovered – happily – that my Puppy Love Skis were not just powder skis, but powder skis with the characteristics I was looking for. So I bought them, and assumed All Would Work Out.

I’ll say it worked out.  They were superb in the slush, and they’ve been performing for me all winter under the snow guns on the groomers (and everything else, up to but not including the icy black diamond from last week, where they cost me 2 years off my life).  And, as I anticipated, they are Cooler Than A Bees Knees.  They have the outre style that I long for from a pair of skis.  Here they are, the Rossignol S7Ws, aka My Goth Girls.

I realize that tentacles and tattoos are not everyone’s cup of tea, but they appear to be my cup of tea.  These skis are so fine, in my opinion, that it makes me want to get some of it tattooed on my own back.  And the beauty of it is that these skis rock the mountain.  They’re not just awesome to regard – and the bases are just as awesome, for anyone who sees me ride overhead on the lift – their performance is awesome. Ski Magazine gave them a Gold Medal Gear award.   On our recent powder day, I was afraid I’d get mugged in the trees, there was so much Ski Envy floating around over these girls.  The waxers love them, too.  There’s one guy who fights to wax them when I bring them in – the others roast him that his “girlfriend” is here when I bring them into the shop.  No, they’re not talking about me.

Eventually, being the purpose-built design freak that I am, I realized that I had icy conditions covered, and I had soft conditions covered, but I didn’t have something that would deal effectively with the In Between.  Those days when the top of the mountain is hard and icy, and the bottom is covered with fluffy soft stuff.  I also wanted something that would be a little easier to carve than my Goth Girls (and yes, I know they’re 110 under foot, but they do carve…it just takes some extra effort).

And so, I was back to the ski shop.  This time, do Try Before I Buy.  And Saturday was Free Demo Day for season passholders (yay!).  And I’d already had a couple of pow-wows with the ski dudes that had narrowed the field, considerably…to men’s skis.  Interesting.  But I wanted twin-tips, I wanted rocker, I wanted camber, I wanted something agile, and I have the power to handle a big beefy ski.  Women’s ski technology is lagging men’s by a couple of years, so men’s it was going to be.  After all, I thought, worst case is that I have to pick between my Rockin Awesome Powder Girls and My Hard And Sharp Ice Skis.  No loss, here.

I was overjoyed to find the ski that filled that hole, with bonus points.  And even more overjoyed to find that my new ski was going to look like this:

Oooh.  They are Ninja Skis.  Curly golden dragons.  Fake Chinese Characters.  You can’t even see it from this picture, but there are actual metallic medallions on the tips and tails (you can take them off and put a precut skin on if you want to hit the backcountry).  They’re bas-relief dragons.

I know that ersatz Chinese art, and the whole Ninja effect, is not everyone’s cup of tea.  But it seems to be my cup of tea.  Not only do these sticks complete my need for any kind of surface I’d be interested in skiing on, but they ensure my spot at the top of the Hierarchy of Cool on the hill.  Granted, that hierarchy is comprised mainly of teenaged snowboarders and 20-something guys.  But I’ll take it.  And I will definitely take the performance…because, of course, that is most important.

Blazing Down The White Ribbon Of Death

At 3pm on April 9, 2011, I added a walk-in closet to my mental landscape and stuffed the ski season into it.  And then I locked the door.  This, strictly, in pure self-defense.  I made my last run at 12:45pm, and just as the snow was starting to move from soft to slushy, I stripped off my gear, dropped my slats in the shop for a summer wax, and hit the wake going on at the bottom of the hill in the form of the Brewer’s Festival, at which me and 2,500 of my BFFs proceeded to get roaring drunk on New England microbrews.  And before I woke up from the post-beerfest coma, I’d locked the ski season away in a lead coffin, socked it into a vacuum, and hermetically sealed the door.

Why?

Because it was absolutely too much to contemplate the prospect of eight (8) months without skiing.  And the thing I dreaded most of all was my subconscious rooting all of that out and tormenting me with dreams of flying down endless pristine slopes of white, curving and carving with the winter sun on my hair and tingly sprinkles of snowflakes dusting down from above.  And waking up to the realization that it would be another six, seven, or – heaven help us – eight months until I could be there, doing that, again.  No.  It was just too painful to consider.  And so I bagged my skis promptly and stowed them and my boots and my helmet and the other 100 lbs of gear and stuck them invisibly into the back of my bricks-and-mortar closet, and I locked the door on my memories.

And there, they have stayed, until today.  Mercifully, the bonds held, and I was not tortured with ski dreams in the off season.  The price of this is that I had nothing but the sterile recollection that I am passionately fond of skiing…devoid of the passion, as if it was something I had read in the New York Times.  “I love to ski” I could say or think, but it had none of the immediacy or urgency of actually “loving”.  And eventually, I grew to wonder if I did love to ski, or if the loving to ski was itself a dream.  I couldn’t feel it.

It’s probably just as well.  The suck weather that we’ve been burdened with all year – tornadoes, hurricanes, and freak untimely blizzards has carried through with its early promise of misery, and granted us endless days above 50 and nights well above freezing.  These are not temperature ranges suitable for helping Mother Nature’s bounty out with a series of snow guns.  On Wednesday it was 65 in Northampton.  By Wednesday night, thank heavens, things were starting to turn around, and my BFFs up in Vermont were able to start blowing snow in earnest.  And yesterday, my hill opened for the first day of skiing this season.

I did not join them in this.  For one, I got a price break on my season pass because it doesn’t let me ski on Saturdays.  This is fine, because Saturdays are a terrible day to ski.  Way, way too many people.  Way, way too many of those people are complete punters who thought to save some time and money by skipping ski lessons, and in consequence, waste both of them (as well as creating a hassle for everyone else on the slopes).

No. I ran my skis to the shop to get the summer wax off and the slope wax on and picked them up Friday night.  Even then the closet was locked.  I waited, giving them another 24 hours to coat the runs with snow (and this was a good decision, I am told).  And I checked the live cam and saw that, yes, there was snow, and yes, there were skiers.  And still it wasn’t real, and still I didn’t feel it.

Nor did I feel it this morning, running through the Ski Day Ritual:  checking the forecast, selecting various and sundry layers, double-checking the contents of the boot bag, slugging down a dense hot chocolate in lieu of breakfast.

I didn’t feel it on the way up, and even the sight of the staties setting up for their Winter Ski Action didn’t make it real.  The Massachusetts State Police is one of the most highly educated forces in the country, and it really shows in the creativity and skill with which they locate their cruisers when designing speed traps for skiers.  No, really.  I-91 is a straight shot from New York City to Canada, and is the route servicing the Vermont ski areas as far as drivers from the City, New Jersey, Westchester County, and Connecticut are considered.  This is a truly impressive parcel of maniacal drivers with over-powered luxury vehicles and a fine disdain for the rules of the road.  And the MA state cops know this, and they know that all of these egomanes consider Massachusetts to be some kind of Drive-Through Territory standing between them and their objective of the ski slopes. We’re not getting any tourist dollars from them, so it doesn’t cost us anything to write nice big fat speeding tickets.  It’s a different story in Vermont, where state troopers are remarkable in their absence from the heavily-trafficked ski-area access roads. Consequently, in Massachusetts, the onset of Ski Season is characterized by a dramatic increase in the Police Presence on I-91, typically seen only in circumstances where informants have provide information about drug mules running giant cartloads of cocaine and heroin up to the international border.

You can easily tell the difference between the Major Drug Bust Action and the Winter Ski Action.  The Drug Bust cops park their black-and-whites on the median, and wait for the drug-addled lunatics to scream by unwittingly.  The Winter Ski cops hide their cars.  They hide them behind bridge abutments.  They hide them behind small bushes.  They hide them behind work barrels.  They hide them behind Jersey barriers.  They hide them in places that don’t seem like they’d be big enough to hide a chopper, let alone an entire state police car.  They’re clever.  We have an artistic appreciation of this, because we know it happens, and we’re careful to keep the car close to the posted limit until we get into Vermont.

But even the sight of troopers working hard to line our state coffers with big fines for moving violations didn’t make it real for me.

That closet stayed locked and barred all the way up through the mountains.  The locks stood fast against the last big turn down the mountain, the one that puts our ski area front and center in the windshield, and where I could see the sparkling clouds of snow crystals rising up through the air from the fan guns.  They even stayed shut as I wrestled my boots on and worked up a sweat in the lodge simply getting geared up.

And they stayed that way until the moment I threw my skis down, checked the snow brakes, and stepped into the bindings.  There is a sound and a sensation, a type of firm, solid, clunk, that happens when – and only when – I step into my ski bindings.  And that tiny sound, and that small solid click, blew the locks on that closet wide up, and burst the hermetic seals, and let the ski season pour out in splendid, marvelous technicolor, amped up with the smell of Der Vaffle Shack and the smoke coming off the grill in the burger joint, and the grease on the lift.  It was amped up by the crunching of ski edges in the snow, and the regular clack-clack-clack of the lift chairs cycling through the loading zone.  It was amped up by the sun on my face and the cold breeze in my hair, and that utterly unmistakable wonderful slippery slidy feeling of the snow under my skis.  And when the rush cleared, it was there, and it was real, and it was fresh.  I no longer had an abstract recollection that I am passionately fond of skiing.  I had, instead, an irrepressible and immediate need to get onto the lift and start sailing.

What I say is this:  Thank God I Built That Closet And Locked That Stuff Up.  It would have made me miserable through the end of April, into May, and June, and July, and August, and September, and October, and November, and the early part of December.  My nighttime dreams would have been a taunting misery of ersatz sensations, dragged imperfectly from memory, and thrown at my awareness piecemeal.  Waking would have been yet worse.  Locking that door was one of the best decisions I’ve made all year, possibly as good a decision as buying Huey, even.

And there I was, lofting to the top of the mountain on the new lift, and hoping against hope that I’d actually remember how to ski.  In April, I was ripping down the easier blacks, and skiing every blue on the hill.  Today, I aimed for the long green run.  My favorite blues have not yet been treated to a coating of man-made snow.  The blue that was available is one of the most difficult blues on the mountain.  Granted, it’s the same blue I bombed down at speed on April 9th right before stripping my gear for the season.  But my self-preservation instinct directed me to the green cruiser.

A jolly good thing it did, too.  For one, my spirit clearly remembered how to ski beautifully.  My body, on the other hand, has spent the last eight months on a horse, and using entirely different muscles.  It’s not that my body didn’t remember how to ski.  It did.  It was just running, say, about 30 seconds slower on everything than my spirit was.

I skied off the lift and without thinking, ripped a hockey stop to turn out of the disembarking traffic and geared up with my poles at the same time.  In that small gesture, the last eight months folded up into a space approximately two weeks wide.  They vanished.  It was as if I had been away from the slopes for a matter of a few days, not most of the year.  It was…remarkable.

Unfortunately, this was also a source of considerable frustration, because to my subjective experience, I was pounding down a black diamond a few weeks ago…

…it has been, in fact, eight months since any of these muscles were used.

And thus began the minor bickering and squabbling that one always experiences when the familiar runs head-on into lapsed time:  My brain says “turn, turn, turn, edge, turn. pole turn pole turn pole turn edge some more turn.”  While my body says “…turn…turn….turn….oh shit, caught that edge…recover…turn…pole…oops…turn….pole.”

And, thanks to the fact that there were loads of punters scraping the slope while major snowmaking operations were ongoing, the slope featured areas that were scraped down to hardpack by incompetent snowboarders…alternating with big stashes of powder, piled up randomly.  Twice, in the effort to avoid noob skiers on their haphazard trajectories I would up with my own tails bogged down in a powder stash, and blam I went down.  None of these were particularly impressive falls – not like the snowboarder who rocketed across the face of the slope in front of me, catching his forward edge and launching into an aerial somersault before landing twenty feet down the hill.  Mine were tiny little pissy falls, hardly worth the term, and good only for reminding me that it’s not at all reasonable to compare my first day of this season against the last day of the last one.

I did hit the blue slope for a single run, and that was enough.  The snow guns were operating at a furious pace, giving us a true powder experience on that run.  And the “true powder experience” means “get there early, because after the first hour, it’s going to be one long field of massive moguls, heading straight down the face of the mountain”.  Unfortunately, I arrived in hour three or four, well after the entire run had been converted to gigantic moguls.

My primary ski is a Volkl Tierra, and I love that ski.  It grips the ice hard enough to make it scream.  If I need to ski New England Ice Runs, this is the ski I want to be riding.

In powder, however, it’s a bust.  Slush, too, which is why I acquired a late-season purchase last year of a pair of Rossignol S7W twin-tip powder skis.  These are the boards I rode for the entire last month of the season last year – so in addition to recovering ancient muscle memory, I was also doing it on a pair of – by then – unfamiliar skis.  Fortunately I had considered the possibility of running into soft snow, and had dragged my Rossis out to the hill with me.  So at the end of that run, it was time for the Gear Change.  And, as I thought, the Rossis turned out to be the Ski of the Day, and took me down the hardpack and the ice and the surprise powder stashes a hell of a lot more comfortably than my Volkls did.

By noon-thirty, it was time to quit.  And that’s when I remembered the rest of it…Phase Two: Apres Ski.

There is nothing, and I am willing to stand by this and swear it on my granny’s grave, there is nothing that tastes better after skiing for hours than a nice cold beer.  And nachos.  Or possibly a burger, but the beer is not optional.  I don’t care what kind of beer it is.  Even a Bud Light would taste like the Best Beer Ever when you’re kicking it back while restoring sensation to your toes and watching the lifts.  Nothing is better than a cold one after skiing.  And while I wouldn’t turn down a Bud Light, I’m even yet more grateful when it’s a microbrew.  Stouts and porters are fine, but what you really want is something light.  A pilsner.  Maybe an IPA.  Maybe even a lager.  It’s strange, but the same kind of beer you’d want after mowing the lawn is the same kind of beer your want for your first brew straight from the slopes.

I’ve unleashed the monster, and now I can only think of when I’m going next.  Soon, I hope.

These are my girls. Not only are they rockin' awesome skis for pounding down the slopes and busting through the crud, but they are easily the FINEST looking pair of skis on the hill.