I got up at 8:00 to a steady rainfall outside. It had obviously snowed overnight, and it was just one big slushy mess out there. Yuck.
I had breakfast upstairs: a bagel, coffee, and some Honey Nut Cheerios.
Back at the room, Robert had on the TV, tuned to the weather station. The local channel here in Tahoe that gives the weather and conditions (of the slopes) report employs the most obnoxious, juvenile reporter on the planet.
I can’t even stand to watch and listen to him long enough to get to the Heavenly report, as he yammers through the Sierra-at-Tahoe and Kirkwood reports, among others.
I decided that I was not up for getting soaked on my way up to the slopes, so decided to just hang out this morning, in hopes of the rain letting up within an hour or so.
I had some trouble reconnecting to the Internet using the 2 hours of time I bought from “BlueGo” yesterday, and had to call their Help Line.
“Raj” asked me to spell my email address so that he could “look up my file.”
“Enn Eee Emm Aay Tee Oh Emm Eee,” I said, and after repeating it two or three times using the “echo bravo alpha” language, we finally got it right.
While I love this user name, because it’s always available when I request it on yet another system, it does have its drawbacks in terms of other people understanding it, when I say it, much less spell it.
In this particular exchange, the situation was exacerbated by a bad connection, and Raj invoked one of my pet peeves.
As I was giving him my “card number” the first time, he said, “You’re breaking up,” — as if I had a pair of scissors and was maliciously snipping the connection in strategic places. The polite, and more accurate, thing to say is, “Our connection is breaking up.” It’s not like it’s either of our faults.
Once I finally got connected, I uploaded my Thursday, Friday, and Saturday blog entries, and checked my email.
On one of my accounts, I had 23 new emails
- 8 of which were calling on me to buy some cheap mood-altering or pain-controlling meds,
- 6 of which were offering drugs and gadgets to lengthen my penis, encourage my erection, or “impress my girlfriend (Ewwww!) with my stamina,” and
- 9 of which were coaxing me to buy my loved ones some nice “replicas” that they’d never know weren’t Rolexes.
I’d like to see that second and third company merge, and offer to create a replica of a raging hard-on of mine that I’ve had for about 6 hours. But I digress.
When 10:00 came, and the rain looked like it had only slightly lessened, I decided to suck it up, and head out to the slope to at least use some portion of my $65-per-day lift ticket.
I dressed extra warm today, adding a sweatshirt under my ski jumpsuit. For the past two days, I’d only wore my long johns underneath.
Today’s additions also included a hat and goggles, and after forgetting it yesterday, was sure to put my phone in my pocket. Is that a phone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me? Ba-dump bump. We’re here all week folks.
While waiting out front for the shuttle, I checked to make sure there was a hood in this jumpsuit, found it, and unrolled it to keep my hat from getting soaked as I walked from the bus to the gondola.
On the bus, I found out that the gondola was closed, due to the wind. That can’t be good. “And only about half of the runs are open,” the bus driver continued.
I skied for just under two hours, and it felt like four. In places, there was close to two feet of new snow, not yet groomed, and it was tough skiing.
I had to really concentrate to stand up straight, lean slightly forward, and to keep my knees totally relaxed to absorb the ever-present unexpected bumps that were under the at-times deep pockets of snow.
On a couple of the runs, the wind was blowing the snow so hard on my face, that I had to stop, face away from the wind, and let my cheeks thaw out a little before proceeding.
Though it was mostly snowing, there were places where it was raining, and it was just a wet, wet mess up there. Because only about half of the trails were open, it was quite crowded on the ones that were open, too.
Basically, I skied long enough to feel like I’d gotten something out of my lift ticket for today, and stopped before I got hurt.
I took my first, and only, fall at the end of a trail that I didn’t want to go down to begin with, but had to because the only alternative trail from that point was marked “closed.”
Happy to be finished in one piece, and to be getting out of the weather, I called the shuttle, and went back to Lakeland Village.
Robert was just about to hop in the shower when I got in, and stopped (like the dear man he is) to heat up his leftover omelet from this morning for a lunch for me. It was an Omelet Florentine, and it was delicious.
I took a mid-afternoon nap, while Robert ventured down to the casinos to check them out, and ended spending his time at Harrah’s.
When he returned, we went to dinner at Tep’s Villa Roma again. We had their Traditional Lasagna, which was quite yummy. It came with their antipasto salad bar.
We had a last leisurely evening, watching Barbara Walters being interviewed on Inside the Actors Studio, which I’d never heard of. Love Ba-ba-wa-wa. And, yes, I do find it a little bothery [sic] that there is no apostrophe in the word “actors” anywhere.
Robert laughed almost every time they focused in on the host, James Lipton, as he said that Will Ferrell does a great imitation of him on SNL.
After that, we watched an episode of The Twilight Zone, which I haven’t seen in years. This episode was about a man who has lived for over 2000 years, who finally gets “discovered,” and then dies to the point of “returning to dust” on the floor of the study.