1.30.00

    You know what hurts right now? Reflexes. Any sudden movement sends me into some pain or another. Because, you see, I'm a big, bad snowboarder. Emphasis on bad.

    To be fair to my own ego, it was only the second time I tried it. I was actually doing turns this time. I'd slowly start my turn and then sort of careen wildly out of control, undoubtedly unleashing a string of curse words, stabilize and then fall to the ground in a heap of nervous laughter. It took me awhile to get down the mountain.

    T. is amazing. He was just tearing up the slopes. I had him giving me pointers on my first run down. At about the halfway point I let him go because he was getting bored. We were there with a bunch of his coworkers and myself and a woman named Tawnya did some really slow boarding around the mountain. Anyway, by the time I reached the bottom of the run, T. was heading up on the lift and he saw me make my first successful turn. I heard this shouting from the chairlift, "Way to go!" and saw T. I stopped and yelled back, "I'm SHRED-DING" and overemphasized some air-quotes (think Dr. Evil and his "LA-SERS") which sent him into a fit of guffaws. Then I realized what an audience I had on the chairlift as more than one group of people were laughing. If I could have moved on with grace and aplomb I would have but instead I fell down. *sigh*

    I think I only did two runs. My head was killing me from a fall I took off of my first trip up the lift. I just cannot get off the damn lift in a snowboard. In Montana when I tried to get off I landed on my own bindings giving me a painful bruise on my hip and nearly slammed my board into my little brother's face. This time was beautiful though, this time, I double-smacked my head against the icy ground. As in, my skull bounced and hit it again. I saw stars. A lot of stars. I just lay there for what seemed like forever, holding my head and waiting for something to happen. I just remember a lot of thoughts going through my mind: did I crack my skull? am I going to get hit by the next people off the lift? why isn't anyone helping me? ow. ow. ow. I opened my eyes in time to seen Tawnya and Helen come careening and crashing off the lift towards me. They were at least four chairs behind me so apparently either the lift-operator didn't know I was lying there with a head injury or he was just a dick. Maybe a little of both.

    When my senses finally came back to me I scooted off to the side, grabbed a handful of snow and slapped it on the back of my head. I had an instant headache. Amazingly, there was no blood but I have a nice goose-egg going on. I did one more trip up the lift that night and fell getting off but nothing too traumatic. I'm pretty sure that Tawnya would have disembarked without event if I hadn't pushed her down. I am truly a menace.

    We were up on Mt. Hood, night-skiing at Ski Bowl. I haven't ever been night skiing and I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to ski. Once I got started, I barely noticed a difference except when I wiped out and took a moment to lay in my back on the cold, soothing snow and star up at the sky. It was a perfectly clear night and the stars were amazing.

    I took some pics with the digital camera. It doesn't do so well at night and I really wished I had my regular camera to take a picture of the slope. Of course, if that happened then we wouldn't be seeing pictures for a long while. (Have I mentioned that I have over twenty rolls of film waiting to be developed?)

    I had to get up early on Saturday with my body aching and my head pounding to teach an introduction to Flash 4 to a group from the local Webgrrls chapter. The class was an hour and a half long and I covered the interface, making simple movies and had some discussion. By the time we were closing my throat was dry and my head was swimming. I have no idea whether or not the girls got anything good out of it. I was really happy to do it, though. I know how helpful it can be to just watch another person use a piece of software. I still pick up things from other people when I watch them use programs I consider myself adept at, like Photoshop.

    Afterwards, I futzed around the office and enjoyed the quiet. I got a crazy idea that people such as you, dear reader, would love to see what my workspace looks like. Coming soon to a 'Ga Wow' website near you is the world's stupidest Flash piece ever. I spent the rest of the day working on it. I was going to do it in .dhtml but I figured by the time I learned enough .dhtml to do it that I wouldn't want to do it anymore. Which, maybe would have been a good thing. Stop me before I Flash again.