Look For Me On Your Local News....

I'm going skiing today in Galena, tonight rather since we haven't left yet. In case of wild weather, in case of emergency, I might have to apply this rather novel approach to surviving.

Last January, after having not skied in about five years -- I used to go all the time as a kid, when I was better -- I nearly killed myself. It was freezing rain the night before and the shift in temperatures from night to morn gave us thick-as-soup fog. You couldn't really see more than three feet in front of you. They should have closed the slopes. I was fine for an hour or two and then midday I started having problems. I punched myself with my pole after hitting an unseen bump -- not a mogul, but a bump. Then the very next run, I hit another bump -- though it might have been the same one, I learn nothing -- got airborne, horizontal to the slope, and barrel-rolled, snapping each ski off as it hit the mountain. Then I collapsed face-down with my right arm extended, in an almost eerily similar way to a chalk outline. I thought I had broken my arm. My sister -- who before that day boasted she had never fallen -- took her hundredth spill of the day right behind me, and was laughing really hard until she realized I had fallen and not gotten up. She looked up and yelled, "Oh MY GOD!! Are you DEAD?!?" Then my dad almost made me wait for a ski patrol stretcher, but I persevered and did it myself. Turns out nothing was seriously injured, but in what I think is a direct result, now my extremities fall asleep on me after just a minute of non-use.

My mom is being a bitch right now, trying to get out of going on the ski trip, but she will not win.