View From the Bushes

Well, I'm back. Of course, this was one of those vacations where you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation, if you know what I mean. I went skiing twice; that was pretty ugly. The ugliest part came when my younger brother prevailed upon us to finally try a black diamond run -- this hubris would prove to be his undoing.

He was two turns into the hill when he fell; not a big fall, in fact it would be difficult to imagine that you could fall any less severely than he did on a black diamond. I skied to where he was and was waiting for him to get up when I noticed what looked like the top of a toy truck in the snow. As I looked closer I realized that it was part of his binding. Looking around in the snow it appeared that the back part of one of his binding had completely shattered.

My brother had apparently watched Better Off Dead too many times and as a result he decided he could ski the rest of the way on just one ski. It turned out to be a lot more difficult then he imagined, and he could either ski five feet and then fall down or get going way too fast without any way of stopping. He choose the latter method to get himself off the black diamond. He had crashed on and ended up wiping out in truly spectacular fashion the minute he hit the cat track. When the snow cleared on it we discovered that he had hurt his shin.

We continued down the hill again and before we had reached the half-way point he crashed again and this time his other binding broke in exactly the same fashion as the first one (I told you it was an ugly run). This time the binding parts went sliding down the hill. My sister took off after them, but every time she got in front of them they would bounce over her skis and continue down the hill. I went down to help her, but before I could get there she had crashed. I'm not sure if she crashed because she was flustered or if she threw herself on top of the binding parts. Whatever the case, she did manage to land on the parts and secure them, but not without losing her ski which started its own descent down the hill. I had just managed to grab it when I heard my brother yelling, "I can't stop!!" He was flying down the hill on his bibs and headed straight for me.

Fortunately, I managed to stop him as well. After this three stooges routine was finished, we managed to make it down the rest of the hill uneventfully (Actually that's not entirely true. My other sister crashed in spectacular fashion after doing the splits and once again almost ran me over, but after what had already happened it was somewhat anti-climatic.) With no posting last week I completely missed the big news story of the tsunami, but I'd still like to post this link to some before and after satellite pictures of some of the affected areas.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross