It's not your aptitude but your attitude which will determine your altitude.

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.
Well, okay. To be honest, upwards of two thousand college students remember it. Vividly.
As you may recall, I wasn't exactly having the time of my life last week, and this was due to the inconvenient sickness that I had acquired, that which we call gastroenteritis. Spanning the time between Saturday the 21st and, oh, about Wednesday the 25th, Middlebury College found itself engulfed in something of an epidemic. Of the thirty or so distance runners (including both genders), the number of unaffected was either two or three; I cannot remember precisely and for that I apologize. But you get the idea. Basically, this thing took over the school and showed no mercy. Even after my recovery I had to hunt for toilets that had not been victimized to the point of being rendered almost useless for those who wanted to use them in the usual way.

But that is enough talk of the plague. I'd like to do a quick recapitulation of the week before the epidemic, i.e. the week that you know so little about because I barely wrote anything last time. Now there is really only one thing of note that happened in that week, and I did in fact give you a very brief statement about it last week, but I'd like to expand on that here.

I was three years old when I learned to ski. And no, that wasn't last week; don't be so pedantic. Backstory is of the essence here. My parents started Cole and I off by taking us up to Big Bear, where my mom grew up and where her all of her immediate family is still in residence, both the living and the dead. Now what you have to understand about skiing in Big Bear is that you do it because it is close by and because it is relatively cheap, which means it's the kind of place where you teach your kids to ski. But of course, in the years since, our four-person unit has traveled from mountain to mountain, skiing in several states, as well as a province (two provinces, in our dad's case). We have many favorites, and we tend to disagree and consequently argue about how this mountain is better than that one, but no it isn't, oh yes it is, ad nauseam. Cole, for example, has this ridiculous notion that Mammoth is superior to say, Park City or even Telluride. So next time someone tells you that the world's going to end on some specific date, you can assure them that you know a guy with even crazier opinions.
I realize I've strayed from the path a little bit. Of course, I tend to do that and if that's not okay with you then, well, you probably haven't gotten far enough to read this anyway. So let's press on. The point I'm trying to make is that we've skied a lot of different mountains. And up until this month, no Satterfield has ever skied anywhere east of Denver. Well, I changed all that with a trip to the Middlebury Snow Bowl, and let me tell you something, this place makes Big Bear look like Vail. Let's put it this way: For a few years now I've kept a list of all the ski resorts I've been to on my computer, and I have them ranked in order of how much I like them. I'm always editing this list, either because I need to add a new spot that I've just been to for the first time, or, more frequently, because I've changed my mind; as such, I'm always switching up the order. Is Snowbasin really better than Alta? How does Beaver Creek fit in here. These are the questions that keep me up at night. Well, maybe not. But that's not the point. Here's the point: Only once have I ever gone to a ski resort and immediately known exactly where it stands on the list. Middlebury Snow Bowl is the twenty-sixth ski area I've been two, and it sits at spot number twenty-six on my list of favorites and it says nothing in protest because it knows that it deserves that spot.
I realize you guys don't give a damn about any of this, so I promise I'm almost done. I'll leave you with a few statistics, displayed graphically, in order to illustrate my point more clearly. Here are a few ski resorts of note, along with the skiable acreage at each ski resort and their vertical rise, which means the summit elevation minus the base elevation. Basically, these are the two main indicators of a ski area's size, and bigger is better. Your task is to appreciate how much worse the Snow Bowl is than the others. It's not a tough job. Oh, and if you ever needed proof that Canada, generally speaking, superior, that should be evident as well.

Well, now that that's over with, I can talk a little bit about the week that I'm supposed to be talking about, and you can actually be interested. So this week was the week of the plague, as I already touched on. My life consisted of sickness from last Saturday to last Wednesday, so I don't have a lot to say about the first half of the week. I didn't go to class or practice and I pretty much just stayed in bed. The weekend proved to be more blog-worthy. We had a meet in Boston, and I ran the 5k. I didn't run well at all, so much so that I'm purposefully going to avoid telling you what my time was. But I will say this: the indoor track at Boston University is 200 meters long, so my race was 25 laps long. Do you know how much it sucks to run 25 laps around a track, especially when you're competing? No, you don't, because you've never done that and you never will. But good things happened, too. Kjell goes to Boston College, so he came over to watch the meet and we hung out and caught up for a while. We also met Sean Lee (another CdM grad who you guys may or may not know), who goes to BU, and consequently discovered the advantages of knowing someone who goes to BU when you're at BU, namely access to the dining hall. So that free meal tasted good, as all free meals do.

So I've only got a week left of J-term, which means I've got a pretty big paper coming up this week, which means this week might just be awful. We have next week off before we start Spring semester, so I'll be back west for a little bit.

Something weird is happening as I type this. To be specific, all the words are bunched up on the left side of the page. I don't know what's happening. Please spare me, O Computer Gods. Sorry that this post wasn't that good either. I know that's two bad posts in a row. I'll work on improving.