Victory belongs to the most persevering.

I hope you all enjoyed your Darwin Day more than I did. But before we get to that, let's take a look at the events of the preceding week. When I last posted, I made it clear that my Monday was far from over, so the first thing I'm going to talk about is what happened after I posted on that day.

My parents and I went to the Ducks game, a very important game (in terms of standings, points, playoff implications, and all those other things that none of you know about) that would see them face off against the Calgary Flames. The Ducks grabbed a 2-0 lead in the first period, but the Flames came back with a goal in each of the last two periods to even the score up by the end of regulation. So then we have overtime. Five minutes of four-on-four hockey, during which nobody scored. So we went to the shootout. You know, when the teams exchange penalty shots, and after three shots by each team, the team with more goals wins? Of course, after three rounds the score was still tied. So we went to four rounds. And five. And then six. And eventually seven. It wasn't until the eighth round that the tie was broken. A Finnish winger by the name of Niklas Hagman, who had begun the season as a member of the Calgary Flames but was picked up on waivers by the Ducks a few months ago, was the man of the hour; he beat his old teammate with a beautiful shot, going upstairs on fellow Finn Miikka Kiprusoff. And that was that.

No, the goalie isn't having a seizure. What he's doing is executing what's called a poke check, which is the term for trying to poke the puck off the attacking player's stick with your own stick. Needless to say, Kipper missed with this particular poke check, which isn't something you could say about Haggy's shot.

Oh, and shall I quote myself from last week? "My dad plays on an adult men's league every Monday and Wednesday night, and tonight his team's game is at 11:30 . . . we can watch a game in Anaheim and play one in Irvine. Barring a record-breaking shootout that lasts thirty-five rounds." Well, I got some of it right, didn't I? Which brings me to the game that my dad and I played in late that night. I scored a goal and an assist. And I sat in the penalty box for the first time in my hockey career. Bad call. Actually, though. But no matter, we won the game. A fight broke out at the end. Once again, that was that.

You can start reading now, Rachael. Just kidding, I know you're a good friend and therefore have read every single word of this post thus far and will continue to do so. On Tuesday I ran with the CdM team, but I didn't have time to drop by and say hi to any teachers. My most sincere apologies.

Early Wednesday morning I hopped in a taxi with my parents and we drove all the way to Park City, Utah. Okay, maybe we drove to the airport, flew to Salt Lake City, and drove to Park City from there. Yeah, that's probably more like it. Anyway, we took advantage, as we so often do, of PC's "Quick Start" promotion, which allows you to ski for free the same day you fly in if you can prove it with your boarding pass. The snow conditions were dismal, and as such we skipped skiing on Thursday, and then skied Friday and Saturday because our family friends joined us for those two days. The skiing wasn't very good on either of those days, either.

But that doesn't mean I didn't have one specific memorable experience from those days. I am referring to a little chair lift ride that I took on Saturday. Now, as all of you are unaware of, Deer Valley's ski school program operates at an instructor-child ratio that requires that most of the kids in each group have to ride each chair without their instructor; there simply aren't enough seats per chair. So this means that when the little munchkins get in line for a chair, their instructor has to ask responsible-looking people in that same line if they're willing to ride up with a couple of kids. I've been called upon in years past to do this duty, so none of this was new to me. This time, I rode up with two little girls, probably six years old, one of which didn't speak any English, and both of which seemed confused about the function of the safety bar on a chair lift. I'll let you imagine how that ride went on your own. Oh, and for the sake of my own personal self-esteem I ought to point out that the chair I was riding while this took place is a small transport lift on the lower mountain that is necessary to take in order to get to a certain lodge; by no means is there an overlap in the chairs that I enjoy skiing and the ones that the munchkins are able to safely ski.

You know, if any of you guys put maps in your posts, I would study them closely. So if you think I'm okay with the fact that every one of you just went "Oh, a map. Typical." and then moved on without appreciating it, think again.

Mother Nature being the witch that she is, we awoke on Darwin Day to find a fluffy blanket of freshly fallen snow smothering the landscape like some gigantic albino lethifold; in other words, near perfect skiing conditions, the likes of which I haven't been blessed with in a couple of years. Of course, all this on the morning of my departure. So we drove down to the airport on streets buried in snow that had been completely barren only ten hours before, cursing our luck all the way.

As is always the case, there are no direct flights from either of the two superior time zones in the lower 48 to Burlington. This time, my layover was in New York. The flight from SLC to JFK took about four hours, and that from JFK to BTV took a quarter of that. Now I ought to say something about the first leg of that travel day. As you may or may not know, some large Delta planes have little monitors on the back of every seat (Except those in the last row, of course. Well, I mean I assume they don't. I guess I've never really looked.), and these monitors carry a hodgepodge of free and not-free services, including movies, music, television, games, and my personal favorite, the digital map that shows you exactly where you are. (Let the record show that I only use this when I do not have a window seat, or if it is cloudy. Otherwise, such devices are unnecessary.) Between reading various essays of Christopher Hitchens in his book that I mentioned last week (more on that in a few paragraphs), I took to playing one of the few games that comes free of charge, and that would be the trivia game that you play against other passengers on the flight, who are identified on the scorecard by seat number. Now let's make one thing absolutely clear here. I ruined everybody. I mean, I just took their poor souls and broke them with my mind. Absolutely no mercy. Or at least, that's how it went for the first few rounds, and how it ought to have been for the last few, but for some inexplicable reason, my damn touchscreen failed me. I knew those answers and had my system been operational I would have gone undefeated. I want all of you to know this, just to make up for all the people on that flight who must have thought that 30F had all of the sudden stopped playing, or somehow lost his capacity to crush them into the ground that was 33,000 feet below them.

After I gave up on that treacherous game, I dropped eaves on the conversation that was going on between the two Jewish New Yorkers that were sitting next to me. (Please don't accuse me of generalizing or judging, you know a New York Jew when you see or hear one, and their conversation eventually proved me right.) You see, they were discussing the skiing, and 30E had several interesting opinions, such as that which held Alta and Deer Valley to be superior ski resorts to Canyons. And by interesting I mean really, really wrong. Eventually their conversation, which I had joined in by that time, led them to 30D's son, who attends "a small liberal arts college about 45 minutes north of Rutland," as he put it. Ah, I said, so do I.

Oh, and I'm still not sure exactly how Jewish these people were, but I do know that the one nearest me definitely noticed my Hitchens book. If he was offended, he didn't show it.

When I finally got to my dorm that night, I found one Chad Clemens there. Now I'm not sure if I've ever said anything about him on this blog, but here's a quick recap: He's a great guy with whom I became friends during fall semester, but an injury kept him home (Las Vegas, Nevada) during J-term, so I hadn't seem him since 2011. So my Darwin Day got a little better.

As I have mentioned, I've been reading Hitchens' stuff, and I've got to say that he is (was) one of the best writers I've ever read, not to mention one of the most all-around informed people that I know of. I don't read his book with a dictionary open to the side, I read it with Wikipedia open. His essays on Newton, Lincoln, Wodehouse, and Orwell have been especially enlightening, and I look forward to the rest, especially the one on Rowling, to which I have thus far successfully resisted the temptation to skip ahead.

But now for the events of today, Monday the 13th of this February. Today is the first day of the spring semester here at Middlebury, an inception that takes place significantly later than any of yours because of our J-term. We have an add-drop period for the first two weeks of classes, which Rich and Nicole might also have because they go to small schools, but I don't know that for sure. What is the relevance of this, you ask? Or rather, what is the relevance of this, I ask for you so I can answer? Well, the number of different classes I intend on attending today and tomorrow is greater than the number of classes I intend on enrolling in. To make it a little simpler, I went to three classes today and I'll go to three tomorrow, and I'll pick my favorite four of those six. Today I tried out "Introduction to Biblical Literature," "Earthquakes and Volcanoes," and "Physical Reality and Human Thought" (which deals with relativity, quantum physics, and their implications for philosophy). The trouble, of course, is that I liked all three of them, and that will probably be the case for tomorrow's batch as well. I'll probably end up dropping E&V, despite one of it's nicknames, "Shake and Bake", and not despite it's other nickname, "Rocks for Jocks".

Speaking of jocks, I ought to relate to you a little something that happened in the locker room today, something that requires one sentence of background information, which, surprise, is the next sentence after this one. We have speakers in our track and field locker room (each varsity team has a locker room), and someone pretty much always has some manner of music playing from them. As I walked into the room to change before today's practice, the speakers were playing the soundtrack to Fellowship of the Ring, specifically the track "Journey in the Dark," which is one of my personal favorites. The women's track team locker room, which is next to ours and therefore sends enough sound waves to us that we know what they're listening to, was listening to Katy Perry at the same time that we were listening to LotR. All this just when I was beginning to think feminism had some good points . . .