No Friends on a Powder Day

Hey fellas. I got sick a few days ago, so I've been inside a lot, which sucks any time of the year, but especially now at the height of ski season. One side effect of that insideness is that I got a whole lotta homework done, and since I'm still kinda sick, I'm running out of things to do, which never happens. Meaning, I get to write a blog post.

Frozen waterfall in town.

J Term was the best. My class was good (nonfiction creative writing) because even though the prof wasn't the best in the entire world, I got to write fun things and read fun things and spend lots of time in the mountains and on the ice rink.

Feb Break (the week we get off between J Term and spring semester) was even more the best, because it was just J Term without class.

I mentioned last time that I'm not doing track this year, 'cause other stuff is more fun. That is still true. I have driven to a couple of meets to watch my guys race, one in Dartmouth and one in Boston. Boston had crazy snow. So did Middlebury, but you expect that.

I took these from pretty much the same spot. I guess I'm a little farther east on the winter one. Anyway, that's my dorm in the background of both. I live on the far right side of each picture.

In terms of actual snow, this has been by far the best of the four winters I've had here. Ever since early January, we have had multiple feet of snow sitting on the ground across all of campus and town and Vermont, and there was a stretch of more than 30 days where the high never got above freezing, so we didn't have any of the rainy stuff to ruin the snowpack. We had our first over 32 day last week. I think it was like 34. Which is 40 degrees warmer than what it is every time I walk back from my Monday night class, so that's nice. It's also 70 degrees warmer than it was this one time I went skiing at Sugarbush. So like minus 40, yeah. There was also a day where the temperature at Middlebury was exactly 100 degrees colder than the temperature back home at the same time. That was when Newport got into the low 80s.

The MRG single chair is strange. But hey, nice bump run, eh?

So about the skiing. Sugarbush is pretty fun, but nothing amazing. Mad River Glen is something else entirely. Better than a number of western mountains I've skied. Unbelievable tree skiing. Great pow. Really steep. Unmarked cliffs. And the single chair is great. You might see more of that later when I finish my video project. Uh, that's a segway to academics.

I'm in a travel writing class this semester and I'm gonna do a writing piece and a video piece about Mad River. I'm better at one of those things than they other, so the video should be . . . bad. But that's okay.

I'm also in my last geography class ever, something about GIS and historical landscape studies. It's okay.

My third class (I'm only in three) is Taboos and Trends in Children's and Young Adult Lit. All we do is read YA books and talk about why they've been challenged, how they should be taught, yadda yadda. It's pretty great. So far we've read Huck Finn, Call of the Wild, Catcher in the Rye, and The Chocolate War. My first time reading all those except Huck, which I read in elementary school, I think, and definitely not for class. Jeez Catcher in the Rye was annoying. Call of the Wild was fun, wish I read that when I was younger. And The Chocolate War was really, really, really good. At first I wished I read it when I was younger, but then I kinda thought I enjoyed it at 22 as much as I probably could have, so maybe I didn't need to be younger, or maybe Nicole was right and I'm still a child. Anyway, great book.

The syllabus has a lot of other cool looking books on it, including The Giver and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stoner, so that's kinda nifty.

Spring Break is coming up, and I decided to go home partly because I won't be going home again until I don't know when. My job starts right after graduation, you see. Me and two other guys from the XC team here (Chuck and Wilder) got menial jobs working at a lodge in Glacier National Park, Montana. We will be there from June 1st to September 28th. If you've got some free time, you really ought to visit.

See ya.