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Your One Stop Shop For Bad Grammer!
Chicka-me For those of you who don't know, and that's probably everyone since I hardly mentioned this at all, I spent this past weekend in Salt Lake City, Utah at a ski resort, celebrating Easter and my mother's birthday. Truly, vacationing with my family is an interesting experience. My mother is the ultimate tourist. When she is someplace new or different, she doesn't care about fitting in, or looking dorky, she is going to plunge right into the tourist experience, determined to make the most of every vacation. When I was younger this was cause for great embarrassment of the, "Oh my god Mom, put the camera down and let me take this stupid hat off" variety. Slowly however, I have come to embrace her philosophy. We're tourists dammit. "Who the hell cares!" inevitably become my motto while on vacation with the family. Really, it's the only sane option. Even minimal resistance to my mother the vacation steamroller (which my dad and brother still try occasionally) just makes everything twice as embarrassing. She's gonna do it anyway, you may as well go along with it and have some fun. So, we like to ski. We're seriously bad skiers (with the sole exception of my brother) but we like to "go skiing." It's fun, it really is, you should try it if you haven't. Every time we take a skiing vacation I think, "I'm not actually going to get out on the slopes. I'm not really in the mood. It's such a hassle." And it is a hassle, a major one. Honestly, we spent most of our time trying to figure out how to get around having to walk anywhere in those damn boots lugging our skis. But it's also seriously exhilarating and kind of addictive, even if all you are doing is cruising down the Bunny slope at .25 mph in the death crouch. My mom and I are unashamed Bunny-slopers. On the first day I was there (Saturday) we met the boys (who had already been outfitted and out on the slopes for several hours) for lunch at about one. Mom didn't want to ski because she worries about her knees and didn't want to "push her luck," I didn't want to ski because I was tired and because I'm always grumpy at the beginning of a vacation. The plan was to get my equipment so that I didn't have to deal with it the next day and then head back to the hotel for a rousing round of spa-age. We passed the ticket window. "Ooh, look Ma, you can get a $11 lift ticket just for Chickadee!" "Wow, that's ... a really good deal." Did I mention the mother can't resist a deal? Get this, she even asked if there was a 1/2 day Chickadee pass. What? You want to pay less that $11? Good luck, Ma. Chickadee is the bunniest of all of Snowbird's bunny slopes (although still not the easiest thing I've ever skied.) We figured we could handle a few runs down before the lifts closed. Then began the saga of the equipment. If you have never skied before trust me the worst thing about it by far is the equipment. For one thing, skiing requires a lot of clothes to begin with, you've got snow boots, hats, gloves, scarves, special socks, and that weird ear/ hair band thing my mom loves, to keep track of. On top of that you put on boots made entirely of hard, uncomfortable plastic, strap yourself into them as tightly as possible to the point where it is not possible to actually walk correctly and lug around two heavy, unwieldy pieces of wood, as tall as your chin, slippery with ice and snow, and having small blades on the side. Woo! Fun vacation! In a moment that I'm pretty sure was deeply Freudian my mom and I actually managed to forget the skis. No, really. We went into the rental place, got all fitted, payed for everything and then ... walked out the door to put our other stuff in a locker and off towards the slopes. Doo de doo, dum de dum. < Abrupt halt to the strolling > "Wait! Anne, where are the skis?" < beat > "Ok, no problem, just walk back into the rental place like we meant to leave them there. They'll never know. I'm sure people do it all the time." The Clampetts Go Skiing continued when, later that day, we were trying to figure out a way to ski all of our stuff over the hotel, so that we didn't have to walk which, as I've mentioned, is to be avoided at all costs. If you take the Chickadee lift up it is possible to ski down into the locker area of the hotel, the problem was he had all this pre-ski stuff, like my mom's purse and both of our pairs of shoes that we needed to get onto the lift with, as inconspicuously as possible. On that note let me just say that it's not every day that you hear your mother say, "Wait a minute, I just have to stuff my boots in my pants." So, it was a nice weekend. Well, I consider pretty much any weekend nice in which my parents pay for most of my food. But aside from that actually it was a lot of fun. And that's the thing about vacations with my family. They're weird, my mom is shameless, as a unit we are helplessly middle-America but they are fun. 9:19 a.m. April 13, 2004
“Y’all aren’t from around here, are ya.” - August 21, 2005 |
The Many And Scary Ways They Get Here Quote of the Day
"They have lots of disturbing cross sections of animal reproductive organs"
Worried by The fact that I just walked upstairs and saw one of my new housemates standing on her desk chair slowly revolving in circles for no apparent reason. Good Reads
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