Everything You’ve Missed or What Comes Between Work and Skiing

I haven’t been around much. I know.

I’ve been busy.

Doing what, you ask? You guess probably watching Criminal Minds and eating bologna out of the package?

Not a bad guess, but sadly, no. Mostly this:

 

With some of this:

 

And mooooore of this:

 

With as much of this as we can cram in:

(But mostly working.)

So that’s the most of it. Exciting, huh? Okay, maybe there was more to it than that. Here’s some of the more interesting shit you might have missed. Or didn’t miss. Either way.

 

Christmas was great.

Both fake Christmas with my family over Thanksgiving,

and Christmas Day with Kyle’s family.

 

And not in a, “Better say something nice, my mom and mother-in-law read this thing,” kind of way, in a, “I’m super serial right now!” way. We don’t get to spend much time with family, living 600 and 1,000 miles away from either of our parents, so the time we do get to spend is precious to us. Also, made off with some seriously kick-ass gifts. Highlights include several fantastic purses, lots of jewelry (including some stupidly hardcore steampunk pieces,) beautiful makeup bag and brushes, and BRIGHT FUCKING YELLOW DOC MARTINS.

(Because everyone know’s there are some occasions when floral Doc’s are highly inappropriate.)

Also, this happened:

 

That’s right. That’s my Grandma holding a kitten. It’s so adorable that I can’t look at it straight on without going, “Awwwww!”

 

My show found vindication in the Bronx.

Remember the show from hell? The one where I took a fucking amazing show into a joke of a space, lit it like a fucking boss, and then in the last two minutes of the show the venue’s board crashed and ruined the show? Well, we took the show to a venue down in the Bronx and remounted the production. In a big boy space. With a real rig. And a real crew.

It was the show it should have been the first time.

 

Was it perfect? No. I had to change the way that I lit the show in order to work within the space’s rig and I missed some of the grittiness that it had in the shit space. There was the matter of the embarrassingly unmaintenanced main rag curtain, that squealed horribly whenever it moved. (Seriously, it was bad.) And there was a cue or two that I didn’t call exactly right, either a touch early or a touch late. (Usually early.) Was it perfect? No. But you couldn’t tell it from the audience, and that’s all that matters.

Kyle got stitches.

Yeah, for true. He was drilling out a flag base backstage and the drill bit broke. The broken end of the bit went right into his wrist, tearing it up something good. Luckily it missed his artery, or things could have been really bad. Five stitches and he was good to go.

I took this picture in the room at Urgent Care while we were waiting for the Dr to stitch him up:

 

The best part of the night was when I posted the picture to Facebook and his mom pointed out that the picture looks like it’s taken of his ass. And then I peed myself.

 

Skiapalooza 2013

Okay, to be fair, most of the new year has been one big Skiapolooza. We’ve managed to cram eight days of skiing so far in this season, after all. But what I’m referring to was last week: three days straight of skiing on two different mountains. First two days were at our home mountain, Gore. Great snow, not too cold, and some new (to this season) terrain opening up.

Kick ass.

At the end of the second day, we loaded our skis in the car and drove to Lake Placid to the quaintest and most adorable mountain inn that ever happened to the world. Seriously, this was the sitting room:

All that was missing was a sleeping dog on the rug and some hot cocoa and I’m pretty sure I would have suffered an adorable mountain seizure. As a preventive measure, we made sure to combat the cuteness by white-trashing the place up a little.

 

Awesome.

But I digress. Back to the important part of the story.

The reason that we drove to Lake Placid was so that the next morning we could be up early to spend the day skiing Whiteface. We’d never been, but Ski NY was offering $10 lift tickets to any NY ski mountain, and seriously, who can turn down a $10 lift ticket?

Unfortunately, our Whiteface experience was not everything we’d hoped. Strong winds kept any of the lifts from opening until 9:30am, (as opposed to 8:30am when they were supposed to open up and when we were ready to go,) and it was almost noon before there was more than one running. And even once we really got to explore the mountain a little, we found that the conditions were shit, absolute shit. At best, it was hard pack with a scattering of light powder, but the majority of it was straight-up ice. It was frustrating, because the runs and the terrain looked like fun, but the ice made it near impossible to ski without fear of wiping out. There were a few moments of unadulterated, “FUCK YEAH, LET’S GO!” but they were severely outnumbered by the moments of, “HOLY SHIT, I’M GOING TO DIIIIIE!”

Over the years, Whiteface has earned the nickname Iceface among skiers. Indeed.

But despite the shit conditions of Whiteface, I had fun on our little Skiapolooza. It was the closest thing to a vacation that we’ve had in a long time, and it was lovely to spend some non-working time with Kyle.

 

So that’s about all you’ve missed. Not much, right?

I told you I’ve been mostly working.