This morning I just ran up to the bus stop as the bus pulled away. I guess the driver decided that I was too far away. I walked up to the house and walked back down to catch the 8:00 bus. Craig had a carpool but the driver said there was no room for me today. I bet he asked her not to take me after last time, because she wouldn’t even drop me off at the bus stop. Well, the walk is good for my lungs. Besides missing the bus I had to put my inners into my boots, I almost slipped on the metal steps down from the locker room, and I had to wait in line at the gondola. After all that, I still got to work less than five minutes late! Tameca said I was on time and nobody said anything about me not having shaved either.
I was on Yellows so I didn’t expect to get a class, but Colin who was on Reds didn’t want to work, so I took all the red and yellow kids, as a red class. That was five children in the morning, and I got a sixth at lunchtime dropped by my friend Chance who was teaching the green class. His report card said he was checked in as a blue, but Chance said he could barely turn! I found him to be no problem. The kids were athletic and fairly responsive. I had three kids who were related, and got two other girls while in the beginner area. Surprisingly, the oldest brother couldn’t manage to pick himself up without taking a ski off, though he was 13 years old and looked athletic enough. His young sister had some trouble keeping her wedge together, and she was the weakest in the class.
In all I thought they all caught on to the beginner stuff very quickly, and they had attentively watched other people ski so things like clipping their skis together or getting them on came naturally to them. After several runs down the magic carpet and a few on the button-lift Sweet Pea, both of which were shallow inclines that made it hard to get any speed, I decided to try them on the High Meadow chairlift before lunch. That was premature, to say the least. It was a SNAFU. I realized after the first little part of it that I’d taken them up there before they were ready. I had little kids with their balance horribly wrong, falling down backwards on every turn, my class scattered all over the place... And of course Jo and other instructors were right there to see it all. So was one of the little girls’ parents, who skied by encouraging his daughter to keep her wedge and listen to her instructor. Jo came up to me and said, “See me at the end of the day.”
I took them right back to Sweet Pea the moment I got them all safely down that slope, and we skied there until lunch. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the rope-tow, Ripper Rue. That one has a slightly steeper incline, though the snow is still sticky and their rental skis have no wax, so they still had trouble gaining speed. On there I did get most of them turning better and I taught them to use all those lifts. I kind of blew it on High Meadow, though if I’d spent time on Ripper Rue first I probably could have had them skiing it by the end of the day. There wasn’t time by the time I felt confident in them.
A couple of the kids complained of foot pains throughout the day and we had two very brief stops besides lunch, where I checked their boots and tried to figure out what was hurting them. I brought them a lot of water to drink too. Two of the kids had double layers of socks but I took those off first thing in the morning. They were wearing good ski socks underneath, and it was a warm day.
It was very pretty weather today: we had gentle snow showers and sunshine in between them. The snowflakes were big and prettily formed and I showed off the ones that collected on my gloves to my kids. We had snowfall last night and Silverado Bowl looked well powdered from the morning bus.
My friend Desty was the liftie on the magic carpet and I found her hugging herself and shivering in the afternoon despite the heat. I was Santa Claus today: I gave her a pair of the handwarmers that I keep for the kids. I gave Leandro, an instructor assistant who was helping us out on Ripper Rue, a Ricola herbal cough drop because he said he was feeling ill. And at the end of the day when I was about to leave, a mother and her small daughter caught me still in uniform. She said her daughter had lost a balloon she was given at ski school. They didn’t have any more balloons in there, and the little girl looked about to cry so I said I had something even better and gave her one of the candies from my bribe bag, which made her day. I got no tips from anybody today, but I must be storing up some good karma which will pay off in time.
I didn’t want to switch coats a lot so instead of going up Saddleback I just went up Short Cut and skied down to the bottom through Silverado, a black run. It had much better cover now than yesterday, and grew some soft moguls over the day. I found the way to ski back up from there to the end of Doc’s Run so that was a nice end-of-day de-stressing run for me.
Jo was gentle about berating me, and she wanted to know what the age gap was in my class because it looked pretty big: it was about 9-13 years old. She seemed to sympathize that I had understood and owned my mistake. Today’s title is a song by Color Theory, by the way.
There was a line to the cabriolet. We were coming down in the cabriolet just as the bus was pulling up into the transit center, and sprinted for it to squeeze on.
At home I cooked up my remaining shrimp and vegetables and I enjoyed my expensive Chimay beer. I only wanted half of the bottle but there was no way to close it again and save the rest, so I drank all of it while watching a silly movie that Josh and Vanessa had rented.
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