Lost goggles

This morning I was assigned the only position on Greens, and promoted two of my kids from yesterday to Green, a pair of brothers. I also saw two girls I had last Saturday who wanted to be with me so I took them too. My fifth kid was Nicholas, the crybaby from last week. He only sulked at lunchtime when he said everyone was mean to him, but he gets over sulks on his own. There were seven kids grouped around me and my green flag, and we were asked to try to limit class sizes to five now, so I asked that they send up another instructor. Iain was meant to be on Yellow but he was working shuttle stop and showed up later, so Jonathan took the yellows out and Iain took second position on Greens. He only had the two girls who weren’t my returns, so he got to advance them quickly and took them on some blue runs. I stayed on High Meadow all day working on basic technique. I would have given Iain one of mine at lunchtime, but I didn’t want to slow him down.

This morning’s safety meeting topic was... suspense... big shocker: lift safety! One of my girls Mandy got her ski tips stuck in the snow of the offloading ramp at High Meadow, and got sucked under the chairlift. They never mentioned keeping ski tips up in the meeting. She fell into the powder pit just before the offloading ramp. The liftie at the top stopped the lift and helped me retrieve my kid. Her skis had popped off and she was crying, but unharmed, just shaken. I nearly gave Tameca a seizure at lunchtime when I said one of my kids fell off the lift, until I explained it wasn’t as bad as I made it sound. She said I didn’t need to fill out an incident report form if nobody got hurt. The kids had much fun considering that we spent all day on High Meadow, but I got no tips today for my teaching.

At the end of the day I had checked out my kids and had the tags around my neck ready to sign out, when a woman came up to me and said her kid dropped his poles off the lift in ski school, and his instructor didn’t even mention it to her. It later turned out the kid dropped his poles at least three times and the instructor just got so frustrated that he stopped going to pick them up. She was unhappy about not being told, so I volunteered to go climb up and get them. The kid dropped one pole at the second tower of High Meadow chair, where there is a big roped-off area filled with snow that nobody can ski on. I climbed up that steep powder cache, crawling uphill in waist-deep snow to retrieve the pole. People going up the chair laughed and called to me, and I replied, “The things I do to keep customers happy!” Later Damien said I should have delegated that work to a liftie because it was within their “cage,” but I saw one climbing up about half the way to retrieve a different pole from there earlier in the day, and I could not ask anybody else to do that work. One of the lifties did ask me to fetch a lost snowboard too if I was going in there anyway. With the rescued pole in hand, I then did about four forward ninja rolls down the hill to get down, until I planted my head in the snow and lost my goggles. They were worth much more than the pole! It was stupid of me to do rolls without pulling the goggles down on my eyes. They fell off my forehead and I couldn’t find them in the deep powder. Fortunately, my parents recently sent me my spare pair of goggles, and the ones I lost were cracked anyway. The woman gave me $23, which was all the cash she had on her, because she felt bad about me losing my expensive goggles. We looked, but didn’t find the other pole either.

I spent that tip not on booze but on a sushi dinner with Damien, Stephanie, and a couple of their friends. It turns out the place that does half-price sushi between 5:00-6:00PM is at Quarry Village, right behind the bus stop near my house! I was happy to go out to sushi, it was tasty and at half-price the prices are better than reasonable. Our waiter was a flamboyantly gay man named Kirby. He was really funny and a good waiter, and after the meal he brought us a free slice of tasty cake. We all tipped him 40% considering that it was half price food. Emily was also there with a bunch of friends and wanted me to come over to her booth so she could introduce me to her friend from California. They had been in the Red Pine Lodge and Emily’s friend had seen me all the way from there, rolling down the hill in my uniform. When I told the story she couldn’t stop laughing. I explained that I did those rolls intentionally because it was the fastest way down without skis, helped me cool off after that hard climb, and was more fun. She said I made her day.