Private practice

This morning I showed up at 0900 in my own gear to take Riki on a half-day unofficial private lesson. I asked for $100 for it, which is more than I’d make through the ski school but less than they’d pay for an all-day group lesson. Some of the other instructors saw me with her and asked me what I was doing. They’re my friends so I hope they won’t get envious.

Riki was a real pain. We warmed up on High Meadow, and I tried to teach her how to hold and use poles: she can hold them well but not plant them. Then we went down Chicane to reach Day Break lift and Harmony run, which she’d done yesterday with her mother. Day Break accesses some good simple blues, but Chicane has steep slippery bits and narrow passes where many people ski through at high speeds, so she was freaking out right away. It’s a difficult run to take kids through to get to the far side of the resort - but it’s the only way. Once we quit stopping to talk about how scared she was, she skied down it just fine, doing round short turns at the side of the slope and still saying she was scared. Now, she was so frightened of everything that she refused to do even the easiest blue runs if they had any incline to them. I must have handled it very poorly; it was frustrating for me how irrationally scared and obstinate she was. She was also frightened of chairlifts and drove me crazy asking me to slow the chair down at the top so it wouldn’t throw her off, and repeating that she couldn’t do anything and she’d hurt herself. I tried admiring the views and asking her to sing (to get her mind off the fear) but that didn’t last long. Pointing out how easily and safely she accomplished everything didn’t help either. I need to remember how to deal with this sort of student better: I’m not used to young kids being so fearful and I don’t remember Riki being nearly so troublesome with the group.

We essentially only skied flat roads that I can’t teach anything on, unless you count pushing yourself with poles. We took a break at the Dreamscape grill and I bought her a bottle of water because they don’t have free water there. After refusing to go down White Water (a short run with a moderate slope and nice soft snow) she even got terrified and fell down a little pitch on Harmony run, and she sat on her butt and slid all the way down until it flattened out! When I got to her she started crying, though she recovered in a minute. She didn’t cry on the much harder Chicane run though her mother told me she had the last time she skied it. We got back through Red Pine Road and did a couple of runs on High Meadow again, and then I talked her into going for one down Snowdancer. Her mother got lost trying to get back via Slidewinder at 1400, so to kill a few minutes we did a couple of laps on Sweet Pea, the beginner button lift. Riki actually seemed to enjoy that, and challenged me to race. I talked her out of skiing all the way down by the double-green runs, because I know there’s one short section that is steep and slippery and would surely have terrified her. Instead, I took her down the gondola so her mother could ride down Doc’s run, and she beat us to the bottom by just a few seconds. Riki’s mother didn’t seem to mind when I told her Riki was too scared for me to teach her anything, but was grateful to have a day to ski on her own.

Right then I bumped into Emily and Chris who coached us in our new hire training. They were on their way back up to the terrain park, so I joined them and we ran laps around the park for the rest of the afternoon. We also told bad jokes on the chairlift. The features of our parks on Painted Horse and High Meadow are “intermediate” and easier, and I found all the jumps pretty easy even though I am very bad at it and didn’t try any tricks. I even slid along a box, though I never saw the appeal of that. A liftie caught me in the Saddleback line and said he knows me, I’m an instructor: would I tell him how to jump, like how to balance in a jump? I said he really asked the wrong person for that, and should talk to Chris.

Once again I ran down to catch the bus, when it pulled into the stop just as the cabriolet neared the bottom. Today I made it, but yesterday it pulled out while I was running to it, so I kept running and tried to cut it off before the next stop. The driver saw me and waved me in at the stoplight.

Craig was kicked out of our house the day before yesterday for generally being an asshole to Vanessa (everyone else tolerated it.) I’m leaving at the end of the month, so now Josh and Vanessa are getting really concerned about paying the rent.