Yesterday was closing day at Deer Valley.  Deer Valley is usually the first ski area in Utah to close, they like to maintain their image and it does get expensive to keep the place open.  This season may not have been as epic as past seasons, but it sure was a lot of fun.  Closing week was even spiced up by a couple decent snow storms at the beginning of the week, in fact we got almost 21 inches at some of the resorts.

Spring skiing is always fun.  It is great to break out the light weight gear and have to put on sun screen to go out on the slopes.  Spring skiing also brings out the wakyness in many people, especially on the last day of the season.  We saw lots of people in funny costumes and some that just didn’t wear much.  There was a family with crazy colored wigs and fairy wings, we saw a guy in a wetsuit with a SCUBA mask and snorkel, and we saw quite a few people dressed in drag.  It is also the time of year when people break out the old wild ski suits, so we raided the cedar closet and this is what we came up with:

Deer Valley Closing

That is my uncle in the middle and his two daughters and me in front.  Yes, they skied with the martini glasses.  They didn’t do that all day though, it isn’t easy to ski without poles.  We could outfit anyone from the cedar closet at my uncle’s place, and we do, as long as you don’t mind looking like a blast from the past.

It is kind of sad to be hanging up the skis now, but it was a good season.  I got a lot of skiing in and I suppose it is time to move on to the next set of activities.  Lots of great stuff coming up this spring and summer that I am looking forward to.  I hope that all you skiers and riders out there had a great season as well.

It seems like it has been a while since I wrote anything about what is going on in life.  It has been a nice relaxing week since I don’t have to be at the theatre every night pushing the GO button.  I have been able to do things like get in a lot of skiing, see some theatre that wasn’t mine, and watch the Olympics.  I think that I only interrupted my “vacation” as-it-were, once to go to a production meeting for our next show, Our Town, in which I had nothing to say on account of the meeting was really a week earlier than usual.  In fact, pretty much no one aside from the costume shop had anything to say.

I kicked off the week skiing with friends from temple, and now I am finishing up the week skiing with my uncle and cousin.  We seem to be getting some snow at the moment which should make tomorrow pretty nice.  Probably another good day for taking out the new wider skis to go bomb around.

Aside from the skiing, probably the most fun thing this week was going to the opening night of the U of U Theatre Department’s production of The Rocky Horror Show.  It is so fun to finally see another musical produced by the department and Rocky is just a fun show to see.  the cast was great, they seem to have a great time dong the show.  While there are a couple of singers who are not the strongest, they certainly make up for it in the rest of the production.  The tough thing was finding the balance of what audience response to give and how much to just watch the show.  In any event, if you like Rocky, it is worth going to see if you are in the SLC area!

Other than that I will be hanging out with my uncle the rest of tonight and tomorrow.  Good times.

At 5:17AM 26 years ago I was born.  That is pretty cool in and of itself.  My parents were excited, my grandparents were excited, It sounds like it was a pretty good time.  I certainly can’t remember.  I also can’t remember the fact that when my mother got to bring me home from the hospital on February 14, she was bummed out that my father had to be working.  I do remember things like the day my sister was born because it was the day of my fourth birthday party.  I thought that was inconvenient, but My sister turned out OK!   According to my mother today, I turned out good.

It is kind of fun to wake up in the morning to have it snowing.  I like that about having a winter birthday.  Maybe the fact that I was born in the winter has something to do with how much I enjoy the winter.  It is also fun to wake up and have an inbox full of emails and notifications with birthday wishes.  Normally I am not a big fan of Facebook messages, but the fact that people take the time to send a quick note for a birthday is pretty nice.  When you consider the number of “friends” I have on facebook, the fact that even a few take the time to send a birthday note is kinda cool.

As expected, I talked to most of my family today.  Thankfully, my mother waited until after I woke up to call me.  Unfortunately my sister called first, right after I poured myself a bowl of cereal.  I was going to go back to it after I got off the phone with her, but then my mother called.  Needless to say, that bowl of cereal was a little to soggy to eat after two phone calls.  There are worse things of course, but it was a little sad.  It was nice to talk to my sister, I have talked to her more this week than many months on account of her birthday was on the seventh.

I think the only people I didn’t talk to were my grandparents on my mother’s side.  They are in Israel right now, so that is not surprising, but the email they sent was nice to get.  If nothing else, a birthday is a pretty good excuse to check in with the family!

I had a nice dinner with Ruth, though it left my stomach feeling a little funky.  I think I just had a little to much spicy wings…  In any event, I have been feeling better and better.  After the show tonight I am going out with a couple friends from the theatre for a little celebration, and all in all I think it was a pretty good day.  So, thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes, hopefully this is the beginning of another good year!

I couldn’t resist scheduling a post to show up right at 5:17 on my birthday. I will write about what kind of a day it was after it happens. I probably need to get to sleep early because my mother likes to call me early in the morning to wish me a happy birthday. Inevitably she will say something like:

Mom: “So you are what, 26 now?”

Me: “Yup.”

Mom: “You are getting old… Wait, that means I am getting old!”

Me: “It happens to the best of us.”

Other than that, it will probably be a pretty normal day. I have to go to work, we have our big preview for Twelve Angry Men. We have some notes to finish up during the day, so I probably won’t even really get to go out for a nice dinner or anything, but we shall see. For the past four years my birthday has fallen during tech of a show, so I am used to it. I will be happy to just be able have dinner with Ruth and then have the weekend off!

I enjoyed the email that I got from my grandparents as a birthday wish:

Dear Alex: We have a big smile on our faces as we did 26 years ago.We visited the Weismans at Maa’le Mich Much a couple of weeks ago. We still enjoy touring and going into the schools. We sometimes miss Winter skiing. Take a run for us and exhale A WHOOPEEE! We hope to see you soon. We love you.What is happening in the life of our BIG BOY? ~Nana and Papa

So, we shall see how things go. It’s another year, I’m gonna try to make the best of it!

More on the day later.

In general, many of us live pretty public lives nowadays.  Even if you don’t do Twitter or don’t have a blog you probably have a Facebook or a MySpace page or belong to some other online community.  The strange thing is that even if you don’t really do anything online there is still a bunch of information about you out there in cyberspace.  We leave cyber trails without even knowing it.  It can be a little overwhelming to try and manage it all and I would assume that most people my age don’t really think twice about their cyber presence.

What got me thinking about it was the fact that a couple days ago I got an email from Facebook that someone had commented on my status.  Turns out that it was my grandfather who had made the comment using my grandmother’s Facebook account on a status update that I didn’t realize had been posted about my latest blog entry. (how was that for a convoluted sentence?)  Needless to say, I didn’t even know that my grandparents really knew what Facebook was, let alone had an account.

I got on Facebook when it was fairly new, in fact I believe that I had to wait until they had added my school as one that was eligible to sign up from.  I probably used it a lot more at that point in my life compared to know.  While it is not as convoluted as MySpace, Facebook has so much going on now with all the apps and ads and pages and fans and whatnot.  Even if I were to clear out all of the notifications currently sitting in my inbox there, I would probably have hundreds more within a week.  I even block lots of Facebook apps, but every day there are new ones and new invitations.  Most of the time they are from “friends” who I really have had nothing to do with since high school.  Sometimes I wonder what the point really is.

Getting that email and comment, while it did get me to call my grandmother to say hi, was one of the last things that I ever expected to see in my inbox.  They are not totally technologically illiterate, but they are not computer wizzes.  The whole situation was an interesting reminder of how quickly information is disseminated and how far it can get.

I actually find the timing of this rather interesting as Sci-Fi (Sy-Fy now I suppose) just aired the pilot episode of Caprica. For those non-sci-fi people out there, the premise of Caprica, which is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, where a preeminent scientist looses his daughter in a terrorist bombing.  Zoe, the daughter had been working on a digital version of herself based on collecting the information from her digital trail through life.  The concept being that what we are today is a sum of the events that led to today and much of that is traceable given how much of our lives are contained in the digital world.

I hear people say all the time that you have to be careful with what you post online.  While it is true that employers may look at the Facebook and MySpace pages of potential and current employees, how much of your life can you really keep private these days?  How much information do you keep private?  Is it actually possible to live a truly private life? Is there anyone whose name you can type into Google and just not turn up anything?