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 is quite possible that yesterday was one of the best ski days of the season.  You know that it is going to be a good day when you get to the canyon road and they are advising 4×4 or chains.  You also know that it is going to be a good day when you get to the mountain and you hear the avalanche guns going (I really want to see them actually shoot the guns, that would be cool).  Of course there is always the question of whether or not you will actually be able to get up to the mountain, but I don’t think they ever actually closed the road today.

I kicked off the day with a little fun.  Being originally from Boston I am still a Red Sox fan and I always will be.  So Sunday night was opening night at Fenway Park and they kicked off the season with quite possibly the best thing you have ever seen.  They had a five-year-old who had memorized and modified Herb Brooks’ “Miracle” speech to apply to the Red Sox.  It is amazingly cute and pretty darn cute.  Certainly inspirational and hopefully the Sox will have a good season.  Below is the clip from the game:

Of course, after seeing that video I had to call my grandparents and see if they were at the game.  They have season tickets and they usually go to opening day.  It turns out that they hadn’t been feeling up to going that night so they weren’t there.  However, they did tell me that they would be happy to take me to some games this summer or let me have tickets for a couple.  I like going to the games with them, it is a lot of fun.

So, after that I headed out to the slopes and we got off to a great start of a very strange day of skiing.  Down here in the valley it was just cloudy, not snowing or raining or anything.  By the tame we got up to Alta we were in a storm.  It wasn’t terrible in the morning so we just went for it.  The skiing was great and it was snowing, which was nice.  It was snowing so hard that almost every run our tracks filled in by the time we got back to the top.  It only started to get strange when it became a thunder storm.  Really, I can’t think of the last time that I was in a snow storm that was an electrical storm.

Just before noon all of the lifts went on lightning hold.  So, we, along with everyone else, were stranded.  Good news was that it was about lunch time, bad news was that’s what everyone was doing.  Somehow we managed to get ourselves a table.  We ended up sharing with some other people which was great.  By the time we had finished lunch they had the lifts running again.  So we hit the slopes for about another hour and a half before the storm struck again and the lifts hit a hold again.  At this point, it just made more sense to head home rather than wait it out as it seemed to be getting bad.

I am just trying to wrap my head around the fact that it is April and it is snowing like crazy.  I really do think that we have been getting the best snow of the season right now.  We have even been getting dumped on in the valley!  I dig it.

I suppose it has only been a couple days since my last post, but I finally feel like I have time again in my life to sit down and write a new post.  We opened the show on Friday night and so far it sounds like all is well with that.  At the same time though, my brother came in for a few days to do some skiing, so as soon as I was free from the theatre I was off to spend time with Dan.  It was a lot of fun, we got in a lot of skiing, and I am still pretty wiped out from that.  It is a lot of fun to ski hard, but you feel it later!

I of course still had a full schedule over the weekend.  On Saturday I did photos for Youth Theatre at the U’s production of James and the Giant Peach.  It was a cute and fun little show and I am sure that I will do some business with the photos.  If you are interested in taking a look at the images you can find them at this site.

YTU was not the only photo engagement that I had on Saturday.  I also went to a performance of Ruth’s which was to raise money to fund her class’ trip to France over their spring break.  The “French Connection,” as they are called, is a group of students who are going to spend a week in France studying, performing, and working with similarly inclined theatre students at a school in France.  It sounds like it should be a fun trip.  Through various fund-raising efforts including two such performances as this one, they have raised all the money that they need to go on the trip.  So, since I would have been at the performance anyway, I took some photos from them, it was a lot of fun.

I did have one other photo adventure this weekend, though this one was not very significant (at least in my mind).  I was walking up Main Street in Park City with my brother and we stopped, as usual, in the Thomas Mengelsen galley.  I love looking at hi work, and he is going to be in town later this month!  As we left the gallery, we ran into a family on the street trying to figure out how to get a good photo of themselves.  They asked if I would shoot the picture for them and of course, I was happy to.  Had to take a couple to get the tiny little flash on the P&S camera to actually light them up.  They were very grateful, at which point my brother decided to point out that they had happened to ask a professional photographer to take their picture.  At which point they wanted to know more about me and my work and I unfortunately didn’t have a card on me (which reminds me I should have more printed).  So, kind of fun experience.

So, I do have to make a couple appearances at the theatre this week, even though I don’t have to run the show.  We have lots of prep work to do for our final production of the season, 42nd Street.  We have a lot of things that need to light up, and if all goes well, I will get someone else to spend their money on it so that I can save my budget for other things!  I am usually pretty good at that.  So, all things considered, I should probably get off my couch, eat something and go to work.  I like relaxing and writing, but I can get paid to relax and write if I sit in my office, it is just not as comfortable as being at home!

I have also heard that the shop is having a party today and the team drawing for March Madness will happen this afternoon.  We do two different pools, one is a standard fill in your own bracket and the other is a random drawing.  I don’t follow college basketball at all really so doing a bracket is kinda moot for me.  The random lottery is fine, cheap to buy in to, but can make you a few bucks.  Plus the party at the beginning and at the end is fun.

So, that is about where things are.  I have lots of blogs to catch up on reading and maybe I can get ahead on a post or two with some of the ideas that I have thought of (and probably forgotten) over the past week.

The other day I was riding up a chairlift at Alta with a couple of guys who were having a discussion about life.  It is very cliché to say that the discussion was about living life to the fullest or living for the moment, but that was pretty much the jist of the discussion.  What struck me as interesting was the angle that they were looking at it from, not just live life to the fullest, more like live fore the here and now.  They talked about how so many people live life waiting for retirement.  Planning to do all the things that they wanted to do as soon as they retire.  I never really thought about it, but it does seem like there are many people who do have a similar mentality.

The point that the guy was trying to make was that there is little point int waiting until you retire to start doing the things that you want to do.  Sure, there may be obstacles in the way like work and family, but should you really put off doing the things that you want to do.  You may have less holding you back when you retire, but do we really need to let these things hold us back in general?  Do they actually hold us back at all?

I come from a family where we pretty much just do the things that we want to do.  My mother has done some very interesting adventures including a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.  She also has a trip to somewhere in Africa planned in the coming months.  We have done various river rafting trips including a “Dad’s and Kids” trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.  I get to do a whole bunch of skiing, and hopefully now that I am a certified SCUBA diver I will be able to work in some dive trips.

I am certainly not rolling in money, but I try to find the means to do the things that I want to do.  Sometimes that may just be getting tickets for me and Ruth to go to show and sometimes it is taking SCUBA classes so that I can go dive with her.  Sometimes it is doing things just for me, and sometimes it is doing things together.  It isn’t always easy to find the time and the means to go do everything when we want to do it, but we certainly try.  I don’t want to wait until I am 65 to start doing things that I want to do.

What would we really be if we waited to do the things that we want to do?  Can you even do everything you want to after you are 65?

No, I don’t mean the electricity that you get from putting solar panels on your roof.  I am thinking more along the lines of solar power driving us, people.  I suppose it may not just be solar power, possibly just being outside, I am not sure.  What I do know is that when I spend a lot of time outside I feel better.  How so?  Well, I feel like I have more energy, it isn’t hard to get out of bed in the morning, and I think that I generally have a better outlook on life.

I, Like so many people have a job that keeps me inside much of the time.  Not only inside, but often literally in the dark.  My job can be a little odd in the land of hours because sometimes it is just a regular nine-to-five job, sometimes it is a nine-to-whenever-we-get-done job (often late nights), and sometimes it is an evening job.  Keeping up with the ever changing dynamics of the schedule can be hard, but I enjoy what I am doing.  I also tend to have the time to get out and do things like ski for a good amount of time.

However, during the spans of time that I work a lot, especially during the daytime I find that I have significantly less energy and motivation.  It is harder to get up in the morning and there are many days that I just feel like I drag through the day.  Then there are weeks like this past week where I got out and did a bunch of skiing and spent a lot of time outside enjoying the fresh mountain air and the sun.  I suppose that I should mention that the air quality here in the Salt Lake Valley is pretty bad which may be another contributing factor.   This past week I have been feeling pretty darn good, though it is always a bummer to drive down the canyons into the SLC smog.  On weeks like this, I can get up when the alarm goes off, get ready and get out the door.  Even coming in to work in the afternoon isn’t so bad!

I have found that I feel the same way when I spend the summers working at summer camp.  Camp is a very demanding job but it is very rewarding too.  Somehow I find that I can spend most of the summer getting up between 7-7:30AM, running around with the kids all day, hanging out with the staff until 1AM and do that pretty much every day.  I don’t know how it works because during the rest of the year I go to bed earlier and wake up later and just don’t usually  have the same energy.  Thus, I attribute it to solar power and being outside.

I know that there is all kinds of science that probably backs up what I am feeling, something about the sun and getting different vitamins because of it.  That is all well and good, but it is still very interesting that it seems to make such a huge impact.  I guess sometimes we just need to get out more.