we went skiing with ingrid and crew again in steamboat springs, colorado. good powder! it snowed for several days before we got there, and also on our first day on the slopes. i skied trees for the first time. i skied deep powder for the first time. i skied a black diamond terrain park for the first time (by accident, naturally). the second day was much clearer and more crowded. skied in the morning, mostly on the backside of the mountain (the morningside lift, for all y'all who've been to steamboat). in the afternoon, ingrid and i switched equipment and tried to learn to board (me) and ski (her). this consisted, for my part, of falling down a lot. i have bruised knees to show for it. i almost learned the "falling leaf" technique for getting down the bunny slope. didn't even try to ride a lift.

the best part of the evening, of course, is the apr�s ski beer-and-hottub action. where you put on your bikini, grab a towel and a beer (or beers) and run like hell to the hottub. sit there til your nice and warm and drunk, then get slowly out and mosey on back to the condo in time to get showered for dinner. the steam rising from your 102� body keeps you warm on the way back. 'course, the second night, the temp in the hottub was a comparably chilly 94�, which is not nearly warm enough to keep you from freezing on the wet walk back. so we warmed up and dried off in the accompanying sauna.

i gave karl smittens for valentine's day. but not the ones with the heart on them. those are not cool. (the probability that you don't think that even the regular ones, in black, are not cool has not occurred to me. so there. ppphhhhhhttttttt.)

karl gave me cheese. from diBruno brothers. and not only that, but he cut the 4 different kinds of cheese into the various letters in "i love you" and put on some cheese hearts in assorted flavors just to emphasize the point.

some stuff that has happened to karl

20 February 2003 - 10:59 am

in college, he got mugged, twice. this has made him more cautious than me, a girl, about walking down dark streets at night. also, it left him with a scar on his forearm from where one of the muggers knifed him. apparently, he was so drunk that he didn't really realize he had been cut until he woke up the next morning (afternoon) and there was dried blood.

while studying abroad at the university of tennessee in knoxville (chosen from knoxville, umass amherst, and u somewhere-else-cold because of the nicer weather), karl left a window open in his dorm room and a mother bird made a nest there and laid eggs. because he didn't want to oust them, he let them stay. they were there for a while, until one hot day they boiled to death in the sun that came through the window like a laser beam of hellfire.

at a shared apartment in manchester, he and e.i.r.u.n (i'm cleverly disguising his name from google searches because i suspect it is a fairly uncommon name, and i don't want him to accidentally come across this site while ego-googling) discovered a mug behind the stove with some mold growing in it. they did not, as a girl would have done, throw it out. no. they fed it. nutured it. e.i.r.u.n claims it didn't ever smell, mostly because they were careful to feed it things like tomato juice and bits of leftover kebab instead of milk and cheese. after they found it, they were able to keep it for about 6 months.