The Tuesday Island

So, now that holidays are over, my schedule is getting a lot more normal. I have mondays and wednesdays off, which leaves a single day of work in between. I call it my island of work. Today was such a day. It was incredibly slow today, to the point that our supervisor was struggling to find things for us to do so we could look busy. Longest day of my life. And I didn't even go for a ski break because I thought I might make up some hours from all the ski breaks I have been taking lately.

So there is not much to tell.

Yesterday was the day Jon and I went to the mountain together. The weather was perfect. It was sunny and warm. What sucks is that it turns out that the board we bought off of the internet is way smaller and more broken than we expected. The bindings have probably been put together out of whatever was available. Every part is different from the next, and nothing matches. It's pretty ridiculous. The top of the board is coming off of the bottom in some parts, which is the kind of damage that takes days (and money) to fix. Not to mention that the bindings are so small that it is too hard to get your boots into them without an extraordinary struggle.

This stuff actually is helping us both understand the details of why boards are usually built the way they are. Knowing what's wrong is a really good way to learn about the equipment that we are investing in. The problem is that it took us an actual monetary investment to learn these lessons. So we were pretty bummed yesterday. We are either going to have to buy a whole new set of stuff and try to sell this janky board, or we'll at least have to buy new bindings and get the board fixed up. As staff, I do get a 50% discount in the workshop. The guy there said a full tune would cost us $26. That seems like a reasonable price to pay for a real wax, sharpening the edges, and gluing the parts of the board back together. This would mean that Jon would have a relatively short board, but according to the internet, it is still within the range of sizes that a person of his height would have. The plus side would be that we could ditch it after he has trashed it for a season of beginner riding. We could just carry the bindings home with us.

So despite amazing weather, the riding was not that great. I'll rent Jon some stuff from rentals until we get this board fixed up. In the meantime, he's getting really good. We're getting some speed going down some of these runs, and despite some gnarly falls, he is fearless. What I really want, though, is to find some people that we can ride together with. We are still searching for the right combination of people to do this with. It's hard to have fun when you are skiing with people of different skill levels. Especially if those people aren't necessarily invested in hanging out with you. It's hard to convince people to go out with you if that means they have to sacrifice their ski time to wait for you. In the end, I got a snowboard and started riding with Jon because that put us on a more even level in terms of riding skill.

We are going skiing again tomorrow, but it looks like the weather is going to suck. We'll see how that goes...

Jalissa