a month's worth of regurgitationokay, my attempt at a month's worth of regurgitation

so yesterday was friday the 13th. yesterday was also alice's birthday. nothing strange happened yesterday, i don't think.

so... it's been a month. well... three days after my last post, i graduated. then a couple of weeks after that, i received a letter saying that i hadn't met gradution requirements. yeah. well, to be more accurate, my parents received the letter. either way, it turns out that i just needed to make the request that my micro credit be substituted into the requirement. so now i've "officially" graduated. still haven't requested my diploma... i guess i should do that before they try to charge me for it or something like that...

if course, in the middle of all this... SNOWBOARDING! canaan valley this year, living in deer lodge. we had our own parking area. it said "deer lodge parking area." the two lodges after us shared a parking area. theirs was labeled "woodcock-beaver lodge parking area." no joke.

teresa was basically the only other snowboarder that came with us this year. there was a little boy named kevin, but he didn't go out every day that we did (more on that later), and he was on the bunny slopes the entire time anyway, so we didn't see him much (we had to go down half the bunny slope to get to where we parked/ate, and the other half to get from the top of the lift there back to our lift--plus, we were on the bunny slopes until michael was comfortable enough to move on). either way, it worked out much better because, (i think) the larger the group of girl snowboarders, the more you sit around. (alex is pretty much completely out of the picture--i didn't realize this at the time, but he didn't even hear about the plans until after the trip.)

first day, conditions were... meh. not really icy, but you could feel a pretty hard layer under everything. poop. the second day, it was raining. yeah, that's right, raining. and we were on the slopes. not all of us--kevin's side (the ones that lived in the woodcock lodge--ha!--didn't go). but... it turns out that the conditions the second day were better than on the first. 'cause the rain melted the semi-iced together layer, and then drained through the base... so it was basically wet granules. not slush. which is what we expected. the only thing was... we needed to be bundled up properly. or else we'd get wet. i'm used to dressing to keep out the cold or the flying ice crystals from high-pressure snow machines, not the rain... it was strange. and we all got pretty wet on the outside

by the end of the day, we'd gotten pretty tired too. we were all taking funny falls (you know, the ones where it just takes less energy to plant you ass down than it does to carve, and your body finally wins over your mind?), and somewhere along the way, my mind gave out from under me. i was watching michael and teresa go ahead of me (i would wait until they got to the next trail--trails at canaan are ridiculously short--before i'd start going)... and when i did actually stand up and go... i wiggled a bit to get the board going... and then leaned back a bit to build up some speed... and then... spaced out. next thing i knew, i was halfway down that trail (the blue) and headed for the "black" (i swear that the blue at seven springs was more difficult... but whatever). uuuh... maybe i should carve. i guess speed doesn't get to me as much as it used to. i'm definitely much faster now... not that you can build up *that* much speed on wet granules, but it's still much faster than i'd have allowed myself to go before i got this board. especially on not-powder. 'cause powder hurts less.

the third day... idle snowfall. i was thinking that it meant that everything that was on the slopes before then would be a giant sheet of ice (if you have snow, and then it rains, and then it snows again... don't you normally have a giant sheet of ice under the new snow?). but... it wasn't so. somehow, the granules stayed granules. semi-frozen granules, but granules just the same. yes, it's different--more grip. anyway, it was a completely different experience. most of the falls we took the first couple of runs were due to too much powder. uh, what? yeah. the snow was dry enough that when the wind blew, they created snow dunes. so you'd be going from icy granules to... a foot-high pile of powder. and if you tried to turn at the wrong part of this transition, weird things would happen.

i think i did the most dumbass one. i went over the snow mound like a ramp... and decided to turn then. but i turned as if i were on the ground (hey, my board was still kinda touching something, right?) the effect was pretty much the same as if i'd jumped up in the air and turned my board 90 degrees before i came down. i was suddenly braking, still going the wrong direction (and by "the wrong direction" i mean "for the trees"), and what happens? instead of turning my board back around performing the turn properly, my body's reaction was to brake for my life. so, of course, i end up on my ass. hard. ouch.

this is not to take away from amazing feats from michael and teresa. they both managed to do the same thing at different times that day... in the same area of the trail, now that i think about it. that morning, was watching the two of them go for the end of the trail, and michael takes an incredibly awkward fall... such that he was on his back, his board was above him (mountain-wise), and he was still sliding. okay, i don't really remember how he got to that position because was rushing to his side as it happened, but when he got to this position, he looked over at me and said "i'm still sliding!" is this oddly gleeful voice that said either he was fine, or he'd completely lost it. and then he decided to stand back up by kicking his snowboard over his head. and off he went. not a beat missed. i guess that means he was alright...

on one of the last runs of the day, teresa took a similar spill and was giggling as she was sliding down she mountain backwards on her back. and then her board did the same thing that michael's did. except, instead of standing right back up and going, she had this look of shock on her face. i think her jacket got caught on a bump or something, and her board was still going, so it flipped her over. either way, it was funny, and i think i owe someone a similar wipeout and recovery.

oh, and the thing about snowboarders... when you go in the offseason, and there aren't lines, there aren't many snowboarders on the mountain. and you eventually start to recognize every group. and guess what... teresa and i were the only girl-group on the blue/black side (michael had gone to spend some time with kevin). we were sitting under the midway lift (more of a habit than anything... i'd made michael stop at certain places to check in, and that was one of them... and at that stop, we'd have snowball fights are just sit and talk for a bit before we went on) and two snowboarders were staring at us. and they didn't look away when i looked up at them. so, i did what i normally do in these situations (you know, when they're going by, but they can't really stop). i waved. amd they waved back. so teresa waved. "do you know them?" "no." i wasn't thinking ahead far enough... at this point, i was worried that they were going to get off the lift right behind us. i'd forgotten that you didn't have to go all the way up. that's alright, though. they didn't. later that day, after michael came back and joined us, a couple of boarders came by us to strap in. one was talking like a douche. "where you from? same! where in virginia? same!" but i have to say that the best part of the entire encounter was this guy's pickup line. "hey, what'd you guys get for christmas?" worst. pickup. line. ever. or funniest. your choice.

we got back on the 26th (also our last day on the slopes). we tried to buy my car on the 27th. manager at fairfax (one of them, at any rate) sucks. either didn't know what he was selling me, or was hoping i didn't know what i was buying. i'm not even sure which one i want to vote for. kinda both, i think. anyway, we walked out. then daddy called stohlman. 'cause they were the only one in the area that had the color and trim i wanted. and they quoted us at invoice. hmm... never heard good things about stohlman.

went in morning-ish (pre-noon) on the 28th. took forever, but i got my car.

if you want to know what it was like around me for a week and a half after that... imagine me squealing, then running to the window, then squealing again. yeah, i love my car. i LOVE my car.

gray gli, manual (yeah, i know, i know... dsg is the shit... but i want my first car to be a manual. and, last i checked, it is my car.), package #1 (NO leather!), and rear side curtain airbags (the only gray manual package on in the mid-atlantic region, apparently).

it got its first scratch yesterday. on, of all places, a window. the front driver side window. yup. right next to my face.

lawn people at the apartment complex. and i know, because there was still dirt in and around the scratch.

but what can i do?

***

so... listening to xm the on tuesday... and guess who's on fungus. lou brutus! that's right, the fa king, lou brutus. and, for some reason, i'm the only person who knows who that is. oh, i know... because everybody always listened to elliot.

i'll tell you what... somewhere along the way, i went to taiwan for a couple of weeks, came back, and lou brutus was gone. there was a large push to find the new morning team (which eventually became, i think, allen scott and gina crash), but there was no mention of why he left. or even that he left, really... just that they needed to find a morning crew. odd. they tried out everybody in that time. mornings were weird. whatever. still not enough to want to keep xm. i'm not impressed with it.

and yes, hfs was better than 101. hfs is gone because infinity sucks. i guess they forgot that hfstival and hfsmas holiday nutcracker and the hfsmas holiday snowjob and all that other hfs-related revenue was... well, part of hfs. aol bought the name and is now web-casting what they think is "hfs music," but it sucks horribly. it was also relaunched on a baltimore sister station. yeah, that helps me. don't know what's going on there now, but, at the very least, tim virgin works there.