3/1/01

I have to be at work at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow and on Saturday. That's half an hour before my mice go to bed. Working with live animals sucks sometimes.

I'm so glad I decided to go on the ski trip--I ended up having a terrific time. I was really hesitant about going all day Sunday. I felt guilty about taking time off from work, and I wasn't sure I'd enjoy spending time snowbound in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere with seven other people and no privacy. Even in the car ride on the way up I still wasn't sure I'd made the right decision.

But somewhere in the middle of the 4-hour trip, I started having fun. We decided to stop for dinner at an A&W Root Beer stand. They make their root beer floats with soft ice cream now, which was good, but kind of weird. I guess nothing is sacred.

It was, of course, snowy up in the mountains, and although the roads seemed pretty clear, I was pretty well terrified for the last 45 minutes of the trip, although I don't think anyone noticed, because I was trying to seem blase. Riding in cars is not something I've done on a regular basis since 1989, and in that time, I've become a very nervous passenger. Also, my scary trip to the Hartford airport at Thanksgiving probably stoked the fires of my icy driving conditions paranoia. And, while the driver of our car seemed to be a very good driver, he's from Palo Alto, and doesn't have a lot of experience driving in winter weather. Anyway, nothing happened (except getting temporarily stuck trying to drive slowly up a snowy hill) so I guess I really was being paranoid.

We stopped for "groceries" (read: beer) along the way, but we needn't have bothered, because when we got up to the cabin, the 4 people who'd gone up earlier in the day had fully stocked the kitchen with both food and drinks, and they were all sitting around drunkenly toasting marshmellows in the woodstove to make s'mores. I tell you, after a long car trip in the snow, there's nothing like kicking back in front of the fire drinking beer and eating s'mores.

We spent the rest of the evening talking and reading aloud from the various new agey books people had left behind in the cabin. My favorite of these was a book which told of how people had originated on the Island of Atlantis, where they originally had 12-stranded DNA, until a genetic engineering experiment gone awry reduced us to double-stranded DNA.

There were four double beds in the cabin, and there were four men and four women on our trip, so the original plan was to sleep two to a bed. But the woman with whom I was supposed to sleep went to bed early to prepare herself for a day of hardcore skiing, and in doing so sprawled out diagonally taking up the whole bed.

I could have pushed her aside, I suppose, but I didn't really feel like sharing a bed anyway, so I just unrolled my sleeping bag on the rug in the living room and slept there. It was actually very comfortable.

I did wake up early, though, when the bright sun came in through the big picture windows right next to where I was camped out. 5 out of the 8 people on the trip were actually skiing, so I mostly just sat around and tried to stay out of their way as they got ready to go. After they left, it was much more peaceful. The three of us still remaining sat around doing work and eating breakfast.

But after a few hours, we were getting stir crazy, and it was a pretty nice day, so we decided to go for a walk. Originally, our plan was to walk down to Donner Lake (I assume the name is taken from the infamous Donner Party--we were also staying right off of Donner Pass Road), which was about half a mile away from our cabin. However, the Lake was on the other side of the freeway, and we couldn't find a safe place to cross over on foot, so we wound up walking along the street for awhile (the sidewalk was covered in a 7-foot snowbank, so we walked in the bicycle lane). It wasn't very scenic, though, so after we gave up on actually making it to the lake, we decided to just walk up a big hill behing the local Safeway. The snow on the hill was about 3 feet deep, which made it a challenging hike to the top. We had to keep stopping to catch our breath, occasionally just flopping down in the snow to rest. The hill was so steep and the snow so deep that all you really had to do was turn around and tilt your head back a bit and you were lying down. We also had a couple of snowball fights, and by the time we got to the top of the hill, we were all feeling kind of giddy and tired and goofy. At the top, there was a big open field that looked like a golf course or something with a big "NO TRESPASSING" sign. I flopped down on the ground and made a defiant snow angel before turning around and heading back.

The trip back down the hill was even more fun than the trip up. We slid down on our bellies and rolled down on our sides, and we all arrived at the bottom covered in a thin layer of powdery snow. This meant that we had to walk another mile home with wet clothes (and carrying heavy groceries, because we stopped at the Safeway to buy things for dinner), but we didn't care. It was worth it.

We then got home and cooked an extravagant dinner for the skiiers, and then sat around gossiping and reading aloud the more ridiculous passages from the Kama Sutra (another book we found sitting around the cabin) and otherwise being goofy. Later, we watched "X-Men" on video, and then everyone was tired so they went to bed. However, my friend Jin-Sae and I stayed up late lying on the floor in our sleeping bags and talking about slumber parties and mutual friends and looking at the stars and talking about how much fun we'd had climbing "Mount Safeway." I think that was the best part of the whole weekend--just lying on the floor half-asleep and talking about whatever with someone who's become one of my best friends in the past couple of years.

We headed home the next morning. I think our car was the rowdier of the two--we spent much of the trip singing along with the tapes I'd brought, ranging from Abba to Led Zeppelin. Both cars set out at the same time, and we kept passing each other on the freeway. Around the halfway point, we stopped at an In N' Out (a West-Coast fast-food chain) in one of those ubiquitous mall complexes you find out here for lunch. I'd never been to one before, and of course, as a vegetarian, there was nothing I could eat there, but I got a shake and drank it along with a Power Bar I'd brought.

It was an amazing, warm, beautiful day, and the sky was perfect and cloudless. We crowded around a table outside (except for Jin-Sae, who went across the street to lie down on a patch of flawless green grass in front of some other chain restaurant). The shake I got was really good. It was all good.

Anyway, it was all just amazingly fun, but then we got back Tuesday night, and I headed straight into work, which is practically where I've been ever since getting back. I'm starting to get ready to take my qualifying exams, which will probably happen in May. I have to write a thesis proposal (a description of the work I plan to do for my dissertation research) and then defend it in front of a committee of four faculty members of my own choosing. Right now, I'm trying to pick the committee. That's the easy part--the hard stuff will be happening over the next few months, which is very daunting. I'm sure I'll get through it fine, but I don't think that the next few months will be the best of my life.

In the forum: Are you Capable of Traveling Light?