The "Perfect" Form

So, it turns out that Jen and I actually enjoy skiing. I don't enjoy the expense. I don't enjoy the painful learning curve (I still have bruises on my shins). I don't enjoy the half-pint six-year-old kids going in a snake very slowly down the slope. But I do enjoy the feeling of rushing down the grade (in control) and "shushing" my way back and forth through the snow.

After our first day's instruction on Sunday, Jen and I went back by ourselves on Wednesday. We were big fans of the pizza-french fries technique.
We never went off of the bunny slopes, but we had a good time. We went up and down the mini-lift just to the right of "Minnie's Lift".

We spent the first half of the day going up and down what's called the "magic carpet". It's basically a conveyor belt that very slowly takes you up the almost-flat grade of the bunny slope. In the picture above, they are labeled 35 and 18. Here's Jen on 18.

If we had one more day of skiing, we would have conquered the greens, no problem. For your laughing enjoyment, here is a vid of my very second trip down the side of number 18 on Sunday. I wish I had a video of me toward the end of the day on Wednesday. Trust me, it would look much different.



There are some other Vail highlights, to be sure, courtesy of the patented Kellogg team bonding technique. First the Sunday night wig-walk:

Monday night Wild West Party:

Wednesday night pub golf in the condos. My condo hosted a drink called a "Colorado Bulldog". It looked like ass and tasted very yummy. Here's our hole before people arrived:
And after:

Thursday was relatively quiet, save for the fact that the closing concert was put on my the 80's rock cover band Fast Times.
It turns out the bar had a wooden floor installed above a layer of tires to help with country western line dancing. When you fill the dance floor with excited, drunk grad students all jumping up and down in unison, the effect is quite shocking. This is a video with very bad sound (the camera was overwhelmed by the huge speakers in front of me), but you can still make out the song being sung mostly by the crowd.



When I took this video, my feet were flat on the floor. The movement is the floor itself. And I was on the side, it was worse (better?) in the center of the crowd.

That's about it for Vail. Watch out, Tahoe, here we come.