Whoof!

It's been a while. It's as if I locked my blog in the closet for a week until somebody called social services.

You'd think I was stranded up on a mountain or something.

Oh, wait...

'Spent New Years and the last few days of vacation snowboarding up at Mammoth, where we got four feet of that strange fluffy stuff in four days. Insane.

The conditions on Saturday were miserable. On the chairlift, I found myself chattering to Cronkette that she had my blessing to eat my corpse if it came to that.

But Sunday was just spectacular, and the trip was a smashing success. With Cronkette's help (and patience) I finally got the hang of that toe-side turn, breaking my illustrious professional snowboarding career wide open.

MVP honors go to my right shoulder, which absorbed most of my falls. Honorable mention goes to my cranium on those particularly hard spills. (So far I still seem to possess both short-term and long-term memory, as well as remedial reading skills. God is great.)

Taking ski trips while on financial aid. Clearly, I am blessed with intelligence.

And I found myself back in Chi-town late last night. 'Started the day in one f-f-f-frozen tundra, finished the day in another.

In the end, I did not go quietly.

It took a surprise tranquilizer dart in the neck to get me on that plane.

"Bastards!! Put me down! I'm not going back there! I'm not! Nooo! Everything's...getting...so...dark... zzzzzz"

And if I weren't so heavily sedated, I could tell you all about the most terrifying mid-flight turbulence ever encountered. But I was tranquilized. So I can't tell you how gut-wrenching and horrific it was - how it made me think of all the people I'd never get to say goodbye to. Oh well.

So I'm back and already had my first day of class. Business wrting - 'should be an interesting quarter. And by interesting, I mean not-interesting. But still challenging and indispensible for better reporting, so no complaints. And hey, I'm officially writing for a legit newswire supplying papers with decent circulations.

Today our new professor dumped more handouts on us than that white fluffy stuff back up there on the mountain. The same white fluffly stuff that's supposed to start falling in Chicago tonight.

So I got that going for me, which is nice.