Yep. Finally. I made it out to Lake Lansing Park North, and remembered why it truly is my favorite place to ski, ever.

For starters, it's really woodsy:





For another, there's just a leeeeetle bit of up-and-down every now and again. Hard to see here, but it's there:



No long, impressive downhills like the one at Eddy Geology Center, nor even a short hill with a 90-degree turn like County Farm Park . . . but there are plenty of places where you can actually slide down without me worrying that I'm Going to Fall and Break My Hip. (Sadly, I've started to fear falling. Well, "fear" might be too strong a word - but the concept exists in my mind as an unpleasant possibility in ways that it simply did not twenty years ago.) So, for the kind of snow we get - smallish amounts that get overskied - small stretches of "down" interspersed among lots of trees and flat is just the ticket.

And there's a varied landscape out there:





. . . with surprisingly varied trail lengths. There's a 1-mile loop, a 3.2-mile loop, and a 3.8-mile loop. The two longer loops have cutoffs that take their respective lengths down somewhere in the 2+ mile range.

It takes about 20 or so minutes to drive out there (longer than it should), and that's in the Subaru, so the Miata on snowy roads would take a lot longer. Thus, not ideal for everyday skiing. But still - definitely worth shoehorning the time into every (skiable) day if I can manage it.

* * *

And some other things I've done:

I applied for a teaching gig in Bao Ji, Sha'anxi Province, for next May and June. The status of the program from last summer is still very much up in the air, as far as I know, and I definitely want to return to China. If I end up in Bao Ji, then I'll take an extra week to travel up to Harbin before I return home.

I also (unofficially) discovered that I got a grant to study Chinese in China next summer. You'd think I'd be doing handsprings of excitement about this . . . it means I am definitely returning next summer, although the exact details have to be hammered out, and I think I'll have to front some cash for some of it. That prospect is tempering my enthusiasm somewhat.

And I learned that I got travel money for a conference in San Francisco next June. So that's good . . . unless, of course, I am in Bao Ji in June . . .

And then there may yet be the possibility of doing the same teaching gig I had LAST summer.

So any way you look at it, the summer is shaping up to hold some interesting possibilities.

By spring, when I know more, I will be excited about them. At the moment, though, I'm exhausted at the semester's end and I really want a long winter's nap . . .