Crystal Mountain

Yesterday I went skiing for the first time this year, and for the first time ever at Crystal Mountain. When I day-skied in the Seattle area, I usually went to Steven's Pass, and had always assumed that Crystal was similar in size. Was I ever wrong! Crystal is a real mountain ski area...a whole level above Steven's. And the snow conditions were fabulous! There was lots of snow, and you didn't have to get very far off the groomed areas to end up in three feet or more of powder snow. And since I'm not the greatest skier in the world, and since powder requires a totally different skiing technique than does packed and groomed snow, I was wary of the stuff. The key in powder is to keep your ski tips up. Once you bury a tip, the unwary skier is headed for a face-plant. And yes, fairly late in the day, I let my concentration lapse and did a serious face-plant, ending up face-first in at least three or four feet of the stuff, with one ski still attached, and one ski buried in the snow somewhere behind me. Once I got over the panicked feeling of not being able to move and drowning in the white powdery stuff, I managed to release the remaining binding and regain an upright position. Then I had to dig around in the snow behind me for at least ten minutes before I found my other ski. I got myself all reattached and headed out of there, with nothing wounded but my pride.

From now on, Crystal will definitely be my ski destination of choice in this area.

On Thursday night, I knocked another movie off my must-see list. Juno is the best movie I've seen this year. It will make you laugh out loud and it will make you cry. The plot isn't as predictable as you might think, and Ellen Page (a Canadian, I might add) lights up the screen like no one else I've seen in a long, long, time. She delivers her off-beat lines flawlessly. She will be a star! It's not often I find a soundtrack memorable, but I liked the songs in this show. This could well be only the second movie (the first being the re-make of Thomas Crown Affair several years ago) that moved me to go out and buy the soundtrack!

I think I'm down to two must-see movies on my list, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men. I doubt they'll make me laugh like Juno did, but I hope they're worth seeing nonetheless.