"Who wants to go skiing? Raise your hand!"*

*that's what my kids say when they have something nobody in their immediate circle of friends have and want to make sure-with perfect clarity-that that immediate circle of friends are 100% absent of that something. try it sometime, it'll make you feel...mmmmm...'bout seven or so years of age.
oh yeah. call me lazarus. i was dead (due to a super-nasty flu-type buggy-bug my brother in-law via my sweet melissa gave me), and now i'm alive (but it took 4not 3 days)! so what do you do the first day when you can leave your bed? that's right, you go skiing. skiing on a weekday nonetheless. skiing at copper mountain. i leave pretty early because i have this thing about being (one of the) first(s) in line when the lifts start running at 8:30. there was absolutely nobody there this morning so i warmed up mid-mountain back to base a couple of times to make sure my skis, legs, and brain were acting like a team. my lungs predicated the rest of my time on the mountain (unfortunately). i still have a boatload of phlegm sitting nicely in the bottommost chambers of my lungs...so!.. even though my pistons were willing to get abused, the limiting reagents were my lungs. i have residual fitness from cycling (i'd like to think. okay, i thought about it, and there's absolutely no crossover) in the legs but it felt as if i had a tracheal opening the size of a lilliputian's sphincter (coupled with da phlegm). not a good combination for anaerobic activities. i'd rip a good line, but when a quarter of the sequence i was visioning happened, i'd have to catch a nice, long breather (being proprietarily sound, i didn't exhibit behaviors of extruding liquid shrapnel from the naso-pharynx passageways either). that's when the octogenarians would pass me. i'm not busting on them, it's just the long time locals tearing it up too (i want to be skiing in my twilight years!). i hit the bowls before the crowds got nutty. the karmas love plowing through the semi-chunky, nougat-esque powder/packed powder. too bad i was slowing them down. i'll let you in on a secret: my skis, as well as my bikes (my mountain bike mostly), talk to me. they are the iconic devils that sit on an opposing shoulder to the angel when you have a choice between moderation and full-on indulgence. sadly, i had to stop in-between evil sessions in order to breathe properly. breathing's important for like, aerobic creatures.
on the way back-especially when you fly solo-i go through a mental debrief. what fosters the mental decompression is music. i've been on this wagner bender lately so i listen to his the ring of the nibelungs. to be precise, it's his first one: das rheingold (which, in german means, das rheingold-actually the nibelung is about 16 hours long). incidentally, i've been to the rhein river in wunderbar deutschland (but can honestly say that mosel wine is superior in taste and finish). and after sampling several of the rhine's best auslese (with french fries mit mayonnaise, yum!)i too have seen rheinmaidens in der rhein. wagner's music is large and in charge; but, his arias can be immensely impassioned. every time wotan busts a solo i'm getting chicken skin. including this, my outing to copper mountain was truly audio-visual.
ite den kids. have a lovely 2008 and if you see anybody in a vitamin cottage cycling kit, y'all wave to them with all your fingers, ite? ite.