New Post, New House!

Greetings! It's been quite a while since my last post. Woops. I can't even begin to recap the past 8, going on 9 months. I went from teaching snow skiing to teaching water-skiing, which has given me an itch to pursue a career in adaptive water-skiing (which will have to be an entirely different post). I was home in May and then, as most of you know already, I drove back out to Utah with my sister, Erin, who took a summer job in Park City at the NAC. Her experiences this summer and her newfound love for Utah drove her to apply for the upcoming Americorps position at NAC and she will be joining us out here for the next year! YAY Erin! Her new residence here also leads me to my most exciting news...our new house! Unfortunately it isn't "ours" but we are the new residents of a cute, 2 story old miner's house on Park Ave.

For those of you know don't know the significance of Park Avenue, it is the residential road through Park City that parallels main street and is within walking distance of Park City Mtn. Resort (aka, work), coffee, stores, bars, parks and is on the route for all of PC's finest buses and parades. Hurray! I was able to experience the perks of living on Park for a few, blissful months last fall until the unfortunate flooding of our condo. Now we're back and ready for a fun year of being right in the action! Erin and I will share the house with our friend, Erica, who is also joining the Americorps force with Erin in the fall. We'll start the moving process in a few weeks, as well as the locating of furniture and household items. It will be my 3rd move in a year, but hopefully we will stay put for a bit.

Everyone come visit!!

White Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

It has been a crazy month and I can't believe it is already Christmas on Friday! My sister got here a week ago and my parents got here on Sunday. It is so wonderful to have them here in Park City for Christmas this year and to be able to show them around my town and have them meet my friends. They were able to secure a condo right in town, so I have moved in with them for the week. They have been skiing while I have been working, but I finally have 3 days off so we can all ski and spend the day together. Erin attended my volunteer training last week for the Ski Center and she has volunteered on one of my lessons and is volunteering on Evan's lesson today. I'm making her work for her ski passes.

Speaking of skiing, I taught my first ski lessons this week! It was a little bit of a shock actually. As a new-hire, we have to complete 12 hours of team teaching before we can be put on the schedule. I had completed about 6 hours when I walked into work and my boss told me that I was going to have to teach in 30 minutes. Ok! My student was great. She is an 11 year old from Texas and we sang lots of songs and played in the snow in between runs. I also attended a 2-day Bi-Ski clinic last weekend. A bi-ski is a sit ski with 2 skis underneath that the instructor usually tethers from behind. It is one of the most physically demanding lessons that we have, and possibly one of the most dangerous (when something goes wrong) but definitely one of the most fun. You can put anyone in a bi-ski and go rip it up all over the mountain. In our clinic, we learned all about how to set up and adjust the equipment, how to load onto the chairlift (and unload), how to bucket the bi-ski and how to tether it on steeper terrain. We did have sand-bag students so we weren't endangering each other's lives.

In other news, I have a place to live! For those of you who didn't hear, we had a water main bust in our attic a few weeks ago. I woke up at 4 am to water dripping onto my bed and a river rushing down our stairs. Within an hour, we had water coming through every seam, overhead light and crack in our ceiling from our upstairs to our basement garage. I left to shower at a friends before work and when I returned 12 hours later, our entire place had been evacuated and gutted. My friends were wonderful and everyone offered me a place to crash as long as I needed to. Luckily, our neighbors aren't returning until after the first of the year, and they were gracious enough to let us stay there. I started looking for a place to live immediately, but the selection in mid-December in Park City is slim. Two of my friends in Americorps with me told me that they were looking to move, so the three of us will be roommates. We finally found a townhouse in a neighborhood in town, right across the street from 3 friends! It has 3 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, LOTS of extra beds (for visitors!) and kelly green carpet. I can't wait to move in!

I hope that everyone has a wonderful and blessed Christmas and New Years! I hope that it is a wonderful time with family and friends this holiday season for everyone. I miss you all and am looking forward to seeing some of you in just a few short weeks! Merry Christmas!

Stats Update

• Total Ski Days: 9
• Lowest Temp of the Day: -6 (Yesterday)
• Today's High Temperature: 0 (as in, ZERO degrees.)
• Hours spent outside in 0 degrees: 6
• Amount of Duct Tape insulating my gloves: Approx 1 ft.
• Number of days homeless: 3

Cashew Chicken Traditions.

Apparently, it is snowing in Baton Rouge right now. That's nice and all, but why isn't it snowing in a place that needs it? All we have are high temperatures that aren't reaching past 30 and icy ski runs. Hopefully though, it will start snowing tomorrow and will continue throughout the week like it is supposed to. If I wasn't absolutely frozen and buried under blankets, I would be doing a snow dance right now. (Though, despite the cold, my friend and I got ice cream tonight...only at the BEST ice cream place ever, called the Yellow Snow. Expect to go there when you all come to visit.)

Anyway, I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! Things have been great in my neck of the woods. Last week I boarded a plane bound for, first Chicago, and then Springfield, Missouri. It was great to get out of town for a bit and see my family. I love Park City, but it

really is kind of like a college town for college graduates. It's small enough to only have about 2 degrees of separation between every person here between the ages of 20 and 35. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it was good to get away for a weekend. I love Thanksgiving in our family. I love the predictability of it. It is 5 days out of the whole year that have followed the same schedule for years. Wednesday night, we all get into town. We go out to Mexican Villa...which we didn't do this year

and I think it rocked my cousin Jeff's world a little. Instead, we went to get pasta. Who, you might be wondering, goes and eats a big, Mexican or Pasta dinner on the night before Turkey Day? The Smith's do. And then we run it off the next morning at the Turkey Trot. Paige and I were the champions this year! We even beat out Mitchell. Then we take family pictures, race to the cold showers and head out to the farm. We then eat ourselves into a food coma. We had 20 people at the farm this year, plus 3 dogs. Unfortunately, Shelby wasn't allowed at the farm since she would roll in every pile of cow poop there. Anyways, we eat alot, as does everyone on this day. The day after Thanksgiving, we split up into shopping groups. The brother's go to Bass Pro and take the annual tour de childhood. Aunt Kim and Maria tackle the intense sales and my mom, Paige and I venture out to an outdoors store away from the madness and then to Starbucks for momma's daily fix. Then, we got Cashew

Chicken. If you have never been to Springfield, you apparently have never experienced THE Springfield Cashew Chicken. It's like Jambalaya

is to Baton Rouge. With a Springfield native as a father, we grew up having a homemade version, which I actually prefer. But it is a necessity, to have the origonal while there. We then go to Grandpa's for pizza, pool and patio-sitting. I introduced the fam to Apples to Apples this year. It got pretty intense. Day 4 of Thanksgiving, we all go see an early movie, watch the Kansas/Mizzou game and go to Grandma & Jim's for early Christmas presents and a homecooked meal. Then day 5, we wake up before the sun and hit the road. What a wonderful 5 days of my life. I am already looking forward to next year.

It's Here!

Tomorrow is the first day of the ski season in Park City! Hurray! It was a long day at work: cleaning the ski center, making copies of training packets; and GETTING MY INSTRUCTOR SKI PASS! Its official. I've got the uniform and the pass. Even though the pants make me look like a gangsta/snowboarder, I am so excited to wear it. I can't wait to finally go skiing. I also am ready for things to get busy again. Tomorrow is the returning instructor training, so everyone will be back and on the slopes. I also get to play sled hockey tomorrow, so that is exciting too. I've started my winter work schedule, so I have no more weekends on the weekend. So while my roommates are planning lots of fun for the next two days, I will be doing the 8-5 work day. Didn't you hear that Tuesday is the new Friday?

I've been told I have to keep up with these blog updates. I apologize for the few weeks that I left everyone in the dark. Well what has been happening? I have started working full time at the ski center, which is great. I love working out of a double wide where I can bring the dog that I am dogsitting to work and where I get to stare at a giant mound of man made snow out my office window. We are supposed to open next Saturday! Which means that it had better start dumping some snow. Speaking of dumping snow...it actually is doing that right now. We've gotten about 5 or so inches at my place in around 5 hours. Im on the lower elevation end of Park City too, so up top there will be alot! YAY! I took Cooper (the dog) outside a little bit ago to play in the snow. It was so beautiful! I love how it is so much brighter when there is a white covering on everything. Anyway, back to work. We've had some serious issues with the computers and phones over at the ski center, so it was really frustrating to have to go back and forth from the ski center to the ranch to work on the computers. Finally, today all was up and running so I actually felt productive! I did some emailing to our 200 volunteers...tried desperately to find some sort of order in how to manage the 200 volunteers and I decorated my volunteer board. I find it amusing that I am the VOLunteer coordinator, and I am also a Tennessee VOL, so I decorated my board in orange and white. It would be silly not to take advantage of that opportunity. Today we also had a couple of visitors from past instructors who are returning for the season. It was so fun to have people start to come by and catch up on their summers and talk about the winter ahead. I can't wait for the ski center to get busy again.

In other news, Halloween was great. I was a superhero, along with my friends Kristin and Libby. Kristin and I spent most of the day friday constructing our outfits...it was great. We were able to meet up with all of our friends that night and had a great first Halloween in PC. Last weekend, I went to Moab, UT with my friend Evan to see another friend from school who lives there. He works for another adaptive sport organization called SPLORE. There ended up being 7 people there that weekend from UT! (That's the University of Tennessee...not Utah) Brad had 4 other friends of his and Evan's staying there while they sold corn dogs and funnel cakes at the Moab Folk Festival. They travel around the country right now, selling those at concerts and other events. It was such a fun weekend. The weather was PERFECT. Warm, sunny...shorts and flip flop weather again! We biked everywhere that weekend (or walked) and we all make a huge breakfast at brad's place Sunday morning. We went bouldering Saturday morning with the dogs and went mountain biking on Sunday. We had a blast staying at the SPLORE house and it was quite comical. There was a working toilet in the boat house, were they store all their river rafts and the one in the house had to be refilled everytime it was flushed. Brad lives in a room converted from a garage. I am actually leaving tomorrow to go back to Moab with Americorps and I think we're going to go and help the SPLORE crew clean up their house on Sunday. Hopefully it won't be too cold this weekend!

Well, I am comfortably in my bed, with Coop sleeping next to me and it is snowing outside. That sounds like bedtime to me. I hope everyone is well and I miss you all so much! Have a great weekend!

Another Tennessean comes to PC!

Get ready Park City! Tennessee is moving in. Starting in December, yet another TR student from UT will be starting her internship at NAC!!! I am so excited! Evan and I found out tonight, and Jessie finds out tomorrow. : ) I knew that she would have no problem getting it. What a fun winter this is going to be! YAYYY! I had to tell SOMEONE, since I can't tell her. Luckily she doesn't know I have a blog.

It's been a great week, even without that news. I babysat the CUTEST kid ever last night. His name is Parker, and he is 18 months, happy and cute cute cute. Unfortunately last night he wasn't feeling well and decided to throw up all over me...it's lucky for him that I am obsessed with him. Today Andrea and I drove about an hour and a half out to the Rossignol warehouse in Ogden to pick up lots of sweet donations for our ski sale on Saturday. Lots of new boots & skis, some slightly used ones and some rando boots for those who only need one. So many that we couldn't have fit another thing into the bed or the cab of the Tacoma we were driving. Then we drove the truck and a suburban over to our storage unit (which we got for free because the number is 666 and no one wanted it) and we filled both cars to the brim with donated boots, skis, a snowboard and some one-piece snow suits that were donated to us throughout the year. We unloaded all of that into the building and spent about another hour trying boots on, picking out our favorite skis and eating pizza. Tomorrow we get to organize and price out all of it. I really don't need anything but gosh, new skis or boots for $25? I can hardly pass that up. Tonight I hung out with some of our baseball kiddos from our Miracle League for their end of the season party. They came to work and climbed the climbing wall and ate pizza. They are so cute.

Tomorrow we are all going to see the new Warren Miller film. This is my first Warren Miller experience, which is apparently THE event to kick of the ski season. His films feature lots of footage of professional skiers doing some crazy stuff and they always have a pretty big adaptive section...my boss's husband Monty has been in them twice as a 3-tracker. They heli-ski and do all this crazy stuff. We have a big group going so that we could get a dollar off the tickets and we also get a free pass to the Canyons!

Well, it should be a good weekend. Its still fairly warm ( 50's) and I think I'm going to take advantage by riding my bike to work tomorrow! We'll see if it really happens.

Also...it is the 3rd weekend in October, which means we play Alabama this weekend. They are undefeated, but we ain't scared. GO VOLS!!!