Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended BAVC‘s Shooting Techniques II class. It was a good class, learned a lot. Blah, blah, blah. So, the good part was, I have a new lust in my life. The Panasonic AJ-SDX900. Hum, yummie. It does all the formats and film look video. Very nice. And I’ll go broke on the extras. Lenses, matte boxes, studio viewfinders, control boxes. Ooh yeah.
Tuesday night after class I drove back to Santa Cruz from San Francisco. We jumped in the mini-van and headed for Dodge Ridge. Spent the night in Sonora and then met a bunch of other home school families for a day of skiing at Dodge Ridge. I haven’t skied more than once or twice in 15 years. It was a lot of fun. Dodge Ridge is a nice, friendly space, or at least it was on a Wednesday. It was drizzling when we arrived. Turned to snow fall later in the day, back to drizzle and rain in the early afternoon.
My son took a ski lesson in the morning. My daughter and I skied an easy slope for the first few runs. I taught her how to ride a chair lift so that she wouldn’t be stuck on the tow rope all day. Once my son finished his lesson we all rode to the top of the mountain to ski down. It was probably a little more than the boy was really ready to handle after only two hours of skiing but he took it like a soldier. We got down the bottom and I took him over to the chair that my daughter and I had be riding in the morning. Skied with him for a few runs after which I was really wanting to go back to the top. The kid says, go ahead, Dad I’ll be fine. He spent the rest of the day riding the chair lift by himself. He had a great day.
My daughter had been skiing before but never learned to ride a chair lift. So, she was relegated to the rope tow which is very short and boring. Having learned how to ride a chair lift she travelled all over the mountain.
My wonderfully devoted wife spent the day in the lodge studying Adobe Illustrator. It was great to have her holding down the base camp. It gave the kids a place to check in and get a confidence check and freed dad up to go out and have fun without worrying about the kids.
It was a lot of fun.
Aloha
Good for you guys. Do you remember the first time we went skiing and we tried to teach ourselves? WOW, what a disaster. You wern’t sure you ever wanted to ski again.
I don’t remember learning to ski. I remember a lot of fun ski trips that we took as a family. I remember going to Badger Pass every year. That was fun. I remember I would ski the Chick-a-pin run at the end of the day. That was fun. We had a lot of fun skiing as a family.
aloha
The first trip was to Wrightwood and you were about 5. And as usual, I was cheap, so I thought we could learn by ourselves. But we finally took lessons later in the a.m. We had a great instructor. He taught your mom and I how to “snow plow” and how to do a 180 degree turn standing still.
Well, so, “I don’t remember…” is a bit of overstatement. I believe I was 7 that first trip. I remember the instructor. I remember herringboning up to the tree and skiing down (you yelled at me, I cried). I remember the cable bindings and how impossible they were to close. Yeah, I remember. It’s just not that big a deal.
aloha
hi smittie,
came here via guy & am now smiling. great post, lovely story.
I’ll be back 🙂
mikey