Monday, February 14, 2011

Valentines day "skiing"

Well, I'm back from our Valentine's day skiing adventure, which did not involve much actual skiing at all.  And not because I just fell on my ass and bum-slid down the mountain, which did happen last time I went skiing.  But instead, because of the following:

1.  I got work to do over the weekend.  I got the assignment at 5:15 on Friday night.  Which, for those of you keeping track at home, is 15 minutes before I was scheduled to leave.  So I had the option of either staying until 9 and then having to find our hotel in the wilds of upstate New York in the middle of the night, or printing a bunch of stuff and working on the romantic weekend away.  I chose the latter.

2.  Kathy got horrendously sick.  Actually, she got strep throat.  I didn't even know grownups got strep throat, but apparently, they do.  None of the kids have it, so who knows where it came from.

Nevertheless, we did get in some drinking skiing before disaster struck.

We left on-time-ish on Friday night, and made it to Cobleskill, NY.  Which is in the middle of nowhere.  We found ourselves a sports bar which said it served food late, although that actually meant they had a late night munchie menu (i.e., literally everything was deep fried).  So for dinner, we had wings, chicken fingers, and this:



At a bar that had one of these:


I learned a few things that night. 

1.  Beer for dinner does not make me a better pool player.  But it does make playing pool more fun.

2.  Cobleskill, NY has a college.  That college has two students, who wanted to play pool with us.  Their names were Alex and Adriana/Ariel.  At the end of the night, Kathy was certain the girl was named Adriana, whereas I had been calling her Ariel the entire night.  We have no idea what her actual name was.  But that's okay, because ever since we left the bar, we have been referring to them as "red tie" and "sparkles," because they were all dressed up for a dance that the college had on Friday night.

3.  Just because a Jaeger shot is really cold and comes out of a fancy machine, it doesn't mean I should drink it.

The next day, Kathy woke up feeling like crap.  It's likely that she would have felt like crap the night before, as well, but it was masked by the beer and Jaeger shots.  I attributed it to a hangover/cold combination, and went to the grocery store to pick up DayQuil, Advil, Vitamin Water, and coffee.  After pumping ourselves full of these items and taking a 1 hour nap, Kathy said she felt well enough to ski for a little bit.  Now, I don't want you to think I cruelly forced Kathy to ski when she was really sick.  I said about 150 times that we didn't have to go.  But here's the thing about Kathy.  She can be very stubborn, and once she decides she wants to do something, there is no stopping her.  The thing she wanted to do was ski.  So we were going to ski.  I still had a hangover, but I thought Kathy looked like she felt worse than I did, so I put on my happy face.


We skied (why does that look like I am using the word "sky" as a verb?) for a couple of hours.  Only once did I sit down and stubbornly refuse to go down the hill because it was too steep and scary.  And I actually got up and forced myself to go down, and was fine.  Kathy kind of looked like she was dying, so we decided to take a break.  Now, if you know us, you will be surprised that we would go to the bar at the ski lodge and drink diet coke.  But that is how horrible Kathy felt. 




Here's a little context for you:


And one thing I love about skiing.  It's the only time a chandelier like this one would be appropriate:


We only made it down the mountain 2 more times, on the easiest of slopes, before Kathy looked at me and said "I can't do it.  Can we go?"  We got in the car and she immediately fell asleep, while I drove back to our hotel.  She crawled into bed and slept until dinner (while I worked, blah).  She was glassy-eyed and had a fever.  She ate dinner with me, we watched a movie on the computer, then she went immediately back to sleep.  I would include pictures of her blissfully slumbering self, but none of them are all that flattering, and I have been forbidden.

The next day, she felt even worse, so we got up and I drove her to an urgent care clinic about halfway back home.  Sure enough, she had strep throat.  Kathy has not really been seriously sick the entire time I've known her.  In fact, she has had the occasional cold or a milder version of something the kids brought home, but she hasn't been seriously sick since she had bronchitis while pregnant with C (who is, as you will recall, in kindergarten).  So it's been a while.  Pretty consistently since Sunday morning, Kathy has been asking me, "What do you think is wrong with me?"  I keep telling her that she is sick, and this is what it feels like. 

So that was our Valentine's Day weekend.  But you know what?  It was okay.  We went out and partied with townies.  We got to ski.  I had dinner and a movie with Kathy.  I got my work done in a way that was relatively painless, since Kathy was sleeping anyway.  Anyway, that is what real life is like, sometimes you get horribly, violently ill on your weekend away and you make the best of it.  And looking back, it's not so bad.

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