I am sitting down to dash this off on day 155 of skiing this year. This has by far been the best worst year of skiing I have ever seen. Cold nights, warm beautiful days and a huge thick slab of blue Vermont ice to ride into May.
We complain about the weather, but we always forget that it is the freeze/thaw cycles and the rain that make our grass the greenest, our syrup the sweetest and our season the longest. If the snow on the ground doesn’t thaw, freeze and bond, then it will just be scraped away in warm weather. If the rain doesn’t come in and fill all the granular gaps in the glacier pads, then we have 30-40 percent less mass of snow on the ground than we think we do.
This season, with its cold nights, warm days and rain, has the potential to last well into May, and I, frankly, am in love with the world. All of it.
I have been getting out in the mornings, and just having a total blast on that fast firm corduroy…and I can’t wait for the time when they shut down the lifts midweek and I can start hiking it every day… I can see my iron legs in the future, and they beckon.
In other news, I finally got Pip The Impaler (the fiercest guinea pig in all the land) a brush so that I could pet him and bond with him without drawing blood from my fingers. For those of you who caught it, the Rutland Community Singers’ Mozart “Requiem” at Grace Church was a roaring success. The orchestra had a few fluffs, but all in all, for a chorus in a small city, everyone did a bang-up job, and I loved getting back in touch with my classical singing side. It has been a long time, 24 years, but I still got it!
Furthermore, in the vein of getting back in touch with my old self, I took my first Taekwondo class in eight years, and stepped back in almost as though I had never left. It helps that I am in far better shape than even when I was competing at a national level… back then I was running on some native ability and natural genetic size. This time I am coming at it with a clear head, a pure heart (well… purer anyhow), and healthy heart and lungs. It was amazing, and every bit the homecoming I had hoped that it would be.
Finally, I now have a membership at the Green Mountain Rock Climbing Center. I climbed a few times this past fall, for the first time in 20 years, and found it enervating, fun and much easier minus the 60-80 pounds I had on me when I last worked in a climbing gym. There will be more on that soon, for sure.
Spring is here, the days are warmer and longer, and I am working 7 days a week on my mission to save the world one rooftop at a time. If I sell a megawatt of rooftop solar, the GivePower foundation will put solar lights in a school in a Third World town that has no electricity. That means classes can be held at night, so that parents who work during the day can be educated alongside their children — and they put my name on a plaque at the school.
If I raise $3,000 for the foundation, I will get to go help install it. This is my goal. If any of you live in Rutland, Chittenden, Pittsford, Mendon or North Clarendon, and want to help me save the world and use the interwebs, then find me and let’s set up an appointment. The average household solar system prevents the release of CO2 equivalent to 200,000 miles of driving and prevents the pollution of about 6.5 Olympic sized swimming pools of water. The environmental impact is massive, no joke.
Help me help us! I hope that I will have seen some of you at the Earth Day event at the site of the Rutland Winter Farmers Market by the time this has gone to press.
