owwwww!

Overall, I feel like I was beaten with an aluminum baseball bat.My knees are bruised to the point of being swollen... this evening I can finally bend them almost normally. My ass feels like I spent 8 straight days on a stairmaster on the hardest setting. I am pretty positive that I have stress fractures in both of my wrists. My entire back feels like it's going to fall apart. I can't lift my left arm more than 30 degrees or my right arm more than 60 degrees. Even my hair hurts. I look, and feel, abused.

Was I in a car wreck? Was I beaten in a dark alley? Did I get into a crazy bitch bar fight (I for some reason want this to happen- I think I'd do okay)? No no and no. Instead of spending yesterday relaxing like I tend to do on Fridays, I decided to try snowboarding. I've been wanting to for the past five years or so. However, whenever we go on our little family ski weekends, 1) nobody wants to learn how with me, and 2) i don't want to spend the whole weekend by myself on the bunny slope while the rest of the group is off exploring the rest of the trails. Therefore, up until now this little desire of mine has remained in my mental reservoir of things I want to do in my life (a few other list entries are sky-diving, getting a pilots license, and learning how to play squash). So when Nell suggested that we go, I figured, oh hell why not! Little did I know...

Like I said, I went with Nell, who knows how to snowboard and said she'd give teaching me a go. Even so, I was pretty much winging it... I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing. I feared for my life and the lives of anyone within a 3 mile radius. As soon as we get there and she shows me how to strap myself on to the plastic board of death, she's like, "Ok! Let's get on the lift!" I was like, "Ok!... um... how?" We get on and as we start approaching the end of the line, so to speak, I realize that this is not going to go well. In fact, I realize that this is going to go very, very badly. When getting off the lift, I was "that person" (who under different circumstances I would be mercilessly making fun of) who gets off and immediately falls into a sloppy heap and in so doing, practically kills a swarm of ski-school 4 year old children. I was already envisioning having to apologize to grieving parents for having run over and squashed their beloved offspring.

The first run down was by far the worst- it took me probably about an hour to get down. And that hour was spent falling over and over (... and over... and over...) again, alternating falling forward on to my knees with falling backwards on to my ass. At one point I fell so hard that I couldn't even articulate the four-letter words I was otherwise using every time violent contact was made with that bleeping Mother bleeping Earth (if I were the subject of a tv show, the soundtrack to my entire day would be one long censored bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep). Instead, all that made its way out was a soft, pitiful yelp accompanied by my eyes immediately filling with tears. A burst of pain travelled from my bum up and through my spinal cord and finally arriving at the top of my head with an intensity that I didn't even know was possible. I'm also pretty sure that due to that fall I'm now somehow consequently unable to have children, even though that theory is technically devoid of logic. I sat in the snow for 20 minutes following that digger, trying to establish whether I should hail one of the guys who go blasting up and down the mountain in their snazzy stretcher-towing snowmobiles.

On the positive end, I do have to say that after I changed from a left-foot board to a right-foot one (I just knew that trying to go with my left foot forward felt overly unnatural..), things improved. I kind of started to get the hang of it and by the end of the day my number of falls taken per run even made it down into the single-digits. The sport was actually beginning to seem fun.

However, the damage had been done by that point, and today is approximately 3847034.39 times as painful as yesterday. I currently have to lift my left arm up with my right one to do anything and have to duck my head down so my hands can reach to shampoo it when I shower. Putting shirts on and taking them off is borderline torture. I have to ease in and out of the sitting position like a 95 year old with arthritis. And finally, tonight I almost couldn't make myself a comforting hot chocolate because the microwave lay about a foot out of my range of arm movement.

BUT...I get to cross one thing off my life's to do list! Betsey wins!!!