Our Wedding Blog: And Then There Were Two

As anyone who's been trapped in conversation with me for longer than two and a half minutes knows, I like skiing. Some people might even call it a private obsession, but I disagree. There's nothing obsessive about sleeping in ski boots or wearing your thermal wear in the shower.

So I always knew that I wanted to teach Amanda to ski. I was, though, a bit nervous. I've never actually taught anyone to ski, not really, so I was a bit worried I wouldn't be up to snuff. Luckily, I had my old friend James, a ski instructor out in Las Vegas, who helpful provided these words of wisdom when I called:

"Don't do it, man," James said, helpfully. "For the love of God save yourself."

See, the first day of skiing isn't the most relaxing thing in the world. It involves a lot of flopping around on your back in the snow and wondering why your knees hurt so much. It can be difficult to master, endlessly frustrating, and really rather cold. Amanda does not deal well with the cold. She is not well-insulated.

But she's a good sport, so three weeks back we took a nice drive out to White Pass, conveniently located just outside Time And Space Itself. And I taught Amanda how to ski.

She was brilliant. She was patient, eager to learn, and only once was I fairly convinced she was about to hit me in the face. She's breezed into wedge christie turns on the second day, mastered every run on the lower mountain, and even failed to complain when the wind chill dropped to a pretty brutal ten degrees.