A Visit from Dad and opening weekend

Fall break was relaxing and all around a great time. Dad flew in on Wednesday as planned and hung out with me for the majority of the week. We spent the first day running errands (I needed to get an oil change and do some other stuff that I normally don't have time for) and relaxing which was beneficial since getting used to the altitude takes a while. Friday we went up to Loveland Basin and got some good early season skiing in. The old man did really well for his first time out in 10 years (only 1 tip-over ha ha) and I'm starting to get pretty comfortable doing 180's and riding switch.

Sunday I took him off to the airport then headed back up the mountain to A-Basin to ski with Rae Kate and some friends. It was a little frustrating since only 1 lift was open and we had to wait in line about 15 minutes on average. However, things calmed down around 2pm and the snow became quite a bit better.

School's been going about the same as usual. I decided not to let all the little things that I consider less important bother me and just focus on teaching my students math - like I'm supposed to. I did decide to rearrange my classroom again. I want to see how well the students work when they're not in groups. This will definitely make my classroom easier to manage, but more work as far as helping with homework goes.

Okay so here's the really exciting part (not to take away from Fall Break at all) - We had Monday off (yesterday) because of Veteran's day which gave me a three day weekend :) So here's how it started:

Friday we had a staff vs. staff volleyball game against one of our rival schools (unfortunately this school wins at everything), so we felt as a staff we needed to make our school feel like winners and show our students some determination by kicking some ass. As many of you know, volleyball occupies majority of my summer team sport activities and I'm extremely competitive. So the first game was crap, the scorers messed up and ultimately cost us the game. It was 23-21 us and for some reason they randomly changed it to 20-20 and we ended up losing by one point. The next loss was even more frustrating because we decided that we would just rotate all the teachers in, so the starting line up sat on the bench for the entire game while the opposing game just played their best players non-stop. So the third game we decided to do the same and rocked them. The fourth game we went back to the old method and of course lost. Oh well, either way it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed spiking the ball into the faces of the rival school ;)

Afterwards we went out to a Mexican restaurant close by for some Margarita pitchers and authentic food, then Ryan and I went over to the Park Tavern to meet up with Jonny, Lauren and Kate.

Saturday was opening weekend for Copper, Breck and Keystone so Kate and I decided we would mount our skis and just rip the man-made snow for the weekend. We went to Copper on Saturday and had an awesome day. There were only 2 runs open, but the lift went up to 12,100 ft and had a pretty decent vertical. The resort was actually pretty empty and the snow was decent (awesome by Midwest standards).

We had a little dilemma afterwards - we couldn't stay with my friend that works at Copper Mountain. Our initial plan was to just find an incredibly cheap hotel in Frisco (city close by Copper) and crash their for the night, but still would have ran us $30 a piece. However, my friend Samira (she volunteers in my math class) was staying in Breck with some friends for the night in a huge hotel room. Saved!

So Samira's friend was putting on a huge benefit concert/auction/dinner/party for the mountain rescue team at a banquet hall. It was cost $20 and included dinner, raffle, prized and most importantly beer! So we met up with them and had an awesome night of bar hopping in Breck and random Obama chants.

I LOVE BRECKENRIDGE. I want to move there. It's definitely the coolest ski town I've been to. It looks kind of like downtown Rochester except surrounded by mountains and wilderness. I'm definitely going to be inquiring on some jobs in that area.

The next morning I woke up early, worked out, then Kate and I headed over to Keystone to meet up with Rae and company. Similar to the weekend before, the lift line (notice "line" is not plural) was horrendous. I felt like I was waiting to go on the Raptor at Cedar Point for its opening weekend. However, that eventually calmed down, we ditched Rae and had about 3 twenty minute long ski runs on excellent snow.

We decided not to drop any money that night on a hotel room since it would actually be cheaper to drive to Denver, sleep in our own beds and then drive back up.

Alright, well class is about to start but I will update later on Monday (yesterday). It deserves a post for itself.