Chairlifts can be pretty scary. I mean, at first glance it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to shuffle yourself dragging a wooden board more than half your height behind you and allowing yourself to get knocked behind the knees by a chair. But yeah, for a novice, chairlifts can be quite scary.

So there we were, in line for the two-person chairlift, on our way up to the beginner run at Bromont in late December. Sandy and I were supposed to get on the same chairlift, and even though she was on skiis and I was on a snowboard at the time it seemed to be a non-issue. When it came our turn to get on, we had been talking so we were just a few seconds late to make our way to the spot.The lift attendant stopped us. "Wait," she said, and held me back in the line and guided Sandy towards the moving chairs.
"But we wanted to go up together" I told the attendant. But too late...the chair whooshed by, without picking up its occupants. the attendant motioned for me stay back. To this day, I'm still not sure why.

"OK, so do I stand there?" asked Sandy, pointing to where the chair had just passed, seconds earlier.

"No, wait", said the attendant firmly and held on to her arm. Sandy turned to me and looked at me quizzically. I just shrugged.

Just then another chair came sailing towards them. "OK!" exclaimed the girl and she sort of shoved Sandy towards where she should have stood. Sandy turned and saw the chair barreling towards her inches away and instinctively ducked. But to no avail. Next thing I knew, she was on the ground, knocked flat by the empty chair. The attendant stopped the lift and bent over her as Sandy grimaced in pain. "I can't get up." she told her.

"English or French?" the attendant asked Sandy, as she remained sprawled on the ground.

Anyway, we eventually made it onto the lift together and started sailing our way up. Feeling the cold wind on my face and feeling a bit nervous because it was only me second time snowboarding I slowly began to feel a little unsafe. I looked down the ground, a good 50 feet below and realized that there was no safety bar. "This is SO ghetto!" I told Sandy, and shrank back a bit so my centre gravity was further from the edge of the seat. We spent the most of the trip up holding tightly onto the sides, looking straight ahead and making comments about how dangerous the whole ordeal had been so far.

As we neared the top I suddenly felt very foolish. People were lifting the bars up over the chairs just before getting off. I slowly turned my head and looked up...sure enough, there it was, a piece of string dangling above our heads to help us pull the safety bar down and maintain a certain standard of safety. But before I could even tell Sandy, she gestured at the skiiers getting off several chairs in front of us. "Ange, look how fast they're going! How are we going to get off?"

A deep sense of dread settled over me as I watched the skiers dissapearing at the top of the hill as though they simply stepped off a cliff. The chairlift must have been depositing them at the top of a little hill at breakneck speed. I closed my eyes and pictured the headlines. Ethnic girls meet tragic demise by chairlift . I could barely get down the bunny hill. How was I supposed to do this?

"Omigosh" Sandy muttered. "I'm scared." We straightened our skiis and snowboards and prepared to meet the end with calamity and dignity. Only it didn't happen that way. I was suddenly seized with panic. "Sandy, we're stuck!!" I shrieked. My snowboard had gotten tangled with her skiis and in my nervous frenzy, I couldn't untangle it.

Somehow, we got off the chairlift, screaming at the top of our lungs as we tumbled out and rolled down the slope. Somehow, the chairlift missed our heads as it continued on its merry way back down to the bottom. Somehow, still screaming for dear life, I half-crawled, half dragged myself of the way and collapsed next to the chairlift operator's booth as the next group of skiers coming off the lift narrowly avoided running me over and turning my imaginary headline into reality.

Despite that harrowing experience and the fact that the chairlift operator at the top of the hill couldn't look me in the eye every time I went up, the rest of day turned quite fun. Half the time I managed to outspeed almost all of our group although it wasn't unusual to find me further down on the run sprawled face-down spread-eagle in the middle of the run minutes later. All in all, and interesting. I might even go tomorrow if it's not too cold. Ah, the stories I'll tell.

So I've finally caved into peer pressure and started my own blog. Well alright, I wasn't actually pressured into it. It was more out of indignation when Lat made fun of me at dinner for watching an average of one hour of TV a day and I freely admitted that I have to watch Smallville and Alias each week.
"You're ADDICTED!!" he crowed. After telling me the number of hours I waste in a year being a slave to that evil medium which is television, along a whole bunch of other things that I wasn't listening to, he said, "Go start a blog or something."

So I did. The truth is though, and I must confess, I miss writing. English was one of my favorite courses at CEGEP. The last class I took which required some form of essay writing was "Communications in Engineering" at McGill, a course in which we were taught to write memos and use a dictionary properly. It confirmed to me that every other faculty at the university thinks that engineers are completely incapable of penning a coherent statement. But I digress. This will be my creative outlet. And maybe this will prove to you that the working world IS quite exciting. You should have seen the state of panic at my office when we ran out of creamers for the coffee yesterday.

Well, stay tuned peeps. In addition to my random musings about the meaning of life, why pi is an infinite number and the reason that bread always falls with the buttered down, I will divulge juicy gossip about all my friends. JUST KIDDING!!