skiing at Lake Louise

What is it with me and analgesics? They either act instantly (implying a serious placebo effect) or take ages. Example, you demand? Today. Just now, in fact. I'm not sure why (since I slept 9 hrs Monday night and 10 hrs last night), but when I got to work/school this morning at about 10:30, I developed an increasingly nasty headache behind my eyes. For me headaches usually occur like this when I'm low on sleep. Anyway, in agony, I stumbled to the convenience store on the ground floor of the CS building along a glass corridor from Earth Sciences. They had Advil; good enough. Two tablets washed down with OJ and water, and still the nastiness persisted; bad enough that it prevented me from thinking, even enough to play hearts. Somehow I passed the time opening and closing windows on my desktop until just ten minutes ago (almost a full hour after taking the tablets)... when the pain disappeared. It was instantaneous and actually shocking; any explanation for this, bio people? It was good timing as I was toying with the idea of defying their "two pills per 4 hrs" dosage recommendation, on the basis that I have more body mass than most. Yay for inhibiting the COX-1 enzyme, depite how long it took.

In other news, I went skiing again yesterday. This time we went to Lake Louise, where because it was Tuesday it was pretty empty. As expected many of the runs were very icy due to the windswept nature of this ski hill, but we mostly stayed on the better protected hills. My rentals were, as with a week ago at Sunshine, fantastic. My thighs hurt from supporting all my weight plus g-forces while carving those turns so nicely. I am also improving my mogul-handling techniques, depending how steep the incline is. I had one absolutely spectacular wipe out, described in the following diagram (click).
Apologies for illegible handwriting. Loads of respect if you can decipher all of it.

I was tricked because the first time I went down that run I went over one of these drifts and only the lip part was soft; perhaps it had begun life as a mogul because it was mostly solid. However, this was clearly not the case with all of the drifts. I was only slightly injured because of the way my right wrist was bent due to the ski pole not wanting to plunge into the snow so eagerly (the left one went in at a better angle). It was surprising to find myself unexpectedly near-horizontal while in the air, but it was also rather comical.

At lunch my rental skis (although strangely not the poles) were taken from the rack by someone, understandable since all the rentals were the same. Even more strange was that they didn't leave a pair of skis with the same size-setting on the bindings (there was a pair there but they were too small for my boots). Since we were at a lodge on the other side of the mountain I had to take the lifts back to the main lodge to get replacements (free of charge). Luckily when we went back to check the same rack later that day, whoever it was had realised their error and put them back. The dude at the lodge agreed to return them for me. If they hadn't been returned, I'd have been on the line for roughly $300-400. As I said, they were nice skis.

On a sidenote, it is difficult to get off a ski lift with only ski boots, but I managed it without falling over. I still looked like an idiot: have you ever tried to run in ski boots?

Unlike last time, I did not collide with any wildlife. I did get some nice pictures of mountains I don't know the names of. They're up above somewhere in case you somehow subconsciously screened them out. Now go look and be jealous. There are more reasons to come to Calgary than the nuts economy.