blog? i have a blog??

No, I hadn't forgotten, and no, I wasn't too busy to update it — just too lazy. I haven't done any racing since last time I posted, but that will change soon. On Thursday the whole U.S. team leaves for the World Cup Finals, on Monte Zoncolan, Arta Terme, northeast Italy. We will race two super G's, a GS, and a slalom on a hill most of us have never been to before. The rumor is that conditions there are decent, thanks to snowmaking and a relatively high altitude. Many other European ski areas are already closed for the season or have too little snow to host a race, thanks to spring-like conditions all winter long. We were scheduled to be racing in Abtenau, Austria right now, but those races fell victim to the balmy weather and were canceled a couple weeks ago.

In other news, I spent five days at the end of February driving around Arizona with Jared in a ridiculous car — a silver Chrysler Sebring convertible, the kind of car you would buy if you were going through a mid-life crisis but were too conservative to consider a Miata. And it wasn't even that warm, so once we left Phoenix the top was up most of the time. We did, however, have a great time in various Northern Arizona locales, such as Jerome, Flagstaff, the Hopi Rez, Ganado, and the Hubble Trading Post.

In Keams Canyon, we met up with a Hopi potter named Karen Charley and spent the better part of an afternoon talking to her and learning about her pottery. Then we took Karen and her granddaughter out for dinner at the Hopi Cultural Center on Third Mesa, where Jared and I stayed for the night. She also set up a meeting with the superintendent of her school district whose board she serves on in Jeddito the next day, and Jared (a teacher) had a good time talking with him about their situation.

On our first day we had hit up Arcosanti, a crazy concrete desert experiment in "arcology" (architecture + ecology). But we met so many cool people there that we decided to go back and stay there for our final night. We made some friends, learned their bronze casting, and even played music with some of the workshop kids there. I may end up going back to do a workshop there myself some day.

Jared took some good photos, and he has posted them online here.