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The one thing I can say for sure about our ski group was that we aren’t the people who are first in the lift lines at 8:20 AM when the first lift takes off for the top of the mountain. This could in large part be due to our general understanding that the main point of a ski trip with 18 people you sorta know through various social networking circles centering around Sarah and me is to drink lots of alcohol, stay up late, and play silly games. On the first night I had cooked meatballs and spaghetti but hadn't seen Robert at all. I was placing a heavy bet against his arrival at all.

He had actually decided to save a few moments on leaving to not print the instructions from Sarah and assumed that we were staying on the mountain. So he was a little confused when he arrived at the mountain at 11:00PM after having stopped at the New Hampshire State Liquor store to purchase Goldshlager and Jaeggermeister. Kate and Matt had been far more upper class by purchasing a case of wine with labels containing pictures of birds on them to add to their bird wine label collection. Most of the rest of us just had our own plain beer, wine, and vodka.

I had been preparing Sarah’s workmates for the arrival of the Acadian wonder since two of them, Amanda and Lena, were both of Canadian heritage and with three francophones in one room I was hoping to hear an argument in French about the right for Quebecois to secede or how the Acadians deserve all of Canada. But Robert was detained slopeside for half an hour with only his wits and a white pages phone book to find the number for the address we were staying at. A few calls later from house to house and he was able to arrive about when I went to bed on Friday night.

Toby, another of Sarah's workmates, had bought a pair of snow shoes but had never snow shoed before. Toby also thought that it was good to have a name most people didn’t have but that unfortunately it was hard for her to walk in dog parks because so many people have the name Toby. Robert once walked a dog with a human name like John and had been heavily chastised by a fellow dog owner and lover for having a dog that was named after a person instead of a good dog name like Manju or Pokey. Robert also was the only other member of our ski trip who owns a pair of snow shoes. He had bought them while in his six month relationship with Andrea, the woman activist who thought he wasn’t active enough. He had fought the purchase since he figured it was very possible that he wasn't going to like snow shoes and it was just a bad investment in a relationship. Robert didn't bring the snow shoes.

So after a night of heavy drinking and wearing of hats and wigs, including a blond wig that I wore while stuffing my shirt with whatever I could find to give the illusion of breasts I went to sleep with the false hope that I could awaken to arrive just in time for the first lift to leave with my rental skis and to test the new $130 pair of goggles that I had been skillfully sold by the goggle enthusiast at the checkout line at Ski Market. They were quite phenomenal and I encourage anyone who uses crappy goggles to try the high end ones.

So the next morning Matt was going to drive over to the resort with me. I crawled out of bed around 9:30 and Matt had been preparing to leave for the prior three hours. So just as I had grabbed my coffee it became clear that I would need to sprint up the stairs and dress quickly for the mountain in order to get a ride to the slopes. Matt and I made it up and down for half the day in the morning and I met with Roberto, the mad Acadian, on the slopes after having lost Matt when I went down a different trail from him in the afternoon.

Robert gave me a full report of his adventures the night before and relayed the most interesting story of the day for single folks, actually folks riding in the singles line to reduce the time waiting, who overhear conversations while on the lift. He had been on a quad where the other three guys were chatting about their après ski the day before at Stratton, the next mountain north, where they have a small wood paneled room used as a strip club. Robert also reported his willingness to make good on the darts debt from a month ago to make me breakfast.

The skiing eventually got my legs cramped and tired so I wasn't too sad to leave the icy mountain when the lifts closed to return to the home base where people were cooking a feast for forty people. Among the heroes of the feast chefs was Matt B., who selflessly sat at home for the entire day on Saturday basting a succulent brisket instead of skiing. The dinner included the brisket, salad, chili, vegetarian lasagne, 4 cheese mac and cheese from Martha Stewart's own jailhouse recipe, lots of bread, and an assortment of deserts. The dinner went off without a hitch and afterwards Dick and I did all of the dishes but Dick did the main work because he had claimed the sink area.

The only odd hitch with dinner was when Robert asked me to pass him the brownie dessert and I tried to pass it to him. He then took a brownie as though I was serving it to him. I tried to explain that passing and serving were different things. Just before we got into fisticuffs over the right for an independent Acadian state to be as constitutionally necessary as the Palestinians right to their own state he agreed to disarm and pass the brownies to other people. He did later find a slingshot that he shot at Sarah without any provocation. It is likely that it had something to do with the Syrians pulling out of Lebanon, but you can never fully understand what the Acadians are thinking because they think in French.

So we stayed-up late again playing games and discussing with certain people whether you receive similar general skepticism from people about your character if you are an atheist or a woman who has decided not to have children. I also explained that the whole idea of converting to Judaism to make a Jewish mother happy is a silly modern thing since Jews never really believed in conversion until very modern times. Jews considered themselves a race as much as a religion. That was the whole point of the god liking them more than other people and being the chosen people. You weren’t supposed to become a chosen person by praying to the Jews god. That was what the Christians created and it was a very popular thing so there are now a lot more Christians than Jews. The Jews big innovation was that you could worship somewhere other than the one temple in Israel that held the ark of the covenant, which according to George Lucas, is somewhere in storage near Nebraska. We also played the movie relationship game while other people played scrabble.

So the next morning we were once again unable to awaken in time for the first lift. It was at this time that I had the revelation that I would never be able to wake-up early like real skiers do unless prompted by force. We probably did awaken fairly early but Robert’s breakfast dart debt payback probably added about an hour.

We did meet folks on the slopes. Kate and Matt had figured out how to cover most of their skin with clothing. When Kate had bundled-up at Bullwinkle's grill she looked like she was the invisible woman, such that if you removed her clothing and sunglasses that covered her whole body you would find a completely transparent person. Matt prepared to rob a bank before skiing with a very ghetto ski mask. I just looked like a bug with my new $130 goggles.

In all we had a very fun trip to Sugarloaf. On the way out Sarah was supposed to pick me up but the over wouldn’t turn off. Since she was my ride and the person most connected to the security deposit she hadn't picked me up on time. Instead she was calling the fire department and the owners trying to co-ordinate a 3-way call with the owner to get the right set of activities down for leaving. But after she picked me up other fellow ski folks had solved the problem with the stove. So we packed the car up with all of the things people had forgotten, like Kate's Rio charger and Robert’s Jaeggermeister and headed back on the long car ride back to Boston.