A bit icy but the weather is perfect. I'm at Sunday River in Bethel, Maine. We haven't had natural snow for a couple weeks. They do man-made but it scrapes off by noon if there's a lot of traffic, which there was this weekend. This week is vacation week for all Massachusettes school kids (mine included) so the place is hopping. Which means my kids are ready to call it quits by 1 pm. Fine by me - I'm getting old and I'm way out of shape. I used to prepare a month in advance for these ski vacations but not this year - too much work.

However, I didn't ski today, so I'm not sure what it's like. My oldest daughter has her car here and drove herself and sister and a couple friends to the mountain today. Ah - the freedom of having older kids is awesome. I'm totally done with little kids. Yay!

We have lots of friends all here in the area in various condos and houses, so it's a blast even if we didn't ski. We're going to have 10 adults and 16 kids at my condo in a couple hours - pizza time!

I saw an interesting thread today about the economy. Is the economic crisis real or hyped? I read with horror all the stories about people losing jobs, hocking tools to pay utilities, stuff like that. I feel really lucky, but not in the sense that I was given a break. Rather, I'm lucky that I figured out how to maximize the value I create specifically in a depressed economy. I don't think a lot of people "game" the system the way I do. And yet, I don't seem uniquely lucky because there is a serious crapload of people up at this mountain, spending money like there's absolutely nothing wrong. It costs about $60 a day for a teenager to ski here, plus at least $10 for lunch on the mountain. So for me it's $140 a day just to let my kids go, and closer to $350 when my wife and I go skiing. (We eat and drink better than the kids.) And yet we're not alone, by a long shot. In fact, we have to wait for a table to eat a nice lunch. We have to wait in line when the kids want to demo another set of skis. (Demos cost another $50 a day.) It looks to me like there is a HUGE number of people who have no problem with the economy. So I don't know what to think, really. Looks like normal around here.

Oh well.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)