I’ve taken to calling the 61-year-old Modern Dad “Old Dad” because of his near constant remarks on our trip about being too old to ski the way he used to. He just can’t ski as fast, and he just can’t ski as long without stopping because he’s not as young anymore.

I’m here to tell you Old Dad is a walking contradiction.

We found ourselves riding Vail’s Eagle Bahn Gondola up the mountain one afternoon. Gondolas are fantastic breaks from ski lifts because you ride in fully enclosed cars and they’re typically long enough rides that you can take off your gloves and goggles and rest.

On this particular ride, we were joined in the car by four other people, three of them appearing to be younger than I. Those folks were commenting about a guy below who crashed on the slopes (because that’s what you do when you’re on a lift) and about various injuries that could be had.

“Just pour some ‘Tussin on it,” Old Dad interjects.

The younguns stare at him blankly, clearly having no idea what he’s referring to. Meanwhile, I start staring out the window, knowing good and well where this is going.

“You know, like Chris Rock?”

More blank stares.

Old Dad proceeds to act out Chris Rock’s Robitussin bit from “Bigger and Blacker” show. He does it with a decent Chris Rock voice. It’s, of course, not the first time he’s recited this. The man is a licensed MD, so you know he’s done the routine for dozens of fellow doctors and nurses, and I’m willing to bet even a patient or two has been subject to it. We occasionally get the “Big Piece of Chicken” bit at dinner, something I even find myself reciting from time to time.

I swear to you, Old Dad skied a little bit faster after we got off that gondola. Meanwhile, I’m willing to bet those younguns shared with their friends over a beer the story of the old white dude reciting Chris Rock.

Warning: might be NSFW, depending on how uptight your workplace is about swearing.

I’ve had two good sleeps since returning home Saturday at 3 a.m., so I’m feeling much more like a human again. I promised photos, and I’m here to actually deliver.

I first skied as a 3-year-old, and I’ve never looked back. I try to ski once a year, though work has gotten in the way of that in recent years. It’s one of my few complete releases in this world … one of the few times I’m able to completely let go of the stresses of everyday life and just be in the moment. It’s me, the snow and slopes and the sky around us.

My parents and I laid our heads in a condo in Frisco, Colorado, and my Dad and I spent two days skiing at Vail (our favorite) and two days at Breckenridge (my Mom doesn’t ski and was content to read in the condo or get out and walk around town). I’ve visited these places so many times in my life that it’s like coming home. At Vail especially, I know where the crowds are going to be at a certain time, I know where the softest snow will be in the morning and I know exactly what spot on each run can give me some air, if I’m in the mood to fly.

I’ve gotten faster on my skis in the past couple of years while my Dad claims to be slowing down as he reaches retirement age. We meet somewhere in the middle. We chat on the lifts and at lunch about sports, past vacations, retirement funds, trivia and philosophies on life.

We’ve put up with a lot of early and late season crummy snow conditions and spring break crowds. This was our first time skiing together in January, and though Colorado and all of the Mountain West needs snow badly, there was just enough snow to combine with the lack of crowds and gorgeous weather for it to be damn near perfect.

**shout out to the Camera+ iPhone app (which is not the same as Camera Plus). Camera+ helped make these photos appear pretty dang close to the real view, which is really hard to do in sunny, snowy, high-altitude shots.

So while I was bitching about my day last Friday, what I wasn’t telling you was that I was also distracted by the fact that I was leaving for a week on the ski slopes about 36 hours later. It’s tough for me to get enough days off in a row during the ski season to squeeze in a trip without royally upsetting my employer, but I worked out four days in the Colorado Rockies.

Y’all, it was amazing. Except for two things.

I’ve been sitting here in the B concourse at Denver International Airport for nine hours. NINE. Four and a half of those hours were by unfortunate design since I had to be out of the condo by 11 a.m. but my deal-of-a-straight-through-flight didn’t leave until 5 p.m. (with a two-hour drive in between).

The other five hours have been an unexplained delay. There’s no weather issues here. The plane I was supposed to leave the airport on arrived on time, but for some reason got whisked away for another flight. The plane I’m now scheduled to leave the airport on is halfway between Denver and Louisville, Ky., after leaving four hours late. After changing three times, the departure time is now sitting at 9:45ish MST, which puts me arriving in Knoxville somewhere around 2:30 EST in the morning — assuming we depart at all.

Oh, and I have to work tomorrow afternoon. Yeah, whoops.

I’d had about 15 years of good flying luck until some wacky delays on our honeymoon in June. Every trip since has been screwy. I thought I’d nip it in the bud this time by going the straight-through flight route, but no such luck.

Aside from being panicked about getting to work on time tomorrow, I royally miss my husband. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t have gone skiing without him. There was no chance of us being off work at the same time for six days in a row. I went with my parents because I love going skiing with them, and because they pay for a place for me to lay my head, which makes it affordable for me to go. I loved every minute I spent with them, and I loved every minute on the slopes. I also felt terrible about leaving him behind and have missed him like crazy every single day.

I usually love sitting in airports, watching the world go by. It’s as if time stands still while you’re sitting there and people are rushing to and from their gates, with overlapping PA announcements competing for their attention. But as the airport has gradually emptied and the hours tick off the clock, my heart just hurts more and more to be at home wrapped up in the arms of the Modern Love Machine. I don’t know if distance makes the heart grow fonder, but it certainly makes you more heartsick.

My parents, who were bound for Memphis by way of Little Rock, made it home four hours ago. In the mean time, I’ve done almost all of my schoolwork for the week, nearly cleaned out my blogreader, ate twice, edited some photos (I’ll share those in a separate post), listened to a podcast and blogged this post.

I just want to be home with my hubby.

I’d settle for a pillow and a teddy bear for the next two hours.

You know those days where you wake up and you just feel off? You’re tired despite having gotten enough sleep. You spill your coffee. You look in your closet and see nothing you want to wear. You struggle to adequately communicate with someone you’re trying to do business with. You sit down to do work but the thoughts just don’t flow. You drop your phone in some sort of liquid. You make coffee in hopes of combating the aforementioned tiredness and lack of flowy thoughts, only to spill it again. You get thrown under the bus in an e-mail by a colleague who’s copied in every one of your superiors. You’re late to every function you attend.

That was my Friday.

After all of that, I had a date to play bunco at an autism charity event with some girlfriends. They had gone to last year’s event, got drunk and had a grand ole time. I like alcohol. I’ve long wanted to play this female-bonding game called bunco. And Friday night is generally the one night of the week I don’t have to work. I was game.

I was dealing with the aftereffects of the thrown-under-the-bus e-mail the whole drive to the event and while others were mingling before bunco got going. I wanted to shut myself in the bathroom and cry, but I sucked it up, went for the red wine instead of the white (red does me in a little faster than white) and blew my entire week’s effort of eating well/losing weight on brownies and spoonfuls of pimento cheese slathered on thick, crusty bread.

I’d never played bunco, but as it turns out it’s a very brainless game. (I told a male colleague earlier in the day that I was going to be playing bunco, and his observation was, ‘Only women play that game, right?’ I hope brainless and women-only aren’t related in some way). You role three dice, hoping for a particular number to turn up or three of a kind. That’s pretty much it.

I won four out of the first six games. Beginner’s luck! Finally, something was going well for the day.

And then I lost. And lost. And lost. I lost an entire round of six games. Then I lost five more. I warned every new partner I encountered that I was bringing the bad luck. ‘No worries,’ they’d say. ‘I’ve been doing really well.’ And then we would proceed to lose. Badly.

Upon seeing my scorecard marked with Ls, the ladies in my final game informed me that there would be a prize for the biggest loser. I was a shoe-in! Until I won that game. Two other ladies and I tied for the most losses at 13 each. We had a roll off to see who would take home the prize. Lowest total was the biggest loser and, therefore, prize winner.

I rolled something like two 6s and a 5.

I could not even excel at being a loser yesterday.

Still, I had a good time despite the Cleveland Cavs-worthy losing streak. I tweeted my woes after I got home (to a house where the Modern Love Machine was already in bed). An old twitter friend told me it took a special skill to lose at bunco and that she loved me and thought I was brilliant. I don’t know what got into her, unless it was a lot of alcohol.

The prize was some sort of ugly vase, so I suppose it’s better to be loved and smart than to be lucky.

So I forgot to mention this, but the cops actually caught the guy who broke into the Modern Love Machine’s car. Color me shocked when we found out. The MLM and our neighbor were summoned to appear in court this morning to play the role witness while I, being off work until later in the day, decided to tag along as local court is one of my, let’s say, hobbies.

An aside: though local courts do not compare at all to Law and Order, they make up for it with the sheer ridiculousness of the people who are being processed there on a daily basis. You won’t get a lot of drama between lawyers, but you WILL get to observe a lot of dumb folks. When paired with an already confusing system, those folks can provide hours of free entertainment.

We showed up at court at 9 a.m., and within two and a half hours, the perp had decided he was going to plead guilty as part of a plea agreement, with the most important condition being he was going to owe the neighbors and us restitution for the broken vehicle windows (and, as the MLM made sure, for the MLM’s sunglasses that were purchased in Ireland). So either we’re going to get paid some cash money or at the very least the perp will be off the street and unavailable to break into our cars for a couple of years.

While we were waiting for the perp’s name to come up on the docket, I finally heard the story of how he got caught, which is a perfectly blogmade story. The perp called the cops to report that his car had been vandalized. When the cops entered the perp’s license plate number into the system, it came up as a match to what our neighbor had reported to the cops the morning he busted our windows. The car description matched too, and our neighbor was able to select the perp out of a lineup. Lock, stock and barrel.

More specifically, the perp had been sleeping with a friend’s girlfriend. That friend found out, got angry and — wait for it — busted the windows on the perp’s own vehicle, which was the crime the perp was reporting when the cops connected him to the crime against our vehicles.

Karma can be such a bitch.

For the past few days the temperature here in East Tennessee has gotten no higher than about 43 degrees, which is heaven to me. I’ve lived in the South my entire life, only to find myself less and less tolerant of the summer heat and mild winters with every passing year. Though we get occasional snows, it’s never enough and it never sticks long enough. I know my Chicago friends will probably laugh and tell me living in the Midwest would cure me, but I’m really not so sure. I love the way the sky looks when it’s cold, and I love how it feels to breathe the cold air in.

Besides, I know the secret, and the secret is: long underwear (or long johns, as my family has always called them).

Everyone knows to layer up on top — piling sweater over long-sleeved shirt over t-shirt — but does no one layer up on the bottom? I prefer Patagonia’s Capilene 1, so thin and silky that I can and do wear them under my jeggings.

There’s also my ginormous poofy black down coat, which makes me look like a black Michelin Man. (Have you ever wondered why the Michelin Man wasn’t black anyway? I mean he’s promoting tires, which are black. Is the company racist or something?) That coat was a lifesaver during my extended stay in New York a few winters back, and to hell with anyone who wants to mock me for how I look in it. They won’t mock me for long when their lips freeze shut.

To be honest, I’m really waiting for this sweater to come back in fashion in a non-ironic, non-tacky sweater party kind of way. It’s from Gap’s winter line, circa 1993 or 1994.

Still hangs in my closet. Because it is awesome.

You guys, resolutions — they work better than I was giving them credit for these past few years. Or at least they’ve worked really well for me for the first 12 days of the year. I have done so many things in the framework of my 2012 goals already this month, which in turns means I’ve been keeping the spirit of doing things. I feel like I’ve already been more productive than I was in all of 2011, and I’ve even managed to relax a bit.

So I said I didn’t have a specific health goal for the year, but in the course of a week I’ve already made myself out to be a liar. I have a goal and a plan, thanks to some timely unintentional intervention by a Christmas gift, my friends and the Modern Love Machine.

I had requested a copy of this gorgeous illustrated version of Michael Pollan’s Food Rules for Christmas because I love pretty coffee table books. Instead I received the paperback copy — not as ideal for display but much more conducive to leaving on your night stand for bedtime reading. It took me about three days last week to blow through all of the book’s bite-sized food proverbs, and that was enough to inspire me. I wanted to eat better again.

Saturday night I had a little Girls Night Out with my galpals, and they mentioned they were planning a 12-week Biggest Losers Contest among our friends and was I interested? Um, considering how uncomfortably snug all my pants have gotten, you betcha. We all splurged on many glasses of wine and some delicious pasta that night for our last hurrah and stepped on our scales in the privacy of our own homes on Sunday morning to mark the first weigh in.

our bathroom floor. isn’t it pretty?

Y’all. It was bad. It was a very bad weigh in. I was so far away from the goal I achieved through Weight Watchers a few years back and so close to my original starting point. I wanted to cry for all the hard work I’ve managed to undo. That was my next prod. I was going to get back into tracking Weight Watchers points, no matter how much a pain in the ass it can be, and make exercise more of a priority.

When I told the MLM of the Biggest Losers competition (there was a $20 buy in to create the winners’ pot of cash), my dear husband asked me what my plan was. ‘Oh, you know, be diligent in tracking my Weight Watchers points and workout more.’ His response: ‘That’s not a plan. There are no losers in this household. Now, what’s your plan?’

I love the MLM so much, despite the fact that my reaction to him at that time was quite the opposite.

After dwelling on a more concrete plan during a long, wet run on Sunday afternoon, I came up with a plan of earning a particular number of Weight Watchers activity points (ie, bonus points for workouts) each week, which has the extra effect of forcing me to login to my WW app more frequently therefore reminding me to track my food as well.

A little piece of me hates how obsessive Weight Watchers can make me when it comes to tracking points, but at the same time I’ve already managed to get rid of about two pounds of bloat and feel so much better already. Plus, I know the more of a routine it becomes the less obsessive it gets. After a few weeks your body adjusts and has a better sense of how much food it really needs. And it’s not like I can’t splurge every so often on decadent things like wine and cookies.

Now I need y’all to hold me accountable. I’d like to lose about 15 pounds from my Sunday weigh in. Minus the two pounds of bloat already gone, I’ve got about 13 to go. Seven or eight of those pounds will be tough.

Blogging about it helped me three years ago, so I’m going to subject y’all to it again. Because there are no losers on this blog.

Man, posting resolution lists seems like The Thing to do this week. I almost feel silly posting one of my own, but at the same time the public accountability and proof of my goals has always been helpful. I haven’t really made resolutions for a couple of years, opting instead for single words that helped me frame my attitude for the year. But since my word phrase is ‘do things’ this year, I wanted to create a list of goals that I will work toward as I do things. My North Stars for the year, if you will. I probably won’t accomplish all or possibly any of these things this year, but I plan to make progress in each area.

Image:Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Organization. I’m a pretty well organized person to begin with. I can find just about anything that is in our house within a reasonable time frame. I regularly pare down and purge. But there are three projects that have been looming for some time: organize and purge CD collection, organize, display and properly store old photos and organize my recipe collection.

Skills. In about a week I return to (online) school to start studying the ins and outs of web technology. I’ve taught myself HTML and have a pretty good sense for CSS now. I just need to start putting it to work more. I’ve got the domains, I just need to do it. While I’m at it, the MG could stand for a new look. I think it’s been a couple of years.

Health. Eating well and being active are and always will be an ongoing project. I don’t have a target in mind other than feeling good, but that will require a better effort at the aforementioned eating well and being active. Also, I need to find myself a primary care doctor. I haven’t had one in years. They’re important.

Money. I’ve always been obnoxiously good at managing money. The only debt we really have is the new car because the need for it came sooner than expected. We financed about half the cost, and I’m paying about three times the required payment each month. Still, we spend frivolously from time to time, so my goal is to spend money for quality and not quantity and to save a bit more aggressively for future home and life projects. And to get that car paid off as quickly as possible.

Connections. This one is hard. I am a natural and dedicated introvert. My worklife only encourages this by giving me the kind of schedule where I work while everyone else is off and vice versa. With a little bit of effort I can appreciate my time with my family and friends more. I can write more notes, make more phone calls and make the extra effort to visit with someone.

Joy. I’m working on developing my life list, which will be full of things that fill me with joy. But it’s not just for reading, it’s a list for living. I want to start crossing some things off of it. Travel is a big part of it, but travel is already a priority in my life, so that’s a plus. Writing is also a focus, and I think if I don’t start this year on that novel that’s been percolating in my head for five or six years, the Modern Love Machine might kick my ass. I’m ok with that.

As everyone’s been posting their year-end recaps and reflections, I’ve tried to wrap my brain around 2011. But even with some prompting questions from my friend Kristin, I really could not sum up this year in any sort of way. I realize after much consideration, it’s because I cannot separate this year from the few years that preceded it.

The past five years have been a period of significant life changes. In that stretch and in chronological order I’ve: bought a house, transferred jobs, moved to a different city, sold a house, had a long-term relationship end, shuffled friends, met my now husband, bought another house, had someone close to me die, had someone close to me give birth and gotten married. All of these things have significantly affected my life over the past five years.

I grew up in a comfortable suburban bubble in which change meant getting new teachers at the start of every school year or at worst a friend moving away. The few years before this period of major change were also relatively static, albeit sort of boring. So as life has hit me like a ton of bricks over and over for the past few years, I didn’t know how to deal with it. I’ve spent these past few years adjusting and reacting while learning to deal with the emotion of it all, for better or for worse. My internal GPS has been stuck saying ‘recalculating’ every couple minutes for five years, it seems.

I guess what I’m feeling for the end of 2011 and beginning of 2012 is a shift in my dynamic. Barring any surprises from the universe, I sense I’m entering a more static stretch of life. There won’t be any relationship changes, we aren’t planning on moving any time soon, we won’t consider any job changes for about two years, we don’t want kids at the moment (or possibly ever). Though there’s still a chance of death or birth of loved ones, the structure to my life should remain mostly the same for a bit.

The difference between what lies ahead and my last relatively quiet period, is I know better than to just sit on my ass to catch my breath and relish the fact that there are fewer curveballs coming my way. Now I’m ready to start working on some more subtle changes — things that are more about the small, gradual steps that lead to bigger things rather than the bigger things themselves. And while the last few years were about learning how to deal with changes, I sense the next few will be lesson after lesson in patience, endurance and fortitude.

Last year, my word of the year was balance. I think I achieved that in unexpected ways this year, and I feel that my life is, in fact, a little more in balance thanks to my ability to better handle change. This year, my word, errr, phrase is ‘do things.’ For the first time in a few years, I’m going to craft a couple of resolutions, though they may not so much be things that have to get done in 2012 as much as things that I must work toward in 2012.

In the mean time, here’s to a present of doing things, a future of big accomplishments and days of auld lang syne. Happy new year!

I successfully completed my pre-Christmas staycation this afternoon. I’ve seen two movies since I last posted, got a pedicure and baked some Christmas treats. Doggie Christmas treats, that is. You can find the super-simple recipe here (shout out to Noodles for sharing).

those are Christmas turtles there at the bottom

I just got off work and have nothing work-related planned for the next 102 hours. We won’t be heading to Memphis. Instead, I’ll be spending my first Christmas with the Modern Love Machine’s family in Nashville. I have absolutely no idea what to expect.

Until I post again, may you all have a merry Christmas or holiday of your choice and a nice extra day off work, if you get one.