Pics from our Salt Lake City trip are being posted here daily... It's much too exhausting (and fun!) to write about just yet. And I'm not only talking about the skiing: we're on a 26k dialup!

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We skied from 9am to 3pm today at Brighton, just a few yards from our little cottage. The mountains are so beautiful here, and the slopes amazingly free of other skiers. This translates to zero wait times at the lifts, of course, and so the four of us zip up and down, up and down, until our muscles scream in agony. We have five more days of this, we remind ourselves, and we head home to watch a bit of the SuperBowl.

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After a hectic night of laundry, packing and repacking, we finally got to bed last night around 2am. Just in time to get a couple hours of sleep so we could wake up at 4 o'clock to head for the airport.

Here we are in Salt Lake City now, the four of us: Greg, his brother Jeff, Jeff's girlfriend Jenean, and me. It's so beautiful out here. We're all so exhausted. We're headed to bed in a bit. Lots of skiing to be done tomorrow.

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Larry is a lawyer and former colleague of mine. He joined the firm in the summer of 2000, and co-managed the group with me. Ten months later, he left, and we spent the better part of the next thirteen months interviewing for his replacement before we hired a friend of his.

In the days of his youth, Larry drove a taxi and once came in to work with a few colleagues dressed as the Supremes. It was one of the first things I learned about him that surprised me; the second was that he wrote porn fiction for a magazine called Screw. Of the latter, he seemed particularly proud, and he would mention it with a cheeky grin and a quiet laugh. "You could make good money writing bad porn," he would say. It's not that any of these activities surprised me, really. It was the fact that Larry did them.

Larry turned 50 this past Tuesday. It's strange when someone you look to as a father figure--or even grandfather figure--tells you of his past life. Larry is an older gentleman, an unassuming lawyer-type, very proper with no extra frills or trappings to speak of. So it was very funny to hear him speak of a wild Bangkok in the pre-AIDS era, of drugs and wild parties, and of all the things he used to do.

The guys and I called him up and invited him out last night for a few drinks. It was the same old Larry we had remembered, and we had a good time, eating and drinking and toasting and laughing raucously into the night. At one point in the evening, I turned to Larry and asked him if he had written any stories recently. He laughed. "No, none to speak of. My wife would kill me if she ever found out about that. That's a prior life."

Throughout the evening, I wondered what it would be like to be 50. Suddenly, it seemed so close. Closer than I had ever been, and only getting closer, I reminded myself. Would I be much different from myself now? Would I refer to my 20s and 30s as prior lives? Would I look back to my 40s and not recognize myself? What would mark the milestones of my life?

Soon enough we decided to move on, and as we walked out of the bar, I looked up to the snow falling onto the quiet Manhattan streets. Time only will tell, I said to myself. And I smiled into the night skies as we headed off to the next bar.

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In his chair, I sit waiting for the nerves in my mouth to doze off. I had swallowed a bit of the anesthetic, and the top of my throat had begun to feel the heavy dullness that promised to soon take control over the rest of my mouth. I look warily around. The tiny room is painted in hues of gray and white, and glints of stainless steel catch my eye as I survey the landscape.

Directly in front of me, in sharp contrast to the clinical monotones, a colourful picture hangs. The black frame is about three feet by two feet and houses a photo of a field of grass. A long, undulating meadow of wild and very vibrant green grass peppered violently with purple flowers. Above the meadow, blue skies are filled with summer clouds, and in the distance a house sits dormant, trying its best to look as inviting as it possibly can. Come in, please. Relax, take your shoes off. No stress here. You are in a house in a field of flowers on a beautiful summer day. Not in a dentist office. And certainly not having a root canal. Trust me.

My dentist asked me today if I use the same hair product as he did. "My bathroom smells like it," he said. "And I like it."

We had a good session today, and the root canal that I'm having is not as bad as I had feared. In fact, at times during today's 90-minute procedure, I almost doze off. Greg had warned me before that he wasn't bad looking, and it is true. Easy on the eyes, he is. Of course, I have to go back again next Wednesday for the third part of the procedure.

And as I am leaving his office, he reaches out to me and shakes my hand. "See you next week," he says.

"Thanks, doctor."

He smiles back. "Just call me George."

Is it really healthy to anticipate so much a trip to the dentist?

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The mid-morning chill had yet to dissipate, and gray clouds heavy with snow covered the Vermont skies and the New England landscape for miles beyond. We stood yesterday morning at the top of the mountain wide-eyed in awe and giggling at the perfectly formed snowflakes dancing around us. Ready? Let's go!

We had a few runs down the blue slopes before the weak winter sun emerged and bathed us in amber. Picture-perfect blue skies opened up, and by early afternoon, everyone around us was commenting that yes, this was just about the most perfect ski conditions they had remembered in a long time.

I like to race down the slopes as fast as I can, but I feel it in my body that I am still very much a beginner, and I tear down in kamikaze fashion with the style and grace of an ostrich on rollerskates. I stop every once in a while with the excuse that I am enjoying the scenery--and oh what glorious views to behold!--but the real reason is to placate my tired legs who couldn't care less for the view. Give us a rest, they beg. But I stop only long enough to give them false hope that this is the last run. Just one more, I promise as we head for the lifts.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this skiing thing.

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In the summer of 1991, the summer right after freshman year and my first summer in the U.S., a friend and I signed up as participants in a University study. For $600 each, we were to have our sleep monitored twice on site, were to eat nothing but the meals provided to us, and were to have our blood drawn several times. As starving students, this was a tremendous amount of money, and with the added bonus of a fortnight of free meals, we were overjoyed when we were accepted as guinea pigs for Dr. Frankenstein's lab of Do As You Please With Our Bodies.

At the end of the study, one of the researchers, a middle-aged Taiwanese woman with half-moon glasses began chatting with me. She seemed to have adopted me for the next half hour, and berated me when I admitted that I had not been to a dentist since I left Trinidad a year ago. She immediately wrote the name of her dentist on a piece of paper and made me promise to get a checkup. So I did. My teeth were fine, and as I left the dentist's office, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I hated going to the dentist.

Without the direction of matronly Taiwanese researchers, I went through life unfettered from the threat of dental appointments, and for eleven years I managed to escape the annual trip to the dentist I had so feared growing up. Eleven years can go by so quickly when you're avoiding the unpleasantries of a trip to the dentist, and I soon began to believe that I didn't even need them in my life. I began believing that my teeth were invincible, that I could relegate dentist trips to the realm of make-believe. I believed I didn't ever need them again. Until yesterday.

One new year resolution and a chipped tooth later, I headed for the dentist chair, my heart racing and memories of childhood panic flooding my sensibilities. My dentist was surprised when he heard of my long absence, and he congratulated me on the health of my teeth. "No plaque and no calculus to speak of," he said. "But we may need to do a root canal."

So I came back at 3pm for the dreaded drilling. It wasn't nearly as bad as I remembered, and I left one hour later with a temporary filling and a promise to return next Wednesday to complete the job. My face was numb and I felt as though someone had punched me a dozen times in the jaw, but I was relieved. I had been to the dentist and survived. My fears had been conquered.

Oh, and it doesn't hurt that he's easy on the eyes, my dentist. I can't wait for Wednesday.

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I picked up my new eyeglasses today. "We have them ready; you can come and get them," said the woman on my voicemail. So I did.

They've got this funny shape to them, and are some grayish shade of the titanium alloy that they are. Strange, when I tried them on today at the shop, the frames looked blue. But I was running late, so I grabbed them and made off without fuss. When I tried them on Saturday, they looked fine, but now that I look at them a second time, I'm a bit worried.

"Trust me, they look fine," the saleswoman said on Saturday, dollar signs dancing merrily in her eyes.

When I put them on at the shop today and looked in the mirror, I saw Lisa Loeb. I winced and ran back to the office without a word. I am now worried that they look too gimmicky. Too comical.

Not that comical bothers me. I wear contact lenses every day, and these glasses are meant to supplement them at night so I don't fumble around blindly after I've taken them off. It's just that I paid a lot for them. Comical for the price of the GNP of a small Third World country. Working guy by day, Lisa Loeb by night. That's me.

We all know who's having the last laugh.

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...and a happy 2003!

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