Speed Dating and Snowboarding, what a combo...

Fri. Feb 10 - The Olympics start tonight. I'm going to try and watch snowboarding as much as I can. Our team is supposedly gonna beat out everyone. Today was another typical day at work, but I got some free time to work on my school reports. It was surprisingly slow for a Friday all day, but more than 80% of the snowboards for the weekend were being used for our trip and a Create-A-Trip for a boy scout troop. We got enough people to sign up for our Calabria Ski Trip for next weekend so I think I'm gonna go ahead and go on that. Their trying to find a good price for me if I can get my room paid for. The Olympics road trip doesn't look too promising. No one wants to sit in a car for 12 hours. It's alright, just kind of disappointing. I should be getting my visa/No-Fee passport in the mail soon. I got a package today from Jeff. He shipped my blanket over to me. It was sweet and just in time for Valentine's Day. I didn't do much work on the snowboards today other than load up the vans for this weekend. I'm going again tomorrow of course and a bunch of our employees are coming along to for the day. It's fun to have people to hang out with and try stupid jumps along the way while falling on your butt. The customers have been really fun lately and a few of our regulars are going with us tomorrow. I left work a little early to meet up with James so I could get a bunch of questions answered for my site evaluations for school. I couldnt find any of the answers for it, so I sat with him in his office for about 2 hours getting everything answered. Luckily no more site evaluations, just weekly reports, a few case studies, my project, and some other small things. It's been a lot of work keeping up with those and they each take about 4-5 hours to type. Dr. Cole wrote me back and told me that they didn't need to be so long. As you can see from these Blogs, I tend to write a lot. Oops. I got back to work and finished up some stuff. I went ahead and left work at 5:30pm to head over to Jox Sports Bar to set up for our first experiment of "Speed Dating." We had 20 people sign up and we wanted to decorate a part of the bar to look nice for the event tonight. They asked me to help them set up to get a girl's touch. They went all out. They bought an arch with flowers, some lattice for along the walls, white table cloths, roses, vases, candles, and some other romantic stuff. It was starting at 9pm, so we definitely got there too early to set up. Oh well, it was alright, I had nothing else better to do. So 9pm finally arrived and we were 5 people short from what had originally signed up. I bet you can guess what happened next.... Yes, they begged me to play. I had already told Jeff about it, so I went along with it finally after a lot of convincing. They finally rounded up 9 guys and 8 girls. Yes, so I had to talk to 9 guys for 5 minutes each. It was so cheesy, yet hilarious. I got maybe 4 good questions throughout the whole night. No wonder some of these guys can't find a date. Well that and theres only like 10 good looking girls that live at Sigonella. We got free drinks all night and it turned out being a good time. Here's the part that really convinced me to participate (well other than my bosses begging me to do it). The winners got a 100 euro dinner out in Catania and were going to be choufered (can't spell) in a brand new 2006 Jaguar all night (Dad and Bill would be so proud of me!). I knew one of the guys so we put our names in together (yes he has a girlfriend and he knew about Jeff) at the end to win. We didn't win of course. I watched some of the opening ceremony tonight on the tvs there. The night finally ended and I got home around 12:30. I needed some sleep for snowboarding in the morning.

Sat. Feb 11 - Snowboarding again today! 4 times in a week ain't bad, huh? We had tons of people going today and two extra vans than usual with the Boy Scouts. Our van was absolutely full, but we made it up there in good time. You can tell the snow is starting to melt and we're probably not going to get many more good weekends to get up there. I wish it would have a good snow again. We haven't had to use our snow chains since Rosario and I had to that first week I was here. The lava is starting to get exposed on the path and the snow thats there has turned into ice. It's kinda hard to get traction on a few of the spots since it's so icey. I'm gonna take some time this week and sharpen my heel-edge on my board that I've been using. It's still fun though and for 12 euro you can't beat a day on Etna. I've heard some good things about the other side of the mountain's ski lodge and lift so I wanna get over there before the snow disappears completely. Today was really fun though hanging out with a bunch of the MWR staff. I'm really starting to get the feel for transitions. I only landed on my tailbone hard once today. I'm getting better for sure. I hope the ships that come in this week decide to plan some trips all week. If they do, I am going to have to go on each of them because Kim's last day is Tuesday. They'll have to find drivers and then I'll be the escort who goes on the mountain to be able to fix peoples stuff and in case of any emergencies. It was awesome. The weather was cold today and cloudy, but I think I've just been spoiled from this Wednesday up there. After we got back, I went and got dressed while they were unloading the vans so I could go with Kim and her husband over to Marinei. Thats the complex they all live in that got flooded in December. Leslie and her husband Jake were having a BBQ so I just rode with Kim and hung out at her house until they got ready. The BBQ was fun and I got to hang out with everyone from last weekend. I met a bunch of new people too. It was fun and crazy of course. We hung out on their roof, had a campfire, ate some BBQ ribs and steak, and had a good time. I finally went to bed around 6am in their big fluffy guest bed.

Sun. Feb 12 - I woke up around 10am and they brought me home. I fell asleep in my room for another 3 hours or so and had to wake up so I could get to the library and commisary before it all closed. I got to the library, wrote some Hello Emails, and headed to the grocery store to get some water, Dr. Pepper, pasta sauce, and some other goodies. I needed more breakfast stuff since I'm gettin really good with eating breakfast everyday with my vitamins. After getting some dinner and snack stuff I rented a movie called Red Eye. It looks kinda good, its got Rachel McAdams from the Notebook in it. I figured I'd give it a try since I never saw it advertised in the States. By the time I got home and made some dinner, I fell asleep to early to watch a movie. I did watch some Olympics updates though between waking up and falling asleep. I ended up getting a lot of sleep yesterday to help prepare me for the crazy week this week. I'm hoping to see a sub early this week down at Augusta Bay.