The Book of Sifty

Texas and Spring break 1:30AM

So heres a few things that I found quite funny.. first one told to me by my crew leader on my lift. He's from Texas, which is to Colorado what the Valley is to Wellington. (Sorry valley people but you know what I mean). Texans are always mocking themselves, putting down their state.

So a bit more background, Spring break from College (i.e University) everybody from surrounding states comes skiing. They sort of stagger when each state has their holiday. So anyway all these people from Texas were here one week. My crew leader Jim, a pretty classic guy, his line about Texas week was :-

'Well at least if a Texan falls over getting on or off the chairlift they apologise profusely for being stupid, while somebody from Colorado will blame YOU for their lack of skiing ability'

I operate a quad-chairlift, that has four seatpads on each chair, and obviously sits four people ;) Infact all the lifts on our mountain are 2,3 or 4 person. So anyway rather worryingly the number of people who try to get five on a seat is crazy. One day I'm standing at the controls loading people at the bottom. Five adults slide up to the blue line where they wait for a chair to come around the corner and up behind them. So it takes a couple of seconds to count and recount the number people standing there. I push in the stop button and the chair stops about 1.5m from them. They all turn from looking at the chair and look at me. I say, rather sarcastically, but with a grin on my face, 'Can you guys count?.. you do realise this is a quad chair?'. To which they reply in unison 'Oh sorry we're from Texas'.

Another joke going around during Texas week :-

Q: 'Why is it so hard to get a blow-job in Texas?'
A: 'Cos all the cock suckers are here'

Totally unrelated to 'Texan week', but mocking the fact that 80% of the time a badly trained monkey could do our job:-
Q: 'Why do lifties only get a half hour lunch break?'
A: 'Any longer and they'd have to re-train them..

Tubing hill 1:50AM

Anyway the other day we decided we had to go tubing. We can see the tubing hill from our apartment. Basically its a huge snow covered hill with a big runout, you rent a truck tube and slide down. The tubes have a cover across the bottom and handles. They have drag lifts (rope tows) to get you back up the hill.

In our apartment block, along with lots of rental units and residents there are about 10 employee housing units. We decided for no other reason, other than that we havn't had one since christmas, to throw a party. Well also Mel, a Kiwi from some hick town outside Christchurch, was leaving and being only 19 couldn't come out drinking at a bar with us. So we got a keg and invited everybody from our lodge, and some hangers on to our apartment. About 9pm when it was well dark, with a wicked full moon, well filled with beer we wandered over to the tubing hill. Mel and Becca told me the best way to go down the first time was to hold the tube infront of you, by the handles, run forward and jump on the tube so you end up sliding down the hill head first and on your stomach. Well pretty darn cool. We did lots of races and several large link-ups where everybody in you group sits in their tube and then holds onto the handles of somebody elses. Wicked! of course you always end up spinning around, going backwards and man you get up some serious speed.

Pretty cool night really. Bit bummed about a poor turnout from some of the apartments. Including one of the girls apartments that thought Dawsons Creek on telly was more interesting than a keg and tubing (Thats what VCRs are for!). Still had quite a large group of people and some of the keg left for the next night.

(Actually Mel did come out drinking last night at Buckets, since we know all the bar staff and being mostly locals nobody really cared about a slightly underage drinker who was leaving)