Even Frosty Couldn't Take This

First, let me apologize for the lack of post over the past couple of weeks. Works been stupid and I took a trip to Vermont for most of last week to snowboard at Killington. To the five of you who read this, I'm sorry. I'll try to pick things up over the next couple of weeks.

Second, I'm going to keep this post short because: a) I have a broken finger on my left hand that still hurting, b) I cut the tip of my right pointer finger tuning my board over the weekend and the band aid is annoying to type with. Would I have injured myself if I had been sober when I undertook the wax job? Probably not. But, honestly, who waxes a board sober? I mean, it's just not done in this day and age. And finally, c) I want to talk about the Killington trip but recaps tend to be boring, self gratifying ego boosters designed solely to make the writer's life look more interesting then it actually is. I don't have to prove how cool I am. I have a blog. Enough said. Besides, I've got enough people blowing smoke up my ass on a daily basis, I don't need to do it to myself. So, I'm going to leave out all the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll stuff that comes natural to a ski house packed with 18 mid-twenty-somethings and copious amounts of alcohol for an extended weekend and instead talk about how fucking cold it was.

I wish I could have seen my nose. The part that I see when I crossed my eyes still looked normal. Maybe a little more red than normal but that just meant the blood's still flowing. However, everything in nasal land was not right. An invisible monster was slowly eating at my nose. His breath was hot but his bite was painless and I never saw it coming.

"Dude, what the hell happened to your nose?" J addressed me as we stood at the bottom of Bear Mountain ready to get back in the lift line after a long run.

"What do you mean?" Was my reply. Everything felt fine. My face had gotten pretty cold at the end of the last run but I didn't think anything of it.

"The end of your nose is completely white."

I took my hand out of my glove and felt the end of my nose. It was hard as a rock and had a texture similar to very dry skin but wetter. Visions of the discovery channel and arctic explorers with black noses or no nose at all flashed through my head as I continued to play with the odd shaped lump located where the fleshy tip of my nose formally resided.

It seemed that the negative five degree high that day had caught up to me. At that point in the morning it may have been more like negative ten but I couldn't say for sure. The night before it was negative twenty two without the wind chill. That was the coldest weather I've ever been outside in. It was bone chilling cold just standing still, but traveling downhill at forty mile an hour made it nothing short of unbearable. Which left me, being the smart guy that I am, without a face mask to contend with the frozen air.

My nose had literally flash frozen. The cell walls bursting as ice crystal expanded and punctured through the membrane. Mitochondria and ribosomes spilling over their borders only to be imprisoned the next instant in ice. The first layers of skin had died an instant death at the hand of old man winter and only thing that may have saved the others was my hand stimulating the region back to life. The stark white faded back to blood red and I decided that instead of become a discovery special myself, I better get my ass inside the lodge and warm up my sniffer before it revolts and leaves me for the greener pastures of the afterlife.

Long story short, my nose hasn't fallen off as of yet and the skin resembles that of burn victim in the area of damage. To remedy the situation I bought a mask in the lodge, which turned out to be one of my personal best purchases of all time. So, if there's a lesson to be learned from my blunder, it's that if weather outside is frightful, at least buy as face mask. Bundle up, my friends, because it's cold outside and you could lose a finger, a toe or a nose.