The one thing about winter...

That I miss is skiing. Skiing was an easy thing in Vermont. You got in the car, drove 30 or 40 minutes, and you were there. I can still ski, of course, not that I've tried in ~15 years, but from Austin, Texas, it's a production. It's like 800 miles, which means you can't just up and go. And you can't just ski once. You have to ski day after day after day to amortize the travel time. Even when I was 14, the first day of skiing for the season would leave me a wreck the next day. There's no way I could go skiing the day after. Now, at my age, with these creaky old bones? Forget about it.

My tentative plan to fix this is to live in Vancouver. Vancouver's pretty cool. We really liked it. There's a ski slope from which you can see downtown. It's no doubt mobbed, but there are two more It's there. Whistler is a 2 hour drive. Maybe it'll be faster after the improvements for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

I have no idea when we could do this. If it was all about skiing, the best time would probably be in around 7-10 years, because the kids would be old enough to enjoy it. The problem then would be getting them out of school. I guess we'd just bite the bullet.

The other tentative plan is to be massively wealthy. That would certainly solve the problem. It's a rather effective solution to a number of things, but I don't know if I should pin my hopes on it.