I was just on the Killington web site and apparently they plan on having skiing sometime in mid-October. I guess I should go get my old 1080’s tuned in preparation for opening day. I still have to find tele bindings and boots for my new 1080’s, but it has become a rather daunting task, due to lack of telemark dealers.

I learned two things last night in my apartment when I decided to make myself dinner. First my smoke detectors work a little too well and I can make a pretty decent grilled cheese sandwich under stressful conditions. I couldn’t decide on dinner last night since I wasn’t very hungry and decided to experiment with a grilled cheese. Now to most people this would be a rather simple, quick and painless experience, but of course you wouldn’t be reading about it if that was the case. I turned on the stove and got out a big old frying pan which was about as big in diameter as my entire stove is wide. I put a couple of pieces of butter on the pan and then buttered one side of a piece of bread. No sooner had I placed the bread on the pan and the smoke detectors were going off. I couldn’t understand it because I wasn’t burning anything and there wasn’t any smoke coming off of the pan, butter or bread. I don’t know cooking too well, but I am sure I wasn’t burning anything. Now on top of the stress of cooking something for the first time I had to deal with the smoke detectors. I turned down the stove and ran to my bedroom smoke detector to begin waving my hands near it to make it stop. After a couple seconds it stopped and in an instant the other detector started wailing away down the hall. I shut my bedroom door to prevent any more invisible smoke from getting to the first detector and worked on calming down the second one. It finally stopped and I opened a bunch of doors and windows to allow for some ventilation. Now it was time to get back to the stove and my now perfectly grilled piece of bread. I turned the stove back up and placed the cheese and the other piece of buttered bread on top of the already grilled piece. The detector started to go off again and I waved a towel in front of it to make it stop. At this point I am wondering what the landlord upstairs thinks about his downstairs tenant. After flipping the sandwich a couple of times I decided it was done and placed it onto my plate. Before eating I decided to shut the door and close some of the windows because it was beginning to get cold outside. I put some chips onto the plate, poured myself a glass of milk and sat down at my kitchen table to eat my creation. I am happy to say it was delicious, though I think next time I will use less cheese. My experience was very mixed while I am more confident about my cooking skills I am now worried about setting the super sensitive smoke detector off. It is time to just cook away.

Other things to note from last night come from TV. The first thing is the gross out challenge on Fear Factor last night. The contestants had to eat these gross bugs and the more they ate the more chances they had to win a sports car. The first contestant a woman didn’t do so well and was only able to eat two of them. The guys on the other hand went crazy and were actually joking around while they ate them. One guy through the spider into the air and then chomped down on the spider. It was gross and the fact that the guys were not bothered was just disturbing.

The other TV thing I noticed was how John Madden doing the announcing on Monday Night Football stands up. Why on earth does he stand up? Is it because the players are standing, do they announce better standing up? It just struck me as strange.