Muscle Memory

"I think I already know your answer, but I had to ask," said Molly, the new production manager at Tram Bar World, when she called me yesterday morning.

Apparently the factory was in crisis mode and needed bars made stat. I really, really didn't want to do it, but once someone puts an idea in my head, I have trouble saying no without a good reason. I had a bar-sized window of time between sending the paper to print and going to kid's practice. I was planning to veg out, clean up my piles, go mountain biking with girlfriends. Instead I donned a sleeveless tee and skate shoes and went to the factory.

I walked in with my trademark churlish swagger, accepting happy greetings but trying to broadcast a half-amused, half-resentful attitude. Then Molly told me what the crisis pay scale was, and I saw that my ingredients had already been measured out. Well, that's better.

Since I left, the factory has seen almost twenty people cycle through, attempt to make bars, and quit with little ado, so my princess treatment was warranted. It's not often one gets acknowledged as the Greatest of All Time, but my bar-making record backs that up.

That said, I was pretty nervous that I wouldn't remember how to do it. My brain had already deleted the file, confident that it was obsolete information. I couldn't mentally walk through the steps beforehand. But once I was in front of a tub of ingredients, dressed in my whites, muscle memory took over and it was like the last nine months had never happened.

Back in my native habitat

I flowed through the steps, performing my weird little granola dance, barely thinking, luxuriating in nostalgia. This was the thing I was better at than anything else I've ever done. But to be excellent isn't enough when there is no personal growth, when my brain melted into custard even as my arms gained definition, when I did the exact same thing day after day.

I left the factory many dollars richer and reeking of peanut butter and honey. I was dehydrated but not as achey as I expected. Deeply-ingrained skills don't go away that quickly.

Job Satisfaction

I love my job for a lot of reasons. I get to wear a hat to work. On powder days my boss tells me to come in late. I get an unlimited supply of lifesaving nugs, the best possible insurance against bonking. I arrive, I work nonstop until finished, and I leave--I'm not at the mercy of the clock or the whims of customers. Every afternoon my arms and back ache, which convinces me that I'll somehow become a rock climber this summer. When I asked for a couple of days off to go to Cali, my boss bent over, touched his toes, and said, "Look. I'm flexible."

All great, sure, but one of the main reasons I love my job is the constant sensory input. As I lay waste to fifty-pound bags of oats or shredded coconut, the smells permeate the air. I hated arriving home from the restaurant reeking of fry oil; I even had to designate a jacket and a scarf as work-specific because I didn't want the rank odor on any other clothes. Now I come home smelling like granola and forget to even wash the spots of honey and peanut butter off my forearms. Measuring and mixing are agreeable tasks. I dole out scoops of hemp seeds, their shells clinging to my shirt. ("Before you get any ideas, they're not viable," joked my boss on the first day, and I, the naif, totally didn't get it.) When I'm wrestling with dried fruit, apricots and tart cherries are the best, because they're delicious, and bananas are the worst, because they're sticky and cloyingly sweet. Once in high school I let a banana squish around in my backpack for a week and now the smell of ripe bananas kind of repulses me. I drag a hand through sunflower seeds with their husks like exoskeletons, flax seeds with their beetle shine, and sesame seeds, which like to congregate at the bottom of a mix bin. I work a paint stirrer through buckets of nut butter, the hateful sheen of oil floating on top promising a layer of cement on the bottom. Once I was in a hurry with a measuring cup and splashed peanut butter oil in both eyes, but escaped with only bleary contacts, thus proving that I'm probably not even a little bit allergic (a big plus in the industry). Between rolling sheets I dart away to drink lukewarm coffee and nibble the trimmings from the previous day's labor.  We alternate between listening to my eclectic and sometimes embarrassing iPod shuffle and the "butt rock" Pandora station preferred by the others, sneaking the volume up in increments until Kate emerges from the office to turn it down. The atmosphere is decidedly chill. Sometimes I fondle the finished product in its matte plastic packaging and fancy labels and think in wonderment, I made this.

Granola porn
Courtesy of our website

And then when I've finished rolling out 105 dozen bars, I stroll home and try to decide what to do with the remaining four hours of daylight. Bike ride? Make dinner? Mail some more nugs to loved ones across the country? Or just mosey over to the pub and see how many friends are there today? 

Greener Pastures

I did promise an update on my employment status, and I come bearing good news. I applied for a very promising-sounding job posting but after I jumped through a couple hoops they let me down gently. Fast forward several weeks of quiet desperation and the company contacted me with a new availability, so I walked over to the facility...a block from my house(!!!)...chatted with the owner, and after a couple painful days of waiting I got the call! I gave the Idiot Bosses a final weekend of my time and rather than braving the likely interminable and hostile resignation conversation, I left a painstakingly polite letter in the office and snuck off into the night.

So I've worked a full week at the new job, and I'm stoked. Go check out the website and you'll realize it is the perfect company for me. I am one of the two people that churns out energy bars five days a week. I make over a thousand bars a day. It's monotonous and laborious work but it feels great to create such a wonderful product, and I get paid by output so I have a lot of flexibility in a work week. Kate, who rides bikes, uses organic ingredients, and is invested in whether her employees get to play outside enough, is a very cool person indeed. I now share weekends off with the housemates, which opens up potential for all the trips we've been wanting to take: back to Sun Valley, up to Montana, down to the desert. And did I mention it's a three minute stroll from my front door? I'm not quite sure how I got so lucky.

Back By Popular Demand

Apologies for the dead air. Our sanctimonious neighbor cut off our internet access a couple weeks ago and I've been reeling from the loss. I've developed quite a dependence on connectivity, who knew?

I have yet to find gainful employment, in large part because of the extreme half-assedness of my search. I am also crippled by the fact that I stubbornly do not want to drive to work, and if I do have to drive to work I DO NOT want to commute over the avalanche-prone pass or on the treacherous road up to the resort.

I'm being a princess. I don't care.

Being unemployed means mind-numbing boredom and loneliness, a miserable contrast to the communal excess of camp, and it also means unprecedented freedom and flexibility. When I'm not skiing the sands pass through the hourglass a single grain at a time. When I am skiing--well, that merits a whole separate post. But unemployment also permitted an impromptu trip to Salt Lake City, where I got to spend some quality girl time with Joh, and then relive the Cruisedays of fall by adventuring with a couple of camp friends.

On the same day as my return from SLC Tyler and I took off for Thanksgiving in Boise, where we did family stuff and he showed me his old haunts and we went mountain biking in the foothills a stone's throw from his neighborhood. It was great. Boise is a really cool and unpretentious city.

We were gone during a dry spell but arrived back in Victor on the eve of another storm, and now everything is coated in white again.

Dispatches from the Western Front

Monday was Tyler's birthday and he pulled some strings at work and got us a party boat. Ten of us piled on and doused ourselves in sunscreen and blasted "Blurred Lines" on repeat and set to work on the mimosas and Torpedoes in the cooler. When it got really hot we jumped in and climbed up to the Tea House, the quaintly named rock edifice in the middle of Emerald Bay. Paul drove donuts at the mouth of the marina before we headed back in with the setting sun. It was the most fun I've had in a long, long time. Clearly the best place to enjoy Tahoe is from the middle of it.

The Tea House

Too. Damn. Good.
(Pic from Katie)

After a surprisingly successful return to "competitive" running (a firecracker 5k barely merits the title), the bug has bitten. Again. Sigh. In September I will have the great pleasure of running up the mountain I skied down all winter, and with my padre nonetheless! Riding in the Graeagle area last week got me thinking about the Lost Sierra Endurance Run and I've actually managed to get my ducks in a row for that as well. I even did a long run yesterday, a long, hot, flattish run that ended as usual with a plunge in Fallen Leaf, and that made me feel pretty good about a 30k* in two months.

*Not 50k because I'm not insane

Office run
(Pic from Merril)

And I got a new pair of fatty fat skis for my powder-centric future plans.

So sexy

Every Friday night at camp the musically endowed counselors set up on the deck and perform for an hour, and every Friday night I stand at the huge window overlooking the lake, in my palatial office, and watch the show, and every Friday night the musicians finish with a rousing rendition of "American Pie", and every Friday night everyone dances and sings along, staff and toddlers and grandfathers and surly teenagers and tipsy soccer moms, and every Friday night, despite the disturbing sense of deja vu, the communal happiness and wistfulness at the week's end is palpable, even from the second floor. And then the sun sets and every Friday night, it's the most beautiful thing ever.

The view from work
(Pic from Nichole)

So This Is Summer

Going into the fourth week of camp, I feel I can adequately express what it's like. Every week's schedule and menu are exactly the same and so all of us staffers have settled into the sometimes deadening monotony of Groundhog Week. For diplomacy's sake, let's pretend I've never mentioned the actual name of my place of employment...so I can now safely discuss the alum of a place called...Treeland University. They are scary wealthy; they are deeply entitled; a lot of them represent a caste I'd never encountered before, "west coast preppy"; they are incredibly wasteful (in my shift alone we go through hundreds of paper cups, napkins, lids, and cocoa packets each night--imagine how I love that); and as a whole they are overwhelmingly generous and kind, although it sometimes feels like they are leaning down to pat your head from the top of their pedestal.

Meanwhile the undergrads who represent the bulk of the staff (or "staph", their preferred nomenclature), are enthusiastic, starry-eyed, exhaustively creative, and often very inexperienced when it comes to actual work. We "permies" (permanent staff) have to forgive them that because while they play hard, they work hard too.

The biggest difference between camp and conference is the sheer number of people constantly milling around. Instead of the maximum 150 or so guests we accommodate during conference, during summer we play host to about 270 people on our little plot of paradise. Children are loud, adults are loud, staph are loud. Fortunately my little cabin is one of the most isolated ones, tucked back in the trees next to the volleyball court. It stays quiet and super cool, even in the "heat waves" Tahoe keeps experiencing (90 degrees is laughable when the humidity hovers at a comfortable 15%). And then on my weekends I scurry back to blessed real life in town, to ride bikes and hang out with friends who don't want to talk about camp.

Back to Camp

I finished off the season with one last magical powder day at Kirkwood, with a group of six wonderful friends, a posse that despite its size never grew unwieldy or sluggish.

And now after a lightning fast winter, I'm settled back in at SSC, with a new cabin and a new title and, oddly, a new sense of detachment. Because this time around I have a life in town, not to mention a set schedule of forty evening hours a week, I haven't and probably won't wholeheartedly embrace the scene that is camp. It's a little bittersweet that I'll never again be a new arrival wide-eyed with wonder (like Eric, who I suspect is in heaven), but instead I can build on friendships I made last season, get to better know the full time staffers, and make some attempt to do my job well (which doesn't come as naturally to me as food service, but what doesn't kill you, etcetera).

Of course the best aspect of camp remains the same: infinite opportunity for outdoor play. The mountains and the waterfront beckon. The trails shook themselves free of snow very early this year, and Rebecca and I have been on a couple of extremely satisfying bikes rides (made all the better by several months of abstinence). On one of those days I had the quintessentially Californian experience of mountain biking and skiing in the same day. And this sunshine doesn't look like it's going anywhere.

Update

I've worked at the coffee shop for a month now and have erased the wretched imprisonment of HR from my memory. I love the coffee shop. More than I expected, even. I had reservations, since we operate under the umbrella of not one but two evil empires. However, the influence of the coffee corporation is barely present, besides the monthly introduction of new cloyingly sweet drinks; Vail's sway is more obvious, between the Byzantine labor laws of California* and relentless rah-rah of the resort. All the employees have past experience in independent coffee shops so we all operate under the pretense that we still work in one, mocking people who order caramel "macchiatos" and ask for grande-sized beverages, and doling out freebies to anyone we like, corporate protocol be damned. I was expecting to serve only tourists, and while the staggering majority of our customers are out-of-towners, there is a solid and loyal contingent of locals, regulars, and year-rounders. Everyone that works in the Village takes excellent care of each other; the us-versus-them mentality is really strong here.

The tourists that pour in are the most cosmopolitan crowd I've ever seen. At least fifty percent of them are wealthy foreigners, skiers and boarders from Perth and Bern and Santiago and Lima and Seoul, decked out in the most expensive snowgear and eyewear imaginable, showing no reaction at being charged upward of four dollars for a single beverage. Everyone is stoked on the sunshine, the scenery, and the snow. Most people that come in are very friendly and not nearly as high maintenance as I had expected, although the entitled Bay brats wielding their parents' plastic can be pretty abrasive. Overall the vibe is great, the tips are generous, and I'm excited to go to work each day. What more could I ask?




*To clarify: California has very pro-employee labor laws, to the point that it's absurd. We the peons benefit, but on the other side of the desk in HR I saw how obnoxious the rules are for employers.