It's been another grand week of cloudless blue sky and mild weather here in Arizona. Snow still lingers in the higher elevations but little remains in town. Last Monday I took snowshoes to Snowbowl with plans to hike to the top of Mt. Humphreys, but plans changed when I found out the backcountry permit office was closed for the holiday. I ended up snowshoeing behind the Nordic Center. As happens when I run back there in the summer, I got disoriented and completely lost. The map, without a compass, was of little use. I didn't have phone service to download a compass app on my droid so that was a dead end. Luckily I was able to backtrack several miles using easy to follow footprints.
The first week of school went well; I had more work in IT than in my classes thanks to new students and the usual password forgetters. It will be a tough semester because I'm taking a lot of difficult courses and am working almost full-time again. Yesterday afternoon I decided to ski up to Inner Basin, a 10 mile round trip with 2900 feet of climbing. Last winter I skinned up with the telemark skis but this time the snow was so hard I was able to hike up the whole way on top of the frozen, month-old snow rather than ruin my skins on icy tracks. Skiing down was also a unique experience; I could stay on top of the crust except in hard turns, whereupon the skis would break through and everything would stop except me, so I resorted to pizza-ing and improvising the whole way down. Using real telemark boots was a huge improvement from the last time I went, making free-heel skis somewhat more manageable.
Interviews are starting again with my first one this week. Student organization duties and events are piling up. There are certifications to begin preparing for. In addition to the CPA, I am pursuing CFE certification for the risk consulting line of work. The professional services industry is littered with acronyms abbreviating complicated names for simpler processes. Just one of the shortfalls of the English language.. But that's another discourse for another day. In short, this semester is no less busy than any other in spite of taking fewer classes. Just another ordinary semester. Relatively.
But isn't everything ordinary? After all, the only difference between the extraordinary and the extra ordinary is one little space. Merely a typo? Nope. Everything, when defined far enough, becomes ordinary. Science has ruined for us the magic of the extraordinary. A beautiful day is simply the right combination of water, atmosphere, and attitude. A good meal nothing more than the right combination of ingredients. Nothing extraordinary about those things. Enter context. A picture becomes meaningful if I'm living it. An ordinary day becomes extraordinary when shared. Science still hasn't defined synergism; it gave us a word without an explanation. How can 1+1 > 2? Add multisensory data and dimensio infinita, and watch the ordinary turn into extraordinary. Taken in context, it's shaping up to be an extraordinary semester. :)