Back from Vacation

I'm back from vacation! Did you miss me? Did you count the days? Here's a list of things I bet you did while I was gone:
1. Counted the days (already mentioned that one)
2. Gave your sadness a name (Clark)
3. Wrote lots of bad poetry
4. Stared out the window
6. Forgot how to count because you were so stricken with grief

I started my "vacation" by flying to Portland on Thursday, and doing three lovely days of comedy in that rainy town. The photo at the top of this post is a cappuccino from the famous Stumptown coffee. SO MANY BOOKSTORES in Portland. I swore I wouldn't buy any books since I was trying to travel light, but I bought two, which is practically nothing: Tenth of December, by George Saunders, and The Magicians, by Lev Grossman.

Anyhow, the shows in Portland were great. Kevin Pollak and Sean Jordan (the host) were both cool to work with. It was a real pleasure spending three days working on comedy during the day and performing at night, and I wrote a couple new jokes:
• Le Dump (my favorite new joke)
• Fancy Hostel
• Columbo (really more of a segue than a joke)
• Please turn off all electronic devices (I wrote this joke, tried it twice, realized it wasn't funny, and unwrote it—nevertheless, it was written, and therefore counts)
• Check under the bed (new segue into Ghost Possum)
• Life of Pi (new joke within my old Misogynist joke)

I realize that bulleted list means nothing to you, since you don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all my jokes and the bulleted names I give them on my set list. But, since you're a purely hypothetical person in the first place, I'm kind of writing this for myself anyhow.

After Portland I flew to Montreal and Jen and my brother-in-law Mike picked me up. We drove to Smuggler's Notch, Vermont, and skied with their family until Saturday. After a couple days without performing I started to get the shakes; luckily we did karaoke Friday night which tided me over.

The second day skiing I took two nasty falls on Madonna (the central, highest mountain at Smuggler's), so I couldn't snowboard for a bit. Instead I did a little snowshoeing, a little hot tub soaking, and a lot of complaining/wincing in pain. Totally worth it for the last day of snowboarding though, which was awesome. Beautiful conditions with mounds of buttery powder coating the trails.

I'm happy to be back in Philly, surrounded by all my familiar things—my big bookshelf, bed, grapefruits, and lapdog—but I sort of miss snowboarding. Maybe someday it would be nice to live somewhere with more nature? I can't believe I just said that. I must've fallen off my snowboard harder than I realized. Nose bleeding. Getting sleepy.