A slow, cold week at the Curious Capitalist

This is the view from my window in the exurbs of Park City, Utah. The photo was taken at sunrise yesterday, so there are no pretty pink clouds on view as I look right now. But it's still a nice view.

I'm on vacation this week, but I'm working today because TIME's crack ad sales team actually 'sold' my column in this week's magazine. That is, they sold an ad page with the guarantee that it would appear opposite my column (to whom they sold it I do not know, and I don't want to know until the magazine comes out). I tried to get the thing done Friday, but I have a pretty bad work ethic on Fridays, plus I had to get the proofs of my book back to my editor before I left town. At the moment I have a draft column with 596 not-very-well-connected words, and I figured it would be prudent to skip skiing for a day to up that number to about 800 and see if I can make the words fit together in a way that actually makes some sense.

As for blogging plans, my half-hearted efforts at finding a guest blogger went nowhere, and I felt guilty about conscripting my new colleague Stephen Gandel into this effort when he's only officially been on the job for a few weeks. So for the rest of the week you've got Barbara—although she's planning a reporting trip the latter half of the week and thus may be too busy for a whole lotta blogging—and whatever posts and roboposts I come up with today while avoiding working on my column. Plus any news and/or celebrity sightings from the slopes of Deer Valley and the streets of Park City that just seem too important to pass up. Ed Burns and Christy Turlington are apparently ubiquitous here, but I haven't seen them. Somebody on the chair behind me on the lift yesterday was talking up a storm about John Dickerson, which was of course very exciting. But I mostly ended riding the lifts with nice people from Salt Lake City—and with Mrs. Curious Capitalist. Curious Capitalist Jr. was in ski school, and he doesn't seem to have hated it.

Finally, this trip and my recent exploits in Switzerland might give the impression that I'm some sort of ski obsessive. Really, I'm not. I've spent a total of about five or six days on the slopes in the past decade, I'm not a very good skier, and I'm so out of shape that late yesterday afternoon I fell down and for the longest time couldn't get up because my legs were jello. The hope is that by the end of the week Mrs. Curious Capitalist and I will be stronger and better at it, and Jr. will be an ace skier. But given how much money this is costing it may be another decade before we get to do it again.