Hog Support & Skiing in the Summer

So every time we leave or come home, we drive down our road and pass 7 houses.
Each house has a full size flag, bracketed up on their porch pillar. The first one is a Georgia flag, then Clemson, Auburn, Tennessee, USC (that's South Carolina for you non-SEC alums), Florida is next and finally Alabama.
Feeling like my Pigs were not being represented and that I should show my alumni support by completing "SEC Row" (as I've so nicknamed our road), I picked up a hog flag. No no, I didn’t get one of those full size jobs, just a little garden flag. I've reserved the large flag placement for the American flag. We'll see what happens during the season, but let me tell ya...I put up the flag and the next day our Piggies whooped Texas A&M's taters! Go Hogs!


A couple days before the Hog flag went up, Dan went away on another work trip to the UAE. The trip was jam packed full of meetings, except for a couple days when he was able to play tourist.
On one of the days he decided to visit one of the enormous malls in Dubai. This mall happens to house an indoor ski hill, a HUGE aquarium, in addition to a million stores I could drop some serious $$ in (Prada, LV, Gucci, Armani, Kate Spade, and Manolo to name a few). For about $60 he was able to get a 2-hour pass (although somehow he ended up with 3 hours).
The way it works is that he got a card the size of a credit card with some sort of electronic chip in it. Even if kept in a pocket, the subway-style turnstile at the lift entrance was able to sense it and tell you how much time you had left. There were also other activities that could be paid for: tubing, lift rides up and down, etc. I hear the whole experience was quite surreal. Sitting on the chair, his nose began to run, his hands froze, the lift wheels creaked because of the cold and then you look up and there’s a ceiling and walls…not to mention the constant pounding of UAE’s version of European techno music...ick. Luckily enough, he said skiing is like riding a bike. No bones were broken and he had a lot of fun. However, at 6 minutes per round trip (4 up, 2 down), his brain joined his hands and started going numb. The excitement wore off at about 10-15 trips and it turned into a plain “half-mile-ish,” green-blue run with a near 90 degree turn halfway down. He said at that point it became an internal struggle on how time would be better spent: option a) ski more since the chance won’t come again, or option b) quit now before you become completely miserable. But in the end, even though the "mountain" wasn't the tallest or fastest he'd been on, he had fun, was able to experience frost bite then stepping into 110 degree sweltering heat, and he'll have a memory most folks won't ever get to see. We also have one of those $25 "roller coaster ride" photos to prove it.
Enjoy!