Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

I went out guided-skiing in Courmayeur with the posh chalet boys again yesterday. We spent the whole day hooning around in the deep powder & sunshine. Loads of forest descents, snow filled gullies and couloirs, and jumping around like goons. The others are pretty gnarly skiers and the stuff we were doing yesterday was right on the limit of my ability and probably the most intense day of skiing I’ve ever had.

more photos

Digging yourself out of waist deep powder is hard work and I was falling a lot, so was properly exhausted by the time I was back in Chamonix.

So getting up at 8am and getting into my ski stuff again to be at Flegere for the seasonaire training session was a bit hard. Not to mention the 3 hour lesson that followed in quite deep, sticky powder in snowy conditions. However – I did learn to do a 180 jump on the piste – landing backwards and skiing off, so am quite chuffed about that.

Anyhoo – judging the fat that I’m in dire need of a nap this afternoon, not to mention the state of my left leg, I should probably take it a bit easier for a day or two.

It’s been snowing here for a few days and according to the forecast there’s another week of dumping snow to come. I went up for a quick ski with Sarah in Les Houches and there was just TONS of fresh snow – the kind where you cut through the trees and it’s up to your thighs.

So maybe this heralds the start of a much better second half to the season? I hope so. It’s funny – pistehors.com published a post all about how winter was cancelled & it had been the hottest year on record etc etc. Then half an hour later there was another post about the fact that the avalanche risk in the Haute Alps is now off the charts since the new snow. It can all change so quickly in the mountains.

Anyhoo – I’m off skiing with the top-end-chalet boys & their guide again tomorrow & have a feeling it could well be the best days skiing ever.

OK, so maybe I did go skiing a few times this week, but I’ve also been doing a lot of work. My ‘get some flippin’ work in campaign has borne fruit. I’m waiting to hear from a few bigger jobs that would really sort things out, but in the meantime I’ve got a lot of design work on and I’ve been doing lots of that.

I’m not really much good as a designer to be honest. It takes me a while, and never having been trained to follow the basic design rules, it’s a bit of trial and error to get something like a logo looking good. Generally speaking, if something comes out looking good, then it’s a bit of a happy accident.

It’s good to get back into doing some client work, though. Having to hit deadlines and briefs etc. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s definitely good for me. And if I can bring one of these larger jobs in over the next couple of weeks, then I can hit the ground running with it.

Sometimes I think it’s just too easy to buy stuff on the internet these days. I managed to accidentally buy a new camera yesterday.

I’d been shopping for a new camera before Christmas and fount the one I wanted on Amazon, a Fujifilm Finepix S5200. I decided not to buy it at the time and wait till I was feeling a little more flush and then kind of forgot about it.

So then I had to buy a book yesterday. I wasn’t concentrating, and using amazon.fr (which is obviously in French). I just searched for the book, clicked ‘buy’ and kept on hitting ‘ok’ until I got through the checkout process – I didn’t even need to put my credit card details in because they were saved from last time.

It wasn’t until I got the confirmation email a bit later on that I realised that the camera I’d looked at before Christmas was still in the basket and I’d just bought it for EUR 220. I really didn’t mean to do that. It was my French credit card linked to my French account too, and that doesn’t have much money in it right now. I even got a phone call from my lovely bank manager Beatrice to tell me off for going over my overdraft limit.

Still. What’s done is done & it is a nice camera. I’m looking forward to using it. I take a lot of photos, but always with crappy cameras. I wonder how a decent camera will affect my photography.