[originally written as an email, thus lowercase]

went snowboarding today. weather was gorgeous, and at least six inches of fresh snow fell last thursday, so conditions were ideal. to make things even better, i magically found a great snowboarding jacket last wednesday! and it was a mere 12,000 yen (about $115) to boot. i spent a few hours riding with my friend mark, mostly on the courses but occasionally jumping off to have fun in the powder. it's pretty easy to get stuck in powder (the nose of the snowboard gets buried, starts collecting snow and thus gets heavier and eventually you just stop). this happened to me a few times. just dug myself out and continued the good times. while on the lift, mark asked me what time it was. i reached into the pocket in which i'd put both my cellphone and epipen and i'm pretty sure you can guess what happened next.

nothing was in there.

seems i'd left the damn pocket open the whole time i'd been snowboarding. which meant that my cellphone (which contains a ridiculous amount of contact information i don't have anywhere else, including asami's, meaning that i would have no way to contact my own girlfriend and she no way to contact me because she only has my cellphone number and email) and epipen (which could save my life, and also costs sixty freaking bucks) were both probably buried in powder somewhere. and i had no idea if i'd lost them two minutes or two hours ago. fuck.

with the help of mark, i retraced my tracks to the place where i suspected my stuff had fallen out. dug around there for a while, found nothing. despair. just for kicks, mark tried calling my cellphone (it was set on vibrate mode, but we were grasping at straws by this point). someone answered. joy. i've never been so happy to hear "moshi moshi" (Japanese telephone "hello") in my life. apparently someone - bless their heart - had found the cellphone and brought it to information. however, the epipen remained AWOL.

i decided to check another powder heap, which i remembered being the day's first place of bailage. thirty seconds of crude excavation later, the glorious yellow of the epipen's case gleamed through a fine layer of snow like a dayglo firefly shrouded in gossamer. elation. laura happened to show up just as i was dragging myself out of the powder. hugging ensued. had laura not been bound to a snowboard at the time, and had perfect strangers not been a horrid sitcom, perhaps we would have done the dance of joy.

beautiful day.

p.s. this year, two absolutely horrible movies about airplanes and the people on them were released: soul plane (another milestone in snoop dogg's rise to superstardom), and view from the top. now, suppose i was the film critic at the paper of which you were chief editor. also suppose that two other horrible airplane-related films had come out around the same time. would you allow me to include the phrase "these four films comprise a cinematic 9/11" in an article/review? it makes me laugh, but that may be because i'm an awful person. ???

I'm continually amazed by the number of people who fail to think of "call the phone" as a step in trying to find a lost cellphone. Glad you found everything.