I love Sundays and today was no exception. The day started with church, and then I had a call with my AXB friends. Three of them are Asian, and we had a sobering dialogue about what they and their families are going through after the Atlanta shooting and all that is happening with Asian discrimination awareness right now.
After that call, we all got ready and went sledding with our friends Jen & Chris, and Courtney and Matt and all of their kids. We went to the head of the Timponogos trail on the Provo side of Alpine loop. We just found a nice hill that started from a snow-bank at the edge of the parking lot. It was the best hill we found in the area, but it had some challenges. For example, in the first part of the sled track, the track veers left and if you don’t veer with it, you could hit a tree. At the end of the sled track, the track dead-ends at either a tree or a brick wall.
For much of the time, people were joyfully building walls to redirect the sleds so that people could safely enjoy the speeds of the track. The first redirecting wall worked very well and didn’t need to be very high, because it was a gentle redirect and the sled wasn’t going very fast yet.
The wall at the end needed to sharply redirect the sled, which by that point was moving very fast, so to be effective, that wall had to be very tall. We were all very proud of our handy work. We never quite got the wall to be big enough to fully redirect an adult on a tube (I could go on a disk no problem because it is not quite as fast as a tube). I narrowly missed the tree when I went on the tube, and I pushed Chris (who went faster than me on the tube) at the end to help make sure he didn’t hit the tree (You can see it in the video below). Ammon was mostly focussed on building the snow wall, and Lydia was did a lot of hunting for ice-cycles. Mary and Clarissa went in the care early because Mary got snow in her boot and Clarissa was sick and we didn’t want her to get to cold. But all the kids got multiple rounds in and loved it. I probably had seven or so runs myself and loved every second. It seemed like our friends and their kids all had a really great time too. It was so much fun!!!
Afterwords, everyone came over to our house for food and we had the most wonderful time all talking together. We talked about fishing, camping, boating, religion and all sorts of things. The kids had a blast playing together as well.
After everyone left, Lily did her Richard Rhor class, and I did some work around the home and then stayed up late journaling about being a better ally to people who are discriminated against.
It was a great great day!