The quiet weeks ...

Hello - It's me again. At last!

It's been a tough few weeks but I've finally had a week with no guests! There's still work to be done but not the same intensity – it’s more straightening everything out that I've not had a chance to do and helping out in some of the other chalets. In fact I've actually got 2 weeks in a row with no guests so I'll have to practise looking busy so I don’t get roped into too much (although with a laptop, sky TV and a Nintendo Wii in the chalet that shouldn’t be too hard!). Hopefully I'll get a chance to shadow one of the chefs for a while to try and learn more about how they go about things. I was due to do that for a couple of days this week but a combination of some flooding issues in the chalet I was due to go to and the guests requesting curry, spag bol and steak have meant that it's not been ideal this week!

Everything went OK last week. It was tough having a chef in but he ate everything which is about all I can ask for with my lowly cooking abilities! A few nice compliments though so that was a good confidence boost. But lots of dietary requirements as well including no red meat, no fish and a surprise wheat-free guest which was all pretty challenging, Hopefully it doesn’t get any harder than that!! Although it did win me the weekly staff prize which is great. I get to go paragliding, which looks fabulous and is something I've been looking forward to trying. Apparently it's easier to do on skis as instead of the ungainly running to take off you just glide off the edge. Looks very odd to see people paragliding past the window with skis on though!

Very well timed for my extra day off was a nice dump of snow the other day. I've had to try and relearn skiing in powder as they didn’t bother pisting much on the first day. I’m getting there had forgotten how much it makes the legs hurt having to learn again! All this cooking, cleaning, running about and skiing doesn’t seem to have done as much for my fitness as I hoped. It might be the alcohol and diet of pain au chocolat, bread and cheese, but surely not!! There's a whole load more snow forecast for the end of the week too which should be good.

It’s been great to have Caryl (Rob’s cousin) and Bruce out here this week. (They managed to get a really good deal with TotalSki which seems to have been OK for anyone that’s interested). We've managed to drag them round a few pubs and out for a fondue which has been great. Although I've had a relatively easy week and Robs had no lessons so I'm not sure they believe how hard it's been so far as they've just seen us ski-bumming around on the slopes and in the pubs all week!

Rob’s had a quiet week which has been pretty good as he's not been feeling on top form and sounds a bit like Darth Vader at the moment! Hopefully things will pick up soon, but all the ski schools are really quiet at the moment so there isn’t much work to go round. Luckily Caryl and Bruce brought out a great bunch of DVDs which Rob looks in danger of getting through by the end of the week at this rate!

Right. Off to the pub!