Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that’s happy to be past Black Friday and into Whatever Saturday this is. Regret All The Money You Spent On Crap Saturday, maybe? Feeling Sorry About All the Chinese-made Junk You Bought Saturday? Or howzabout Finally Not Feeling Like You’re Going To Explode Saturday?

We jest, of course. As good Americans, we were out there doing our part, buying crap and taking names. We were in the parking lot at Walmart at 3 a.m., of course, fighting for our place in line, and when the doors finally opened, we stampeded over all the grannies and little kids to get to the big-screen TVs and $200 laptops. We emerged with a jacked-up rotator cuff and a black eye but laughed it off as we ogled our haul and hopped in our nitro-burning funny car to make it down to Target, the Outlets, Office Max and even the Kum-n-Go, which had a sweet deal on a case of Slim Jims (alas, we were there too late and had to settle for a pack of Pall Malls and a broken ice scraper).

One person we know who came out ahead on Black Friday is SDN staffer Kim Nicoletti, who won one of three $1,000 shopping sprees at The Outlets in Silverthorne. Kim crawled out of bed in the middle of the night and made her way down there, and it was worth it!

So don’t ever say “I never win anything.” Even if you really don’t ever win anything, we don’t want to hear it. Read The Secret or something. C’mon! Chin up! Be optimistic!

Yeah. Just look at the folks in the picture above. Maybe they, too, were the kind of people who often said “I never win anything,” and then look what happened.

Of course, it’d be pretty annoying to win stuff all the time and then go around bragging about it. Everyone would hate you. Better to be modest about those kinds of achievements, don’tcha think?

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One thing we know you can’t lose on is heading out to make some turns on one of our four fine local ski hills. It may be a little busy, a little chilly but we don’t want to hear any whining! Great early-season conditions dictates you get out there, b’golly, so go!

We out.