My Rules for Skiing

I hope all 5.8 of my regular readers had an excellent weekend. I took advantage of the fresh snow and went cross-country skiing with Hardingfele yesterday. There are two rules I must always follow when skiing:

1. I must fall down at least once.

2. And it must be in front of an audience.

In that spirit, I was skiing down a small hill as two people walked up it, and as I swerved to avoid them, I totally fell down. Of course they were all worried: “Are you okay?” but the only thing injured was my pride. Then I heard Hardingfele holler from somewhere far ahead: “Are you okay?” so I had to holler back that I was FINE. Then I had some trouble getting back on my feet on the hill. Finally I skied over to Hardingfele, who asked if I broke anything. No, no, just fine. So we skied back toward the car, but I was really tired by then and BIFF I went down on a straight part of the path right in front of the road so who knows how many cars saw me. This truly mystified Hardingfele: “How did you fall THERE?”

I’m just that good, darn it.

Famous Hat

Special Holiday Guest Blogger

Merry Christmas, everyone! What Richard Bonomo wanted for Christmas was a post written by ee cummings. It wasn't easy digging him up, so to speak, but I did what I could.

eskimos or as they are known

(in some circles) inuits; have

54 words for snow -

i look at snow and think how

can we sum this wondrous

stuff up in one

word?

clearly there is snowball

snow: for making snowmen and

snow forts and even, in the backyard of

famous hat - a snow loch ness monster

powder snow like sugar or even (it

may be said) cocaine - this is good

snow for skiing/per famous hat

hardingfele has professional

skis which can be

waxed and used in many snows, maybe

all 54 inuit - or eskimo - varieties

she found the snow today quite

enjoyable as she and famous hat

skiied

tho it was clearly snowman snow

famous hat begged to differ as

her no-wax skis stuck to the snow

ee

True Adventure: Frosty Fern!

Sorry, no Lenten reflection today either. Instead, let me tell you about Frosty Fern, which is actually a club moss (selaginella krausianna) that I got just before Christmas, when my parents came to visit. We saw them at the grocery store, and my mom and I thought they were just adorable, so we bought one for each other for our birthdays. I have mine at work, but it has been quite an adventure! It was starting to get dried out in spots, so I looked it up online and found they need high humidity and do well in terrariums. So my officemate and I put a vase upside-down over the top of the pot, and at first it looked much, much happier, but then last week my officemate noticed that part of the plant was moldy! GROSS!!! So I cleaned all the mold off of it and found a huge vase I could put it in right side up, where it seems to be reasonably happy. Now it has higher humidity but some air circulation too so hopefully this will be the end of its adventures!

Saturday Anna Bananna II and I went to the health club and I had a medium latte before hitting the treadmill. The good news: I went three miles in only 35 minutes! The bad (?) news: my heart rate was SUPER fast, getting as high as 180 and staying well above 170 for the better part of a half hour. Is this dangerous? Afterwards I felt fine, but my face was bright magenta! Yikes!

Yesterday I talked Rich into going skiing in the tiny amount of snow we'd gotten the night before. We went to a park with a lot of hills, and I kept tumbling over. Rich had a camera with him, so he captured one of these ignoble falls on film. Part of the problem was that there was barely any snow left by then, so we spent half the time on grass and leaves, and part of the probem was that we left the trail. Then we discovered the church a block from his house was having a spaghetti dinner, so we had TWO plates of spaghetti and meatballs and TWO desserts. (They were small desserts.)

OOPS!!

Finally I went home, thinking I'd spend a quiet evening nursing my bruises and washing the mud out of my clothes, and then my brother and sister-in-law called to say they were in town! So we hung out at a restaurant where the waitress recognized me from the bus by my purple velvet bucket hat (so I have TWO famous hats!!), and at one point my brother said to his wife, "I may be a blonde but I'm not THAT dumb!" For some reason I thought he said, "I may be a bong..." so we got a lot of mileage out of that one. Seems like a pleasant life, but I tell you, if I were an inanimate object I'd be a timbale - then I'd have men hitting on me all the time! However, Anna Bananna II has convinced me that being a professional timbale player would not be the best idea because apparently they can get kidney problems from all the muscle damage from hitting their hands so hard! She showed us all (meaning Rich, Kathbert, and me) an article about a drummer whose urine looked like cola! Yuck! Guess I'd rather have functioning kidneys than get to play with a salsa band. Maybe if I took up the trumpet...

Famous Hat