icicles and other warm treats

Friday night, I am piling into a car with four smelly boys and driving to the Adirondacks, where I will freeze my patootie off. Yes, I am losing my winter camping virginity, and I must admit, I am quivering with anticipation...
Ew. I am so gross sometimes.
Anyway, yes. I have been meaning to pop my winter camping cherry (damnit!) for a while now, but now the fact that I need to buy a whole pile of gear... and fast... is here. Down jacket. Booties. New long johns. New socks. Tails for my snowshoes. The middle of nowhere when it's -20 is no place to fuck around and try and be tough and save money by not buying the proper gear... so, another big fat pile of money moving away from that bike I keep telling myself I'm saving for.
Bah.
Anyway, should my camera not freeze and the battery not die, I should have some very interesting pictures for you this time next week.

mememememe

I been tagg-ed! Dangit!
This is probably a good thing, as I was rolling around a few ideas for what I was going to write about. One was about the rediculous yoga class I went to this morning, where the instructor decided it was "partner yoga" day. One was about how these days, I don't feel like I've grown up, I just feel like I've slowed down. And one was about how I've taken another large step in the systematic alienation of all my close friends, moving me yet another step closer to being the crazy lady in the house falling down at the end of the street, who will die alone in the spring and rotfor months until the spring when someone finally notices the smell and scrapes my gelatanous remnants into a Hefty bag wearing biohazard gear.

I'm not overdramatic. Really.

Four Jobs I've Had In My Life
- Sailing instructor
- Selling knives
- Building conveyor in a brewery
- Quality Engineer

Four Movies I'd Watch Over and Over
- Wayne's World
- Mortal Kombat
- The Collective
- Robin Hood (Men In Tights)

Four Places I've Lived
- Montreal
- Small town (way) outside of Cleveland
- Small town (way, way) outside of Buffalo
- Cochabamba, Bolivia

Four TV Shows I Like to Watch
- Family Guy
- Drop In
- Grey's Anatomy
- Corner Gas

Four Favourite Places I've Been on Vacation
- Lake Titicaca, the Peru side
- Lyddington, England
- Barcelona, NY
- Mejas, Spain

Four Websites I Visit Daily
(excepting the links in my sidebar)
- This One,
- This One,
- This One,
- And my company's website. Lame, but true. It's how I get people's contact info and stuff. Bo-ring.

Four of My Favourite Foods
- Anything thai, especially with peanut sauce or red curry.
- Mango on a Stick.
- Empanadas.
- Anything chocolate. I seem to be in a bit of a moose phase. I made cinnamon-ginger brownies tonight. Mmph.

Four Places I'd Rather Be Right Now
- On a bike (outside).
- Georgian Bay, Ontario.
- The Gorge (local hangout in one of those aforementioned small towns).
- In the water. Possibly at Cala Luna, Sardinia. Swimming is the best.

Four People I feel Sorry For Because They're Getting Tagged
- That kid in third grade that I caught up to on the playground when we were playing that chasing game.
- The guy who passes out on the street in an area full of spraypaint-happy drunkards.
- The dead guy (well, his toe at least).
- The guy in the discount store who spaces out for a second and is suddenly worth $.99, much to the amusement of his discount store coworkers.

Well, that was theraputic. I'm off to place #5 on the "places I'd like to be" list; bed.

twizzles and sticks

There's something about Canadian women's olympic hockey. Fuck, I love it. I don't know why, but I feel like it is truly the essence of sport.
We had a few (two) people over to watch the usual Sunday night shows, and ended up watching ice dancing afterwards. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard. The idea that an "athlete" could wear a pink and green maypole-ish outfit and get dinged by the judges for her "twizzle" is just absurd to me. Yeah, twizzle is actually a term in ice dancing. The commentators will say things like "ooh, their twizzles were a little out of synch on that last pass..." The hysterics started when I made an off-colour comment about "crazy, bendy sex" that the couple with the matching last names must have. Little did I know, they were brother and sister. Normal! Then, there was the dropping. There were five solid oops-babe-sorry-I-dropped-you-on-your-chiffon-wearin'-ass-on-this-cold-hard-ice moments. We must have annoyed the hell out of the neighbours chanting "fall! fall! fall!" at the top of our lungs and then screaming with laughter when they did.
Now, I'm not being stupid enough as to say I could be an ice dancer. No way, man, my twizzle is all off. I'm sure it's incredibly difficult. But there's something about ice dancing that is just so silly. It's like figure skating without jumping. Or something. I dunno. But watching the vasoline-toothed, nylon-wearing women and the vasoline-toothed, nylon-wearing men prancing around seems so anti-sport. To me.
But the Canadian women's ice hockey team. God, they get me choked up every damn time. There's something so awesome about the fact that they have the medal ceremony right there on the ice, with the losing team looking dejectedly at their silvers, strewn equipment all over the ice... families that have sacrificed so much bawling in the stands, and every Canadian that can possibly get themself to Italy singing tunelessly along to the anthem. The girls are drenched in sweat and can't stop jumping up and down, and then a few usually burst into tears when they recieve their medals. There's none of the swagger of, say, the American track athletes at the summer games, or even the men's ice hockey team. I knew one or two players on Team Canada a few years ago, and I've seen how they live; student life at best. They get very little funding from the government, and most of them work except in the year before the Olympics. They sacrifice left, right and center to get to where they are, and it is truly love of the sport; not something they happen to be good at and discovered they could get cushy sponsorship deals by doing. The NHL is all fine and good, but they rest plumply on their seven- and eight-figure salaries in between training. Doesn't move me quite as much.
And there's something about such dedication to a sport that means so much to a country that, well shucks, roundabout this time every four years or so, just gets me right choked up.

blow job (a boring post about the weather)

Friday was crazy. Crazy, I say!
I was out of town on business in Ontario on Thursday. My flight back to Montreal was supposed to leave at 6:00pm. At 9:00, we were just taking off, after sitting in a two-and-a-half hour line to get de-iced. The airport was down to one runway for takeoff and landing. It was most rediculous. We flew an hour and a half and landed in freezing rain. Then, someone took our cab, stranding us out in the middle of nowhere for an additional half hour.
I was hard pressed to keep my peppy-young-professional face on, but I think I managed.
Perhaps.
Friday, I woke up to -10 (probably closer to -30 with windchill). I almost bit it on the stairs leaving my apartment, and then went off to work. At around noon, I looked out the window and saw one of the lamp posts outside springing around in the wind like it was made of rubber. Someone mentioned that winds were up towards 110kph. Then, the roof of the building next door started falling apart, and pieces of it blew into the parking lot and took out a few cars. The windows in one of the buildings actually blew out, and security sent everyone who sits within twenty feet of a window home early. Paid. (So not only do they get to sit by a window, but they get to go home! Grr.) The city is now pretty thoroughly covered in ice. The wind blew anything resembling something fluffy or snowish away, and now it's just rock-hard ice. Everywhere. There's no slush by the curbs, and the bus makes a shattering noise as it crunches to a halt. Shuffling down the street as fast as I could, I'd occasionally kick a loose piece of ice, which would skitter along the rest of the ice, making a sharp noise like glass on glass. This kind of ice, it's something I've not seen outside of Quebec. I'm sure it exists in places like Indiana, Manitoba, Russia, and Siberia, or any other barren wasteland, but it's different than the stuff that comes out of the freezer.

It's funny, to think that my freezer is actually heating up the stuff inside it.

I moved to Quebec in 1999. I remember my first Montreal winter, and my first real cold day. We had an 8:30 broomball game, and my roommate had to pick up her shinpads from the hockey rink. I remember hearing her pants making this strange snapping sound as she walked. It took me a while to figure out that they were frozen. This time of year, it's cold on a level that people who haven't lived it can't understand. As you breathe (if you were dumb enough not to cover your face up to the bottom of your sunglasses) your breath moves away from your body, and then falls, as the moisture in it freezes. If you were dumb enough not to wear sunglasses, your eyes freeze, and you'll have to turn away from the wind for a few seconds and blink a few times to get them to unfreeze. You'll get a strange feeling in your nose and throat (mucus and snot freezing) and a strange taste in your mouth (ice, as the spit on your tongue freezes). As you shuffle along, raging cursewords in your head, your thighs will get cold and turn bright red within a few minutes. The soles of your shoes will freeze right away. Beer, chilled on the back porch, is frosty cold in under ten minutes and starting to crystallize in twenty.

It's damn cold these days.

ack!

*implode*

kittycide

12:34am.

Roomate has new... um, evening activity, and therefore has not been home much this week. Cat has not stopped meowing for at least six hours. I am at my wit's end. I need sleep and the pitiful whining will not stop.

She has food. She has water. She has a cleanish shitbox. I even pet her for a little bit.

I fucking hate cats.

teetering at the edge of the grid

I went down to Vermont to visit my friends C and C this weekend (if they were a music factory, I bet there would be some good vibrations... yuk yuk).
They live in a little house that was originally built off the grid. It has propane lights/stove, and all the fixin's to stay up when the world ends. It's since been brought into the 21st century, with DSL, supercable, drywall, plumbing, and all that good stuff, but you can still lie on their couch and watch the clouds dust over the mountains in the back yard.
I guess it's not technically "their" house... they're housesitting for a few months for some crazy lady, but it's a damn nice place while it lasts. Maybe the crazy lady will decide to stay in crazyland for a little longer and they'll get to keep the house. To get to it, you have to drive on this sketchy mofo dirt road for about 6 miles. Some of the ruts in it (due to the recent warm weather) were so deep that it was kind of touch-and-go with the car getting stuck. My all-wheel-drive Subaru.

Freakin' sweet.

I spent Saturday snowshoeing around the ascents off Notch Rd in Vermont. I was following some crampon marks up to, I guess, the start of an ice climbing route. Up was going fine for about 20 minutes or so, until I realized that, unlike the people who made the tracks I was following, I am not an ice climber. Therefore I was going to have to go back down. Alone. Through the steep, ice-crust-on-wet-snow-covered-in-ice-pebbles, way that I got up. That was dicey at best. I kind of did an ass-first bear crawl down until I passed the big boulders, then free fell until I came crashing out on to the road. Interesting time. If I hadn't been alone, it would have been the perfect little chute to go completely kamikaze down, but when I hike alone I'm mega conservative. Unfortunately, as I am an idiot, I left the battery charger to my little camera in San Diego, so it crapped out after I took one really lame picture of one of my boots. God, I love those boots. They're trail-slut red. They go brilliantly with my 1986-green jacket. I am so pimped out, I can't even look directly at myself. It's like Medusa, but instead of turning people to stone, I turn them to chrome.
Anyway, last night I had extremely violent, scary dreams. I don't normally dream, and when I do, I usually forget them either by the time I wake up or soon after, but this one was different. I was horrified to think that I could have thoughts beyond dealing out the occasional well-merited ass-kicking, but then I realized the reason I was having these terrible thoughts was that the crazy lady's cat was chewing on my face. Just one more bit of proof of my ongoing theory that cats are actually the devil.
Well, I guess I should get some sleep. And by "get some sleep," I mean "read this until I fall asleep."

Flex day tomorrow!
Weekend away!
Three whole days without using my brain-muscle!
Yay!