Post-festive/seasonal/holiday Update
16.01.04Jesus, have I truly not written since December? More consistent writing was one of my New Year's Resolution. But then again, so were regular morning sit-ups and taking less shit from Maddy, and there hasn't been any great progress on those fronts either. (Though we are at least trying to take less shit from Maddy: at dinner the other night I shot her with a rubber band because she wouldn't eat with her fork, which made her cry, and which made me feel pretty bad once I stopped laughing. It was very hard not to laugh when she demanded an "ice package" to dramatically lay upon her wounded bicep.)
Where to begin? Late December was characteristically hectic. First Madeleine then Annette succumbed to the flu, so the latter's marking was delayed, with multiple consequences: I spent a lot of time with my daughter and very little time doing sports; we postponed our drive home until the 23rd; I did all the festive-seasonal shopping alone on a child-free Monday morning, completing the checklist in ninety minutes and keeping us well within budget, thereby preventing the fiscal hemorrhage of years past.
We spent a week in Vancouver, which flew by in a blur. Three days here, three days there, equal time for the grandparents. Annette's folks were busy with the seasonal festivities, but mine enjoyed some undiluted Maddy time while Annette and I disappeared. We saw a movie! We went skiing on the local mountains (Grouse) and spent most of the afternoon in lift lines, reminiscent of skiing at Whistler circa 1980. I bought Maddy the sprint trike, of which I am hugely fond.
We picked good weather for both drives, doing each in a day, and returned to Calgary before year's end. Having left things much too late we failed to find a babysitter for New Year's Eve; I was exhausted from travelling so I volunteered to stay home with Mads while Annette went to dinner with the usual gang of friends. Little did I realize that I would be on solo kid duty until dinnertime the next day, while someone lay in bed recovering. I figure I scored 21 hours child-free credit, to be used for sporting purposes.
Since then we've just picked up where we'd left off - busy. I went back to work, Mads went back to school, and Annette is teaching now after a hurried week of preparations. I finally spent a weekend mucking out the shop area in the basement, and while things aren't quite finished - one more weekend and it's done - the entropy level has been greatly reduced. I was therefore allowed to slide again.
Skeleton has been the current obsession in our household. I made it onto the track on 2 January for three runs in horrifying conditions: air temperature -25 C (it would be worse with wind chill at 110+ km/h but you don't present much surface area going head-first). The ice was terrible, so hard that the sled skidded uncontrollably on every straight (and this differs from my normal driving exactly how?). The worst part was the ride back up to the start house in the back of an open, unheated truck, wearing only a few layers of lycra. Deadly.
Then a week later I managed two more training runs followed by my competition debut in the national championships. You've got to to love a sport where your first race is nationals. My first run was a personal best; the second sucked; I placed 30th out of 33 so I wasn't in fact the slowest. My four compatriots from this year's driving school were all clustered at the bottom.
But the truly significant sliding happened a day later. Back in the fall I signed up Annette and a half-dozen of her younger colleagues (with their permission of course) for a "Discover Skeleton" evening: two runs from the junior start, just above turn 8. Everyone survived, though a certain faculty member screamed and dragged her toes down the entire first run, ruining a pair of boots despite repeated email warnings not to use good footwear. Everyone had fun. But most of all, Annette was fast. She didn't have the best time - a lot depends on the strength with which one is pushed off from the start, and the short course favours heavier men who can maintain their momentum through Kreisel - but she drove an absolutely perfect second run and recorded the fastest speed through the trap at the bottom - 87 km/h. I think that's faster than anyone managed during the first day of our driving school. If only I could be so smooth on the straightaway. It was a thing of beauty to watch her follow the line down the middle of the track. The giggling and laughing afterwards was also very encouraging. In the car on the way home, unprompted, she said "So, I could see myself doing the driving school next year..." My cunning plan may yet bear fruit.
Mads enjoyed watching her mother and various friends shoot down the track, though she does grow tired of standing around outside in a snowsuit all evening, prefering the warmer confines of the Ice House, where she can sprint up and down the wood decks alongside the push tracks. We even tried some double luge starts on the wheeled practice sleds.
Fun link du jour: Kamerafahrt! Click on the video link for a slider's-eye-view of a run down the formerly top-secret East German concrete summer wheeled-luge training track, hidden deep in the forests of Thüringen. One also enjoys a nice top view of Jan Eichhorn's lycra-clad package bouncing every time he hits an expansion joint...
[Last-second update: At Skeleton training last night I drove my first clean straightaway - no hitting walls, no skidding, clean into Kreisel. That makes a difference. I certainly hit hard coming out of Kreisel, which is probably due to my not scrubbing off a ton of speed by entering it sideways. Now I have to start driving the bottom of the course. The first run was a disaster, I blew out of the groove on my start and rattled off the walls through the first three turns, not really getting things back under control until four. Isn't it nice to have this weird new sporting vocabulary?]
Festive-seasonal letter
It is time once again for the annual non-denominational festive-seasonal letter of greeting. See also our slightly unflattering official festive-seasonal family portrait.
2003 was a year of neither highs nor lows. Really, it was just one of those neither-here-nor-there sorts of years. But a pleasant one.
Madeleine, previously two, is now three. This constitutes progress, we are told. As we probably wrote twelve months ago, she is bigger, faster, meaner, stronger. Also chattier. Much, much chattier. Actually she's lots of fun, and we have a wonderful time causing trouble together.
Vita persists. You can't ask for much more from a cat.
Annette survived her first real year teaching a full load of lecture courses (her first semester in the fall of 2002 didn't count, she only had one seminar). The time commitment proved to be a bit staggering, but at least she enjoyed some down time (sorry, working-hard-on-the-house-and-garden time) over the summer. She's enjoying the job.
Scott [so do I refer to myself according to the convention of writing festive-seasonal letters exclusively in the third person] finally found a job. Actually two, as he picked up the long-forgotten tools of his trade and worked as a bike mechanic at the local shop in the spring. Summer he joyfully squandered waiting for a freelance writing contract to be finalized (loafing about, riding his bike, reading great stacks of books and doing next to nothing on the house); when summer ended and the gig fell through, he found an "interactive agency" job with surprising speed. It appears that he will remain a full-time "web content analyst" for the first part of the coming year, until various debts have been paid off, and then may continue on a more casual basis. Beyond that the future is customarily murky.
Great progress was made on the house, though perhaps with less speed and greater expense than first hoped. (Admittedly, without the considerable aid of respective fathers it wouldn't have happened at all.) The basement, once an empty concrete shell, is now a fully functional, aesthetically pleasant living space, a large combination office-play area-guest room plus a bathroom, storage and shop areas. Only detail jobs linger unfinished. Our last great task is The Organizing of the Stuff or, failing that, Scott's forcible expulsion from the home. Outside, huge advances were made on the landscaping front, though much remains to be done.
We have adjusted, if that is the word, to life in Calgary. (Perhaps "resigned ourselves" would be a better choice.) By studiously ignoring all local media, we have almost succeed creating the illusion that we live elsewhere. Oh, it's not as bad as all that. We quite like our leafy little "inner-city" neighbourhood, and we have hurled ourselves into winter sports in an effort to remain sane. We bought new downhill gear and have begun skiing regularly, in addition to which Scott has taken up long-track speed-skating at the Olympic Oval and skeleton - a.k.a. "head-first luge" - at the Olympic bobsled run. The place has some advantages. Nevertheless, in the guise of "The Reluctant Calgarian" Scott wrote and recorded a series of short monologues for CBC Radio in which he complained bitterly about the many shortcomings of the city and its residents. Suburban commuters were outraged.
Plans for next year center on spending the summer in Berlin. The timing and mechanics and so forth are as yet uncertain, but hopefully we will be able to leave Calgary behind for at least two months. Scott and Mads are preparing for the trip by watching lots and lots of German children's cartoons on DVD ("Little Bear Invades Poland" and that sort of thing).