Another weekend, but this time skiing
24 November 2003

What a strange day. We had a wonderful weekend and all that but this afternoon, damn, I am feeling glum. Completely flat. I think it's simply fatigue, but perhaps it's also Monday and having to work and, just perhaps, the realization that winter sports and buying the equipment required to do them won't necessarily replace everything missing in one's life (i.e. skiing and sliding aside I'd really still rather be in Berlin).

So our little Madeleine, at the tender age of three-and-a-month, skied for the first time on Saturday at Lake Louise. We survived our first day of the season. It was a trial run for the new gear and the on-hill child care. Maddy, god bless her, didn't object to being dumped off and may have even enjoyed the hour's "Kinderski" lesson after lunch. It was hard to tell, she looked so serious when we snuck over to watch. The instructor hauled her up the slope, set her down on her skis, pointed her at another instructor and let her go. Away she slid, her face a mask of ferocious concentration. I'm just happy that she was not unhappy, so that Annette and I will be able to ski together one day each weekend we go up. (By trading parenting days, we'll each manage to ski three days out of four, and there's lots to do in Banff so it's not like hanging about with Mads will be a problem either.) So I think she's getting skis and boots and a helmet for christmas.

As for the adult skiing, it too went rather well. I have not forgotten how to ski. Far from it. The new equipment was fantastic (as it should be, given the price); turning on the steep, bumpy, cruddy stuff is just effortless. I'm not very happy about all the scratches we put in the bottoms of the skis - while the snow was generally good, it is still November, and there were rocks afoot. And I forgot our poles during the rush to load the van afterwards. The day was beautiful but colder than hell, twenty-belowish, as cold as I've ever skied. (We were very red-cheeked by the end of the day, but appropriately dressed so not hypothermic.)

The next morning we took her to another swimming lesson. Soon I'll introduce her to skating. What are we turning into? This is becoming quite exhausting.

There's just no shortage of things to do and see in and around Calgary at this time of year: World Cup speedskating, World Cup downhill skiing, World Cup skeleton and bobsled. The weekends are quite full. I want to see the Nordic sports as well: x-country skiing, biathlon, ski jumping.

We were a bit vegetative on Sunday, needless to say. While I didn't feel tired or sore after skiing, my legs turned to jelly once I got out on the skates for the late-afternoon workout, so I packed it in and went home for dinner and relaxing evening watching TV with the daughter curled up next to me on the couch. I skate again on Tuesday night, special mass-start races, and will surely have recovered in time.

Not much else to report. The weather shows no signs of warming - it's going to be a long winter. We're doing a few small jobs on the house with what time we have (not much): Annette is sewing a luxurious curtain for the living room; I must organize the basement shop area this week or face possible divorce. Last week I gave in and bought steel-studded ice tires for my x-country mountainbike, so now I have a bad-day bike and a good-day bike (the studless commuter). The tires are hilarious, noisy as hell on bare pavement, but once you hit hardpack snow or ice the spikes really bite, and it's so fun to throw the thing around.

The current reading list, piled atop the bedside table, in no particular order save for the first, which I've begun: Nick Hornby, High Fidelity; Alan Furst, Dark Star; W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction; Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma; Anna Funder, Stasiland; Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919. Also piled in there somewhere: Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler; Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners. When it arrives in a week or two I'm going to bravely tackle a German novel, Herr Lehmann, the tale of a late-80s Kreuzberg deadbeat existing "in the broad spectrum between life-artist and loser", in the loose translation of one review.

Christmas is but one month away. Holy fuck. Weather permitting we'll drive to Vancouver in exactly four weeks' time. And then the god-awful shopping.