In order to relax my aching muscles (both from skiing and woodworking) I had a really nice massage by our friend Suzanne. It was a present from Alison, for Christmas 2003. I should have used that voucher much earlier, it feels so good.

In the end of season sale, I bought myself an early birthday present, a Telemark ski set. The shoes, that unfortunatley weren’t marked down, are the most expensive shoes I ever bought. They are almost as expensive as Manolo Blahniks.
A bit heavier though.

We have supper, and the dogs can only watch. Poor doggies…

Translation: “Gouda Women. Gouda Men. Cheeses from over here. Enjoy their taste.”

So now we know who stole our cheese! The canadians, and they made perfume out of it.

Poupoune on the lookout.

Pepe and Poupoune like to lick the scraps of our plates when we’re done. Especially when we had fish or broccoli. And even though they can’t stand each-other (read: although Poupoune can’t stand anybody getting attention beside her) they don’t fight over food. They eat their food out of the same bowl and share the licking of the plates happily together. Except when I made this picture. This time Poupoune started growling at Pepe and I had to push her away. The picture is better this way, so I don’t mind.

Even the public phones are affected by the snow. This was a closed phone booth but the fine snow finds its way through the smallest openings.

The phone still worked fine.

Two days of snow but I do need to go to a firm far out on a industrial zone, and can’t get there by public transport. So I drive through the storm and enjoy it. I’m always surprised that Montréal doesn’t grind to a halt when there is a lot of snow. The snow removal is pretty efficient. Even though the snowing hasn’t completely stopped, you see snow plows, bulldozers and salt and sand dispersing trucks everywhere.

I later read that there was a snow storm in the Netherlands as well and that in some parts they got two feet of snow. Which is exceptional. It’s also very cold at night, even colder than here. That’s even more exceptional. And there was total chaos on the roads and on the airports.

I’m glad I’m here.

Because my cholestorol was too high, my doctor called me to see him. That was 2 months ago, it takes a while before you can get an appointment with a doctor here. Doctors are really scarce in Québec, especially in Montréal. There is a big shortage because doctors can make more money if they go work in rural places (where there is an even bigger shortage) and way more money if they go work in the US. Because the number of doctors that are coming off the universities is limited and a lot of them don’t want to work 7 days a week the planning is hopelessly wrong. And with the baby boomers getting older and needing more medical care the problem probably will get worse. I was very lucky that I found a doctor who would take me as a new patient.I know many people here that don’t even have a family doctor. My doctor resides all the way in Westmount, on the other end of Montréal (technically it’s not even Montréal) but I’m not going there every week, so that’s no problem.

I now have yet another pill to take every day.

Alison wrote this email to her friends and I asked her if I could put it on loglog. So here’s your guest blogger for today:

[Alison]
Since arriving in Canada, Mark has been on an aggressive campaign to introduce me to winter sports. Last year he bought me snowshoes, but finding somewhere you’re allowed to walk for which snowshoes are required is not always easy. This Christmas I got skis, so we’ve been doing lots of that.

Mark is a much more experienced and adventurous skier than I am but he’s usually very patient with me. We go doggy-style: I chug along, and he runs back-and-forth ahead of me. When he isn’t patient, he’s cross because my learning style isn’t what he wishes it were or because I’m refusing to try new things. Which means that we go skiing on days when I’m feeling good, but other days when I’m feeling tired and cross I balk and refuse: we go for a walk instead, and then Poupoune can come too.

Today was a lovely sunny day. We packed up our skis to check out Oka where neither of us had ever been in the winter. Arrived at a giant parking lot. I needed to pee and Mark wanted a trail map, so we went into the service centre where I immediately got the willies from the sporty affluent white breeder crowd and became resentful. We hurried out to the ski trail which was nice and easy. Wide, flat and impeccably groomed. Wheelchair accessible, even. Literally. And crowded with sporty affluent white breeders of all descriptions. I rushed along to distance myself from all the people – I like going to the country to get away from people, not to gather in herds – but of course there were more people up ahead and all that happened was that I was rushing too much to pay attention to the landscape.

So I concentrated on composing an e-mail to you all about what a terrible time I was having, and about the grim looks on the faces of the sporty affluent white breeders. Fathers who had worked in an office all week and wanted nothing more than to be adventuring on a remote ski hill with a guy friend or a lover, but instead were following their undisciplined little whiners around with snot rags because that’s what good fathers do. Mothers who just wanted to be alone for once were pretending to be interested in going out for a family ski in hopes that their children would learn to like exercise and be better people than they were. Kids who were not really sure what was going on except that the activity was organised for their benefit and that they had better appreciate it or die trying.

“Mark,” I called, “We’re going to take the shortest possible trail and head home as soon as we can. I hate it I hate it I hate it. We don’t have to turn around, but let’s not prolong the misery.”

(Ooops, thought Mark.) Pause. Careful, upbeat reply, “Alison, this part of the trail is crowded because it’s the common access to five trails. It will be better when the trail splits into five.”

I stopped and took off my skis at the first intersection, which happened to be in the middle of a beautiful swamp, sat on a picnic bench and had something to eat and drink. Why am I so crabby? I asked. Why do I hate these sporty breeders so much? A trio passed by, the boyfriend challenging the girlfriend’s nine-year-old daughter to a race, the girlfriend following behind chanting “Pousse avec les bras! Pousse!”

“Anything to motivate her,” commented Mark. “But why,” I asked. Mark looked puzzled. Then patient. “They are doing what I’m doing. They’re teaching her technique and improving her fitness so that eventually they can take her interesting places they want to go.”

But why? Why isn’t the pleasure of being outside enough? Why can’t they stop and discuss the vegetation, try to figure out how they know they are in a swamp even though it’s covered with snow, how they know it was made by beavers even though they can’t see any beavers? If they aren’t enjoying themselves now, then why do they even want to bother teaching the girl to ski? Why would the girl want to learn to ski if skiing is only going to be about not being good enough? Because wherever they go, they are going to be better skiers than she is.

And Mark, if you aren’t having fun going out with me, if you are only tolerating me now, and taking me skiing on the most horrible trails in the most boring places you can think of in the hopes that next year you will be able to take me adventure skiing on remote slopes, we might as well go home right now because there’s no point.

I put my skis back on and we continued. Mark was right: the crowd thinned out. He asked me which trail I wanted to take, and I told him to choose: “I’m feeling crabby today and I want to be able to blame you if I don’t enjoy myself.” He picked a trail with an “intermediate” as opposed to “easy” rating, and while it was still extremely easy at least the landscape was more interesting. (The “intermediate” trail was easier than the “easy” trails he’d been on with his friend Paul the day before, in a different park.) There were even some hills for me to practice going down. Mark coached me, then I told him to go down and keep on going and not look back. I skied down the hills without falling and was very pleased with myself. Mark was able to control himself and wait for me without going back to rescue me.

When we got back to the picnic bench in the swamp we took the snowshoe trail back to the service centre instead of heading back the way we had come. There were really no people there. At one point we saw ski tracks heading off into the woods, not following a trail at all. On a whim we followed the tracks, which took us to another trail. Still no people. We headed down to the beach, where I took some pictures of Mark skiing on the lake. Another picnic stop, Mark sitting on a tree stump and me stretching out on the snow, in the sun. Mark’s friend Paul is a good, fast, fit skier and they have a lot of fun together, but he won’t leave a ski trail. Too much work for not enough speed.

It was getting late, so we skied back towards the service centre across the lake; we didn’t go inside, just kept on going to the parking lot.

In the end I think we had a pretty good time.

[Mark here: I can only confirm that. And I’m surprised how reluctant Alison sometimes is to do things and how much progress she makes when she does it nevertheless. Because she almost always does.]