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Another culinary post.

Putting fish and rapini (broccoli raab, a bitter vegetable related to broccoli) in a oven dish and having it cook in the oven for an hour was not a great idea. The smell it produced, a mix of sulphur and rotten fish, was so profound that it was almost vomiting inducing.

A waste of good trout and rapini, but the destination of this dish was the waste bin. We ate something else instead, out of the freezer.

Fortunately Alison is not always this adventurous while cooking.

(I forgot to take a picture, so this one comes from Flickr.)

I’m suffering from a lot of pain in my shoulder lately. It’s the same arm that was badly sprained last Spring, and it might be related. Strangely enough it doesn’t hurt when I ski, but it does at night and when I carry things, or forget that I shouldn’t use that hand. Sometimes I almost faint.

After having done X-rays my doctor thinks it’s a inflamed tendon, and he wants me to take an MRI. Okay, that doesn’t hurt, the insurance pays the bill ($650!) and it might be a good idea that the physiotherapist knows what exactly is damaged.

MRI stand for magnetic resonance imaging and it is a machine with a couple of magnets that spin around your body. By measuring the changes in the magnetic field it can produce very detailed images and animations of soft tissue.

I arrive at the MRI clinic, and after paying and answering a couple of questions (“Do you have any metal in your body?”) I can undress and I’ve to put on a hospital gown. Then the operator puts me on a table and fixates my shoulder in a plastic harnass. Then she gives me earplugs and slides me into the machine. It’s a very narrow tube and I’m going in very far, only my feet stick out of the machine. I immediately start to hyperventilate, my heart starts to race and I shout: “Sorry, I can’t do this.” I was forgotten that I’m much more claustrophobic than I want to admit. I remember the one and only time I went into a deep cave, and almost got stuck in a very narrow passage. Not good for my anxiety.

After a lot of talking and deep breathing, and after I get an eye mask (Thanks Air Canada) I manage to go for another try. When the machine starts to operate it is a bit easier beacuse there is a lot of noise to focus on. With lots of will power I manage to stay inside the tube for the 40 minutes the whole procedure takes.

After I’m ‘saved’ out of the evil tunnel I buy myself lunch and go to the cinema. I earned it.

During a solo cross country trip, I seek shelter from the cold and the wind (windchill -28 C) in an explorer tent. A tent with a wood stove, it’s amazing the thing doesn’t burn down. Maybe it does, regularly, but not when I was in it, eating a banana. It’s also hard to believe that the early Europeans in this country lived in such tents.

Pepe enjoys the sun.

For the first time I’m went telemark skiing in the U.S.
The ski resort we went to, Jay Peak, is very close to the Québec border, but it is just in Vermont. They get a lot of snow, much more than the surrounding hills, because some sort of micro-climate, but it also suffered from the rain and thaw of the past week. The day before 30 cm of new snow had fallen. Normally that would be enough, but because it fell on a layer of ice it doesn’t stick very well, and the wind blows it away. So some descents were very icy. It took a while before I got into the groove, also because it was rather crowded. It was spring break in Vermont and lots of kids and their parents tried to make the best of it on this first sunny day in a week. Bad planning on our side. It was beautiful however, and nice to ski a bit longer runs, because this mountain is a bit bigger than the ski hills to the North of Montréal. But those are sufficiently high for me to practise.

In the ski-lift I met a man from Ontario who was born in the Netherlands. He was surprised I lived in Montréal: “So you’re not a farmer?”

Alison baked a big batch of her flax muffins. They’re yummie!

After another freak weather situation (a lot of new snow then a night and morning of rain followed by a drop in temperature of 20 degrees in a couple of hours) the sidewalks are covered in a thick layer of ice. But thanks to my ‘Yaktracks’ anti slip devices I have excellent traction and can keep my usual pace, overtaking lots of skidding people.

My improvisation dance class has started its second round. A completely new group, all girls, and I’m the only one from the old group who stayed. I feel so experienced. It’s also funny to see that the group dynamics are completely different. Unfortunately I liked last year’s group better…

We had an improvisation with objects and I put my camera on the floor as an object to play/dance with. Many people picked it up so now I’ve many pictures. This one was taken by Sophie.

Even though it was snowing hard, Paul and I went cross country skiing. The tracks were completely covered with new snow so we had to break in the trail. Our speed was low, but nevertheless it was very nice.

This lovely woman came today to fill up our heating oil tank. We had to pay her, and a lot, with the current high prices of oil. As I wrote before we have a very old furnace to heat the house and use (waste) a lot of oil to also heat the Great White North. But since we pay for the oil, and the landlord pays for the furnace she doesn’t have any incentive to replace it with a more modern and energy efficient one. Fortunately it’s not a very cold winter so far.

It’s stupid to heat with oil at all, because Montréal is located on a very hot spot and we could easily install a geothermal installation. That consists basically of a pump that pumps water into a deep drilled hole in our backyard and when the water is heated up by the hot earth below it uses that hot water for heating the rooms. The installation cost could be recouped in only fifteen years and after that we would heat for free. And we would also not emit any greenhouse gasses and wouldn’t have to rely on oil. But because we rent that is not an option right now. However it’s strange that the Canadian or Québec government doesn’t actively promote and subsidizes this technology. Oh wait, it’s competition for Hydro Québec!