"When It Rains, It Pours Barf From the Upper Bunk"

I love typing blog posts, you know. It's way big many muches of fun.

However, it takes some time, and that I don't have this week...

...now that The Flu has moved in, and we're all fighting off low-level nausea, the likes of which I last felt when watching Steven Bochco's Cop Rock back in 1990. Plus, there are the aches, the pains--oh, and in Niblet's case, the fever and the vomiting all over the bunkbeds at 1 a.m. To his credit, he did manage to earn Yack Points on approximately 100 of his 223 stuffed animals. Score!

The household is feeling like a Little Smokies sausage that's been left on the counter for about 8 days.

Gross.
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So here's a quickie, a little vignette that attests, for once and all, to my occasionally-questioned nobility of character:

Last Sunday, I was tromping around the woods with Niblet's KidSki group, a bunch of preschoolers and kindergarteners on cross-country skis. Mostly, they fall a lot and then lay in the snowbank and eat snow off their gloves. After a few minutes, they look up, a little bewildered, and announce, "I have to pee."

At any rate, through that crazy coincidence-machine called Fate, it turns out that the 4-year-old son of my husband's "When Vasectomies Go Bad" doctor is in the KidSki group.

Oh, Little Simon. Look at you pipping along there, swooshing and falling and leaping up and laughing, all things Groom hasn't been able to do since January 23rd, when he first dropped trou for your daddy, The Scalpel Hacker.

Here comes the part where I'm noble and have good character:

At one point, I was directly behind Little Simon. Holding a ski pole. At right about the level of his future vasectomy.

And I didn't.

Pole him.

In the "Balzac."

While shouting the words, "Go home and tell your daddy how that feels, Little Simon!"

Feeling very proud of my restraint--and the fact that it had only taken three other parents tackling me to keep it from happening--

I looked up

and saw, directly in front of me and my ski pole,

the "Balzac" of Little Simon's daddy, who, breathless and sweaty, had just finished his own ski and had come to retrieve Little Simon from class.










Whoops.

"She Had Eight Weeks to Work on Her Final Essay, a Period of Intense Craftsmanship That Resulted in This Opening: 'Are kids still talking to their parents? Well, some are but most don’t talk the old fashion way or the way they should, they now talk to their parents through texting and emails and once in a while, if you are lucky, a phone call (most likely from a cell phone)'"


Gasping, flailing, wiping gunk from my eyes, I'm surfacing, turning my face up from the mass of research papers that has consumed my energies in recent days. Students have told me that Americans are obese; water is scarce; language is overly casual; music should be freely downloadable; smoking bans are good; coral reefs are dying; modern animation rules; and BPA might be dangerous.

Slap my knee and call me Tiffany, but I'll be damned if they're not right.

Yup, I'm swimming along with their opinions, gliding through the pages, occasionally taking a break to stand up and keep rice-sized blood clots from forming in my legs.

And when I stand up, I look out the window. Well, shitbam.

Somebody put nine inches of snow out there and shut the town down when I wasn't looking. Here I just gave Krystal an "A" for hepping me up about global warming, and during the grading, the Abominable Snowman sneezed and shook his dandruff on the house.

Easily, my grading break lengthens from a leg shaking to out-and-out abandonment of duties. I not only need to prevent rice-sized blood clots from forming in my legs, but I also need to prevent student prose from clotting my brain.

Clearly, it's time for us to strap things to our feet.



This one is eight. She's a better skiier than I.

In my defense, I'm only six on the inside.



That one there is five. I urged him to jump into the street and notify any passing eighteen wheelers of his presence by waving his poles around wildy should they bear down on him.



I cannot convince the obstinate lad to ask for his two front teeth for Christmas. He's all, "Who even cares about toofs, Mom? I want some Star Wars legos. Santa can keep the buckers."



When skis get tiring (sort of like the continuing speculation about Katie Holmes' tense friendship with Victoria Beckham), we move to the bear claws. My tastes being more refined, I often attach French crullers to mes pieds.



After an hour's romp, Niblet is more than ready to "act like Mommy grading research papers."

Inspired by the drama of his body language, I head back inside and bring my computer out of its hibernation.

"Wax On; Wax Off"


In the past week, my mid-sized burg has received upwards of a foot and a half of snow. In other words, I've already had my Christmas.

Snow, to me, is a gift. I love that junk--slippery, light, heavy, cold, transmuting, crystalline; it satisfies my Myers-Briggsian ENFP need for change, as it takes the entire world around me, covers it with Abominable Snowman vomit, and makes everything seem different and new and worthy of attention.

Plus, snow means skiing. And, hypothetically, I love skiing.

Since we didn't leave the house so much during my youth in Montana (but, man, did we watch us some Family Feud!), I only took up cross-country skiing when I was 29. In my mind, then, that was last year, even though a closer look at the calendar might reveal it to have been 11 years ago.

When I started skiing, I lived in Southern Minnesota, where the strongest adjective that can be applied to a hill is "undulating." As well, I didn't know anyone else who skiied, so I pretty much winged it when it came to buying equipment and technique. Suffice it to say, I went "novice" with both. I learned to slide a little on short, wide, waxless skis. Shuffling along, I zip-a-dee-doo-dahed and looked at deer and squirrels at the local nature center. They looked back at me. It was all very "Disney on Ice," except no one came along and took a rifle and blew Bambi's mom's head off while I shooshed by.

A decade later, my equipment and ability were still stuck at novice. I had met and married Ye Olde Groom, a Norwegiany type who had been on skis from age 4 (admittedly difficult during the summer months, but, amazingly, he still managed to swim, eat corn on the cob, attend the State Fair, and learn to cross-pollinate corn, all with a pair of Rossignols strapped on). He'd even competed as an individual in cross-country skiing at the State tournament during high school. Having held a life-long anti-jock policy (killer premiums), I had to take a great leap of confidence to allow such an experienced athlete into my life, much less to allow him to lay eyes on me attempting to ski. The first time he watched me barrel down an icy hill, he was typically kind, applauding the fact that I had stayed on my feet, smiling joyfully, the whole way down.

I confessed that my face, pulled back by the G-force of the wind during my uncontrolled plunge, had been frozen into kind of a death grimace.

Nevertheless, I benefitted from the tips he gave me. But then, a few months later, we started running the Kid Gig, and that meant tag-team parenting, which, in turn, meant I was back to skiing alone, my technique petrified. Two winters ago, when we finally took the financial plunge to buy me some new, waxable skis, it was my will that became petrified. While my hope had been that better equipment could help me take that leap into becoming a better skiier, the actual result was that better skis highlighted completely my inability to ski. Those old, waxless skis? They'd obligingly hidden my lack of know-how. However, genuinely slick skis caused me to cry, panic, and then crumble out there on the trails. They went really fast, and I didn't want to go really fast. I had rather cottoned-to skiing like an 80-year-old priest, it turned out.

So now I'm all about rationalizing my way into situations where I need to use my old, comfort skis. The newer, excellent skis sit largely unused there, in the corner; they've taken up crocheting. I may get a lovely scarf out of my neglect. Instead, I either make a case for the temperatures being too cold or, um, too warm for me to deal with waxing my hot-shot skis. Barring that, I have decided to cultivate an enthusiasm for back-country and river skiing, pursuits that require wider, hack-em-up skis and virtually no understanding of how to use the poles or hit a rhythm. I don't even mind the spots with frozen waterfalls, where I have to take off my skis and huck them to the top and then scramble up after them. I'm never a better skiier than when I'm holding my skis and tossing them away from my body.

Oh yes, I'm a rhapsodic river skiier. Today, I twittered out for my first river ski of the season. Sure, it's been cold, but the season is still in its infancy, and the subzero temperatures have just settled in, so as I departed, I tossed a quick, mostly-facetious, "Hope I don't break through" to Groom.

Forty minutes later, after zig-zagging past and over myriad patches of open water and burbling holes, I had, indeed, broken through at least five times. The first time a five-foot slate of ice crumpled below me, causing my being to drop a foot, I squealed like Angelina Jolie spotting an Asian orphan. I didn't get wet, though, and since I know the creek I was on isn't particularly deep, I kept going. And breaking through.

After a bit, one of my skis was caked in two inches of ice and would no longer glide. I was snowshoeing on skis on a semi-frozen creek. But, hark!, there was a birdie. Tweet, tweet, little birdie. Look at Jocelyn here, being a skiier!

Crash. Down I went again. On about the sixth whomp through into the still-running creek, my one ski had become a leaden popsicle, weighing me down. I did a weird little wet-in-a-frozen-creek version of the hokey pokey and finally managed to extract that iced-up paw from the waters below.

Since the whole point of my venture had been exercise and relaxation, and since I was feeling decidedly weighed down and anxious, I did the logical thing: I took off my skis and climbed up the side of the little canyon to the road.

It was an agreeable toddle back down the road to my car. During my walk, I considered the ambivalence that marks my relationship with skiing. I have a bit of a complex about it, what with living in an intensely-accomplished outdoorsy community. I would like to be good. I would like to hang with the big guns. I would like to be able to stop screaming in my head when I have the sticks strapped to my feet.

Odds are, that isn't going to happen. What does satisfy me is knowing that I'm doing it and that there is a certain grace in trying. I don't come from a tradition of "getting out there." Yet I'm getting out there. In the larger context of my life, the fact that I even own skis is a marvel. The fact that I willingly take them onto thin-ice-over-running-water somewhat cavalierly is nothing short of miraculous.

As is the feeling that my kids will grow up free of my athletic demons. Although I will fail them in other ways, and they will grow up to discover they lack other skills they wish they had, I can at least snarl at them in the middle of a future argument, "Listen. You know how to ski. I gave you that. So hesh up, Little Miss 'Why Can't I Play the Bassoon When All the Other Kids Can'!" (that's generally how I talk to the kids, incidentally)

For right now, when they are young, and my feelings toward them are uncluttered with too much annoyance, I can simply call it a miracle: thanks to a community program called KidSki, my kids will always find skiing natural.

Tomorrow is the first meeting of Kidski for this year. It will be Girl's third year and Niblet's first. Already, they've been in the yard this week, tootling around merrily on their skis. Niblet spends most of the time on his back, skis to the sky, eating snow. Girl, however, whips around the house in gleeful loops.

This is Girl, two years ago, when she was five.


Here is her Kidski class, the same year.











Groom built a "digger sled," which can be pulled while he skis. We took Girl out on the river with it one day, a couple seasons ago. She refused to set even one boot in it--because she insisted on skiing instead. Of course, she got all frustrated and had an enormous meltdown out there, and we had to threaten to leave her there in the snowy woodlands to grow up a feral child, raised by wolves, speaking like Jodie Foster in Nell, before she stopped her fit and allowed us to take the skis off her feet. But, hell, she wanted to ski that badly. I would have been in the sled in a trice, were I her. I was in the sled, in fact, as we waited for her to wind down, the crazy little snitter.


Girl skis across a plain of caved-in creek ice. It's always good to send out a child as a "test balloon" first, when the strength of ice is in question.

I could have used her today, as I broke through repeatedly. In her absence, though, I plowed on, gave up, and hoofed it back to the car, mentalling marveling at her easy confidence, her free-wheeling joy, on skis.


I don't get it. But I sure do admire it.

"Paradise White"





Look at them, those long, white, snowy lines of powder.

I spent all last weekend snorting them up.

It was quite a binge.

Two weeks ago, I was jonesing for snow.

But then I pawned my fishtank, sold some plasma, and scrounged for loose change in the sofa cushions. And whaddya know...I got me some, and after the flakes fell, I started frollicking in the stuff around the clock, neglecting sleep, friends, and work as I went on my spree.

In fact, I'm still coming down from a lost weekend of unrestrained, immoderate self-indulgence.

Some people looked at our newly-fallen gutter glitter and thought, "Well, iddn't that purty?" In our household, however, we were like Aaron Sorkin with a new coke mirror, pack of razor blades, and rolled up Benji in his quivering hands: we went a little wacky on the junk.

We got amped on skijoring.

We got high from the howls of of sled dogs.

We ate weasel dust tossed onto our faces by a slew of runners at the start of the 2007 U.S. National Snowshoe Championships outside of Minneapolis (you rocked it, Groom!).

Seven kilometers into the race, Groom redefined "blow" as he whooshed past.

Because our addiction naturally translates into a cycle for the children, even Girl took off down the dusty roads.

A little later in the day, a friend and I (shout out to i-jim!) reveled in Lady Snow, as well, running the Citizens' race at the championships; #102 suits me, doncha think? And note how my triumphant finish rallied the crowd, rousing them to a series of cheers and chants of "Jocelyn, Jocelyn, Jocelyn." Either that, or they spurred me to the finish line through their passionate indifference.

After racing off our jitters, we spent the rest of the afternoon inner tubing down those long lanes of powder that started this post. At the end of each run, we'd stop and mist a little Ocean Spray up our nostrils, just to fool the bouncers.

Later, in the absence of any national championship, though, we still continued our toot through Mama Blanca, hefting the kids off the deck (There's a sink or swim moral here, right? We're really just giving the kids a lesson of the streets).

And now, at the end of my binge, I feel like I've been run over by an eighteen-wheeler, I'm shaking and wet, and I'm reconciled to taking about twelve steps towards Spring.

Time to look at green buds for a few months, drag out the flip-flops, and dim the snow lights.