Simon says

Crystal mentioned to me that she had a student who lived with his dad who was always away working.  Dad left money for food but the student had no idea how to cook so lived on junk food and gummy bears, for breakfast.  The student is a nice kid, smart enough, no reason he can't learn to cook but I guess no one ever showed him. The demise of home ec. has been well lamented elsewhere and gone are the days when it went without saying that you that learnt life skills where you lived life, at home.  This got me thinking.  I have been through my own arc of gastronomic ambition, from the 8 slices of toast and a pint of tea diet at boarding school to phoning my mum from uni to ask if I should still cook the chicken if it had gone green.  I ate a lot of frozen sausages during that period of my life.  In the last few years I've been a bit more ambitious as time and money have allowed.  But since our second kidlet was born I've reigned it in.  No more so...

Sunday, April 5th, 2015

Friday, April 3rd, 2015 Simon and Derek take Felicity and Tristan to Camp Fortune. The sun is shining and it's plus 5C.

The last time I wrote a non-skiing post was after we'd been to the farm on March 7th.  I had warned the readership (me) that the blog would be taking a break due to coursework commitments.  We have been feeling stretched of late so it is very pleasant to find myself on this, the first day of April, sitting alone at the kitchen table at 11am enjoying bright sunshine and silence.  Toby is napping and Auntie Ronnie, who is at home waiting for Jackson #5 to arrive, has whisked Felicity off to the grocery store.  I am confident that my Spec Ed course instructor does not read my blog and if she does I will beg forgiveness for not doing extra work but I think I am finally up to date. A quick recap of the last three weeks.  A week preparing to go on holiday, a week on holiday in the Dominican and a week catching up from being on holiday.  The Dominican Republic and the resort of Viva Wyndham Dominicus Palace (no less than a palace for the Fergusons, although I'm ...

Felicity took Crystal downhill. We skied P10-Champlain-#1-P10. Stunning weather.

Felicity skied part way UP the hill today. Age 3yrs 1 week. Good job!

Glorious.

Before we went to the museum on Family Day Monday the kids needed to be entertained while I did the Loppet on Sunday.  And if I was skiing, they wanted to ski.  And because there was a wind chill of -35 outside, they got to ski inside.  Felicity is so competent she is carrying a picnic basket, plate and doll.   Toby looks like a natural.  I always remember seeing toddlers running around the chalet in salopettes and ski boots when we went skiing in Switzerland on a school trip age 11.  I don't know why that memory has stuck but I'm pleased we've been able to at least give them a feel for being on the snow fro the outset.  The forecast is for a high of -1C this coming Sunday so we shall dig out the shorts and sun cream and hit the slopes. On Monday it was cold again, blah, blah, blah.  So we wet to the wonderful Children's Museum which is housed inside the spectacular Museum of History, formerly Civilisation.  They had so...

See if you can figure out this pictorial representation of skiing in the Arctic north that is Ottawa (we're really nowhere near the Arctic): Technically the Loppet is in Gatineau but it's all part of the National Capital Region.  I know that skiing is inherently a cold weather sport and that it is not much fun otherwise but there are different degrees of cold.  For a start, and what better place to start, there is our friend Kelvin, way down there where there ain't no Kelvins: 0 degrees Kelvin (-273C).  That's really cold.  That's where there is no energy at all.  Anything warmer than that and we have energy but if it's colder than we are, 37-ish degrees C (310K!) we're losing heat to our environment.  So when on Sunday, day of the Loppet ski race it says that it will be -23C on the start line with a very brisk wind gusting 50kmh, we're losing a lot of heat.  This can be mitigated by some well chosen items of clothing but the face gets little prote...

This is the question I asked, idly, aloud, somewhat rhetorically.  "In here!" was the answer I got, emphatically, from Felicity who was simultaneously banging her hand on the super lazy susan corner cabinet.  A super lazy susan is, I believe, differentiated from a simple, straight forward, bog standard lazy susan by the sole fact of its separately rotating two shelves.  Make sense?  Good.  So what better place to keep that elusive, bendy, unruly and enigmatic of concepts: the time.  I am affording myself this indulgence of semantics today to compensate the cross I have to bear in the form of a continuous stream of green/yellow/dark green/dark yellow phlegm emanating from my daughter's nose today.  All of that on about 3 hours of sleep last night thanks to my course, some late night grocery shopping and a Toby who refused to sleep from 3am until 5.30am when we finally gave up and got up. Pictures come to you today from yesterday.  Reading ...

We did it. Chris Roy and I. Yesterday, Saturday.  37km skate skiing around the park. It was fun, really fun. I took some photos.  Here are the details: P8-P9 - 3.5 P10-junction - 4 Junction-Champlain - 2.5 Champlain-McKinstry - 9.2 McKinstry-Champlain - 9.2 Champlain-Penguin via #1 - 7.3 Penguin-P8 - 1 Approx. 36.7km We left a bag at Huron on the way up which was a magical treat on the way back. Stopped at Huron, McKinstry and Huron again. Strava said 36.5 when we got back to P8 so we skied 250m towards P9 and back!