This last week or so

hasn't been too great for me blogging, wise. There was the exam, and then post-exam house messiness, and then the weather turned nice and mild so I went skiing Friday afternoon and all Saturday, and I went to the metropolis of Espanola on Sunday to my favorite store, Canadian Tire, and bought various house hold goods and a new skidoo suit on sale. A skidoo suit is basically a thick snow suit, not unlike the kind your mom would bundle you up in when you where a kid and played outside in the winter, only here adults where them too, and they are usaully black, navy, or zippy florescent colors, not pastel pink or powder blue or ducky yellow. Still, sometimes, when I'm zipping up my padded suit, I have these flashbacks of being bundled up and sent off to sled by my mom. But one thing you learn about surviving in Canada - it's all about having the appropriate clothing for the elements. Winter can be fun if yer dressed right, honest.

Crosscountry skiing is the oddest sport. It is gentle - you feel so cushioned, warm and swishy, and the scenery is so distracting, that you don't realize how it utilizes completely different muscles than walking and running and the things you normally do, and that you may roll out bed painfully sore the next day. Cross country skiing uses strange unidentifiable muscles in the groin, the insides of your legs, the backs of your upper arms, all sorts of weird oblique muscles, muscles on the surface of your upper toes! Muscles you would use for almost nothing else except unusual sex acts or dancing. It's taken me two days but I think I've recovered.

Carolyn stayed home today; she woke up in the middle of the night with an earache.This morning she didn't have a fever and said it hurt "only medium" and would go if I thought she should, but I'm glad I didn't make her, because she slept like five hours this afternoon, something she never does; so something must be brewing. My mom used to make us go to school unless we had raging fevers or were projectile vomiting. Sometimes I think kids miss less school and get over it faster if you put them to bed the first or second day and just give into it. It was like a Puritan work ethic thing with my mom; we had to go. I wasn't even a big faker; I liked school. My brother once blew up a thermomter by holding it too close to the bedside lamp.

The Tehkummah Historical society is creating a community cookbook. It's a common fund raiser in small towns, and they solicit recipes. They wanted "family" or "historical" recipes. So my contribution was my Cincinnati Chili recipe which I developed as a homesick immigrant. I loved being able to use the phrases "Chili parlor" and "five way" in a sentence. It sounds vaguely derelect.