Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

The other day was awesome! I tweaked my knee and jammed my shoulder (the one I had surgery on last summer), but it was still awesome. Pretty sad that a day ending in injury was my best day yet. But I guess it’s understandable, considering I spent the first five or six weeks battling pneumonia and a thrown-out back. With a start like that, a messed up knee and shoulder is an improvement.

During the dead of winter, we hardly get any light. The sun comes up, runs along the horizon for 3 or 4 hours, and then goes back down. But we are approaching the other end of the spectrum. Now the sun doesn’t know when to go home—it just stays and stays. It’s kind of like an unexpected house guest. At first, you are really excited to have it drop by. But when it refuses to leave, you start wondering. It stays light here until after 10:30 now, and it gets later every day. Soon, it won’t be going down much at all.

This whole sun-switch has our internal clock completely thrown off. Unless we look at our watch, we have no idea what time it is. The other evening, we were doing stuff until dark, and then we sat down for dinner. It was 11 PM. Our systems are all whacked up.

So back to the terrific day. It was gorgeous outside! And we had sun! And it was not too cold (we'd hit double digits). Life was really looking up. So Keri, Taco, and I went cross country skiing.

The locals think we’re nuts to enjoy skiing. It’s hard to stay up on skinny skis, it takes energy, and you can’t go near as fast as on a snow machine. I guess they look at us the same way I look at people who seem to enjoy jogging—figure there must be a few screws loose.

But out in the open with nothing but nature and a couple other nut jobs (fellow skiers) is a wonderful place to be. And around here, if you go fifty feet in almost any direction, you end up in the thick of nature. So we took off. It was my first time on skis this year. We'd been gone a whole ten minutes before I wiped out—which was a coupe, because I expected to biff it after only five minutes.

We picked up a couple of extras on the way out. Or rather, they picked us up. A couple of village kids started following us, and before long they had started a game of “tag” with Keri and Taco. I was deemed too dangerous after my first face-plant, so I just stood there and took pictures. The kids ran all over, yelling and chasing and being chased. The kids were squealing, and my guys were roaring. I don’t know who was enjoying it more. All four of them ran and skied themselves to exhaustion.

When they finally slowed down, the kids decided they wanted to ski too—so they stood on the back of Keri’s skis and held on while he took them for a ride. It was really fun to watch.

I actually made it through most of the trip before I hurt myself. I waited until I was within sight of the houses where people could see, and did a spectacular face-plant that was quite laughable. If there had been judges, I’m sure I would have rated a 9.7 at least. I could feel my knee hurting, so I took my skis off and limped the rest of the way home. And the next day, I could hardly move my knee or shoulder. I hobbled around the house for days.

But tweaked knee and jammed shoulder included, it was still a terrific day!