Winter Fun
Jan. 15th, 2011 07:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eregyrnToday, I went cross-country skiing for the first time, and did not even kill myself or break anything! This is a minor miracle, because I am not good at ice-skating; I tried rollerblading once and broke my elbow; and I have never been on skis before, at all. (I view the concept of downhill skiing with suspicion. But I always wanted to try cross-country. It's flat! That always seemed much more reasonable to me.)
What they don't tell you (except for how![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
my_tallest totally told me) is that cross-country is only MOSTLY flat. There are little hills that you have to learn to go up, and deal with going down.
Anyway, I had planned to go to the walk-in lessons at a nearby ski track, but they were full. Andkatie_m was with me, and she said she'd done it before and it really wasn't hard, so why didn't we just rent the skis and do it? And so we did.
GOSH, those things are slippery. But by the end of the two hours, I was getting around pretty well, the stride felt pretty natural, and I even managed one smaller downhill, and then one bigger downhill (where the wind blew back my hair and everything!) without falling at all. Woo! So yes, I would like to go again.
In a different category of winter "fun", I also bring you, belatedly, some pictures from this past Wednesday's blizzard. It was an impressively sticky snow. And then, at the very end, I bring you video of Emily-cat exploring the snow. (She really likes walking outside, even when it's cold and snowy. Alas, I just barely did not turn on the video soon enough to catch her rolling in it. But then her little feet get cold and she wants to go in.)
Mounds of snow. The lump in the righthand foreground is my car. I like how the snow has plastered itself all over the vertical surface of the garage. Every north and northeast surface is like that; still, days later, even.
Opening my back door. And the snow is only that low right there because of the wind currents. It was deeper elsewhere.
My poor little car. You can see that I got the bright idea to leave the windshield wipers out so that they wouldn't get iced to the windshield.
Gives a sense of how deep the snow was on the roof. After I had shoveled out along both sides, I then pushed all the stuff off the roof and the sides of the car... and it was about as deep as it had been before.
Furry legs. I love my furry boots. They keep my legs and my feet extremely warm. (Note: not real fur.)
Harvard is a Winter Wonderland.
Finally: Emily is Adventure-Cat.
(The sky looks blue in the pan up at the end there, but it's not. It's actually a very very dark grey, as this was from the middle of the storm.)
What they don't tell you (except for how
my_tallest totally told me) is that cross-country is only MOSTLY flat. There are little hills that you have to learn to go up, and deal with going down. Anyway, I had planned to go to the walk-in lessons at a nearby ski track, but they were full. And
katie_m was with me, and she said she'd done it before and it really wasn't hard, so why didn't we just rent the skis and do it? And so we did. GOSH, those things are slippery. But by the end of the two hours, I was getting around pretty well, the stride felt pretty natural, and I even managed one smaller downhill, and then one bigger downhill (where the wind blew back my hair and everything!) without falling at all. Woo! So yes, I would like to go again.
In a different category of winter "fun", I also bring you, belatedly, some pictures from this past Wednesday's blizzard. It was an impressively sticky snow. And then, at the very end, I bring you video of Emily-cat exploring the snow. (She really likes walking outside, even when it's cold and snowy. Alas, I just barely did not turn on the video soon enough to catch her rolling in it. But then her little feet get cold and she wants to go in.)
Mounds of snow. The lump in the righthand foreground is my car. I like how the snow has plastered itself all over the vertical surface of the garage. Every north and northeast surface is like that; still, days later, even.
Opening my back door. And the snow is only that low right there because of the wind currents. It was deeper elsewhere.
My poor little car. You can see that I got the bright idea to leave the windshield wipers out so that they wouldn't get iced to the windshield.
Gives a sense of how deep the snow was on the roof. After I had shoveled out along both sides, I then pushed all the stuff off the roof and the sides of the car... and it was about as deep as it had been before.
Furry legs. I love my furry boots. They keep my legs and my feet extremely warm. (Note: not real fur.)
Harvard is a Winter Wonderland.
Finally: Emily is Adventure-Cat.
(The sky looks blue in the pan up at the end there, but it's not. It's actually a very very dark grey, as this was from the middle of the storm.)
