Other Lives

I think I may have been a polar bear in a previous life.

The snow started again last night before I went to bed. When I got up, I noticed that the pavements, and ruts in the ice on the road that had shown through, were now covered in snow.
It stopped around the time Colin and Justin stopped showing off, but soon after, started up again and has been going all day. And I'm still as excited about it as I was at first fall.

Yesterday I went out for a walk on the trails. Walk may be rather an oversimplification. You know those dreams where you are moving through something viscous and not really getting anywhere? Yes, it was like that. I soon became annoyed with myself for wearing a coat. I neither wanted to wear it, nor carry it, but I had no choice.
I saw an eagle. It was very high up, but I could clearly see its white head and tail feathers.

The experience made me a tad, but only a tad, sympathetic to those who get lost in the snow. Even knowing the trail as well as I do, and as clearly cut as it is, with everything covered in snow, there were places where it wasn't clear which way the path led.
But another two skiers lost their lives on Whistler mountain because they didn't follow the instructions of signs telling them not to go off piste, that there were restrictions because of snow conditions.
Today, four people had to be rescued on Grouse mountain because they were where they were expressly told by staff not to go. They are being charged with the cost of the rescue operation and are now claiming they hadn't needed to be rescued anyway. Jerks.

Another thing we did on hectic New Year's Eve was too go to a Chinese Restaurant. This is more daunting than it sounds since here, the Chinese restaurants are full of Chinese people, all talking loudly in their native tongues, and no-one offers you a set meal for six people.
We went with a friend who is Chinese and who did the necessary. Although I refuse to use them myself, chopsticks do render a meal convivial when used by the Chinese. It is their very ungainlyness that renders this. Chopsticks are just pointy shovels really, like eating with spoons but without the spoon part. So there is no ceremony. No-one's watching to see of you're tilting your soup bowl in the right direction, everyone's just slurping and shovelling, sucking up noodles and picking things up with their fingers. The tablecloth is a war zone. Even the Chinese cannot pour efficiently from their own teapots.
And the best thing of all is - there's no Mexican standoff over the last piece of any dish.

My own personal jury's still out on the Hijab. Is it or isn't it? I don't know, but so long as women wear it because they WANT to, then fair do's.
But now, I feel there is definitely a feminist side to Muslim women. There is a court case in London where a Muslim woman is suing an ex-employer for firing her for refusing to wear a dress that would have been to revealing. I hope she wins, it is good for all of us, like the two sisters who fought and won because they were discriminated against because at a certain level in certain city jobs, business is done in pubs and strip clubs. It shouldn't be. It simply reinforces the Old Boys' Club.

And the Poinsettia. What to do about the Poinsettia. By Twelfth Night, the decs must be down and the Christmas foliage out of the house along with the mischievous spirits they have collected. The holly and the ivy are usually in a dessicated state by that stage in the game, but the dear old Poinsettia IS game and has held its own. It seems just wrong to dump it out into the snow.

Well, I figure it's OK to leave it. The plant is indigenous to Guatemala and Mexico apparently and thus must have been unknown to the Celtae who set the rules of Christmas.....er, I mean Yuletide.

Outside, the whine, whine, whine of some huge boat-like car spinning its wheels as it fails to move anywhere. It's probably more difficult to rock a car like that using just the gears.
Schade.

I'm not initially enthused by the new Doctor Who. David Tennant would most certainly have been an almost impossible act to follow, but this chap looks more suitable for a vampire part. But then without the magical partnership of Russell Davis and David Tennant, well, we'll see, we'll just see.
The afterglow of truly golden days can fade fast.