Metamorphosism

Blogtalk 2.0

Currently debating whether I should attend Blogtalk 2.0. It's being held in Vienna. But 5-6 July, those are week days, aren't they. Feh. I'd have to use up two days out of the 5 weeks vacation I get.

Or feign illness...

Hmm...

Oh what a perfect day

Usually the knowledge that you will ultimately die -- not now, not soon, rather at some distant, distant, please, very, very far off time, but still, ultimately -- is comforting. Or, perhaps by congratulating yourself on your cleverness at deducing that it is death that raises life's price and maybe even value by giving it scarcity you manage to distract yourself from what might otherwise terrorize you. Whatever. Either way, you accept, more or less, the birth-work-death cycle.

Except on days such as this. This, the day in question, being last Thursday I believe, when I stood at a window at work looking at the snow with a single thought in my mind: I could live forever on a day like this. The snow was perfect snowman/igloo-building snow. The sky was overcast but not dark; pleasantly but not blindingly/skin-carcinogenicly/cataract-causingly bright. Cold so it wasn't melting but not cold-cold. Just under freezing.

In other words, a perfect day. I even thought of the song.

I could live forever. I suppose I did, in those couple minutes.

Then I went back to my desk and checked my referrer stats again.

On sexual reproduction in humans

Jadedju's thoughtful essay on dating, Don't Ever Take a Walk with Me, got me thinking, which is often a bad idea, so I stopped and began to reminisce instead.

Not only is my wife a very sweet person at times and I {{{heart}}} her a whole lot, which by itself is probably enough of a reason to stay married; being married also means I don't have to date anymore (except for dates with my wife which I enjoy greatly, or dad-daughter dates with my daughters, which is also nice). But dating-dating? First-dating? I am so thankful I don't have to do that. So, so thankful. I would rather go in for another root canal than go on a first date.

I've had a couple memorable dates, though, back in the sad days before I met my wife.

Liisa, for example. A smart brunette of Finnish extraction I met at college in Seattle. Interesting tastes in music and attire. Exotic double vowel in her name. Liked to eat and drink. She invited me over to her dorm room (she lived a couple floors down or up and down the hall) for lasagne and wine. All her dorm-mates were out. We filled up on the delicious pasta dish she had cooked and emptied a bottle or two of red wine.

We sat down on the sofa. She got what I thought was a sort of dreamy or sleepy expression in her eyes and lay down with her head in my lap, and did something I will never forget as long as I live.

I won't say what it was Liisa did on account of all the freaky search visitors that would attract, but when my kids were little, like babies, especially the first one, you know how you want to make sure they get enough to eat, or actually drink, and you sort of insist they finish the entire bottle of formula, then you prop them up on your shoulder and burp them and they go *BLEARGH* and you have the formula all down your shoulder and upper arm and part of your chest? Well, when my kids did that, I always thought, "Well, at least it's not a kilo of lasagne and a bottle's-worth of cheap Chianti."

Happy world domination day

Hi. I'm a bit preoccupied today with efforts to publicize Teh Bgu. You can help introduce him to a wider audience by linking http://metamorphosism.com/bug/ on your site today, if you don't already, and if it like doesn't clash with your usual style or anything. If enough people link, you see, the site gets onto Blogdex or other similar places, and millions of people see it. Literally millions. And they all come to the site to play with the Ebug Bugbot and buy the merchandise and syndicate the comic and all that. So, if it's no problem for you - totally optional of course - please give The Bug a link today. We'll return to regularly scheduled programming shortly.

Ebug

Ebug - the world's first bugbot.

Talk to Ebug and cheer up.

The first date is always the hardest

Now with helicopters.

Queer marriage

First, go read Peggy.

Also Gwen.

I've always found marriage a most queer institution, so this whole controversy is a little hard for me to understand. I'm straight, I'm married and I don't feel threatened by anyone else getting married unless it's like Rush Limbaugh marrying Ann Coulter and they're planning offspring.

I'm an ordained minister (and have performed a marriage, and they're still married), and wouldn't mind performing marriages between consenting adult humans as long as they promise to coax me thru when I get stagefright.

Fog blah blah sunrise etc

Left for work early again today, drove Beta to the train station. Light was good, days are getting longer, it was nice to be able to see things on the way to the office again, like fields covered in snow, patches of fog, a sky freezing cold and nearly white, tail end of a sunrise fading from purple to orange, icicles a meter long (that's about 39 inches for those of you etc etc) hanging from the freeway overpasses.

Yes, it's been good icicle weather. Damn, icicle is one of those words, the more you look at it, the more it looks like a spelling error.

Icicle, icicle, icicle, icicle. Icicleicicleicicleicicleicicleicicle.

It's fasting season, so everyone is eating herring here today, except me. My sweetie is out of town for a week, it's just me and the kids, and the grandparents. Oh and the cats. Mother-in-law emphasized last night, then emphatically reiterated, the importance, the essential necessity, that I not pack the kids any meat products or by-products in their school lunches this morning. So they got bread-and-butter, and strawberries (you'd think strawberries out of season would be more luxurious and non-fasting than bologna) and carrot sticks, because they always get carrot sticks. Gamma feeds them to her friends in school, or trades them for sweets. Not sure what Beta now does with hers. In grade school she also distributed them. I kept her entire class in carrot sticks.

Kids who distribute carrot sticks are high up in the pecking order in Austrian schools, or something. They also buy friends with the chocolate chip cookies I sometimes bake.

So anyway, no bologna so God is happy. Or at least my mother-in-law. Is there a difference?

Inner quadralogue, II

Id: Woo! Woo! Woet! Yes!
Superego: Ssshh!
Ego: Relax, both of you. The windows are up. Anyway, she's wearing a coat. What's with you, Id?
Id: Under the coat she's naked!
Superego: You're disgusting.
Ego: She's wearing jeans and a sweater under the coat.
Id: The jeans were faded, did you see that? They were faded in a way that suggests she has a butt.
Ego: Everyone has a butt, except maybe for that actress who was in, what was that movie called? Speed?
Superego: Sandra Bullock has no butt?
Ego: I remember her saying that in an interview. What do I know?
Id: Ha! You said butt!
Superego: Grow up.
Ego: You know what? I'm tired of both of you. [Stops car at red light.] Both of you, in the back seat right this minute. Gestalt, get up here in front.
Gestalt. Heh.
Superego: But without me you'd do something you regret.
Ego: The only thing I regret is paying any attention to your prissy, wet-blanket party-pooping fear-mongering warnings all my life.
Id: Hah! You the man! But without me you'd have no fun.
Ego: Fun? What fun? You think you're so bad, but what trouble have you gotten me into? What fun have I ever had on account of you? All my youth, there I was, surrounded by cheap booze, fast cars and beautiful interesting people and your idea of fun was to find where my dad hid the nasty magazines he found on the bus.
Superego: Under the mattress.
Ego: Where else?
Superego: Did you ever find the quirt in the dresser?
Ego: No fooling?
Gestalt: Heh. Look at the big picture, man.
Id: But...
Superego: But...
Ego: Forget it. From now on, I'm driving.
Superego: The Id's on my half.
Id: Am not. Go run for President, why don't you.
Ego: Pipe down back there, I've had it.
Gestalt: Heh. Where's the Sepultura CD?

Think global, eat local

Ten years ago I lost fifteen pounds without dieting, and kept it off for a long time. Beta, who was then four, had a medical condition which required that she abstain from eating anything containing various ingredients including primarily white flour, yeast, and sugar. We decided to support her for the several months she ate like that by eating that way too. We could eat as much as we wanted, as long as it didn't include this list of ingredients.

Have you ever read the list of contents of anything you buy in the store? Everything contains sugar and yeast. It was like raw carrots for us, and one or two other things. But very healthy.

So that's what I'm going to try again. Sometime soon. The idea of processed food is increasingly repugnant to me anyway. The food that I eat, I think, ought to be something simple. Like, food. Not some industrial product.

Like, besides the fact that my kids hate it, the idea that consuming tobacco supports rich subsidized monopolists who willingly trade the health of millions for more money makes it easier for me to refrain from smoking.

One could, I think, come up with political diets. The no-grain diet, in protest of those vast fields of wheat. The no-corn diet. The no feedlot meat diet. Whatever.

I'm cutting down on sugar, yeast and white flour, and you won't catch me eating tobacco either.

Dainty

Faeries

Gamma had two friends over so when I got home late last night the house looked as if... imagine faeries are having a war and are going off to war, or are going away for a long time for some reason like to college or off on some faery quest and they have a big paerty beforehaend to say good bye to their faemilies and fraends and shag their sweethearts senseless in all sorts of constellations in one, potentially final, huge bash with faery lights hovering around and a gigantic punchbowl full of some delectable intoxicating nectar-like liquid pulsating like disco lights and glitter, glitter everywhaer. That's what the house looked like. I thought, eh, little girls at play. I even had glitter on me and I had only been home five minutes. From the upstairs, clear down to the cellar, glitter tracks.

And Gamma was tired.

And we went to bed.

And this morning, wind and sand blowing in from the Sahara. Pretty sunsets.

Cats sleeping here and there. Glittering cats.

I'm cranky as hell. Cynical and sarcastic and nasty.

Gamma stood beside me. Placed one hand on my back, one hand on my stomach, and said, "whoa, dad," in a serious tone. I'd read that if you want to lose weight, best way is to eat 5-6 meals a day instead of just 3 or heaven forbid, fasting. Maybe they should be smaller than average maels. I'll have to try that next week.

Inner quadralogue

Id: Woo! Woo hoo!! Baby!!
Superego: Please. Sshh. Have a little class.
Ego: It's okay. The windows are rolled up.
Id: Man, did you see that leather miniskirt?
Superego: [Rolls eyes.]
Ego: I'm trying to drive. I'm concentrating on traffic.
Id: Walking up those stairs there. Woo!! Woo! Check that one out.
Superego: You're terrible.
Gestalt: You're all looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Ego: Who invited you?
Superego: You'll have to leave. We don't understand anything about Gestalt.
Id: Who gives a damn? Neither do 99% our readers. They'll just think we're smart.
Gestalt: You can let me out at this light.
Id: Baby! Look at those boots.
Superego: Sshh.
Id: Seventeen is such a hot age.
Superego: Sshh!

Tactical error

For instance:

1. He gets up early to pack lunches, empty and/or load the dishwasher, make coffee. When she gets up a few minutes later, he pours her coffee and all she has to do is look at him and he pours her milk too. No, not that milk, the other milk. That milk is past its expiration date, although it still tastes fine.
   
2. When he gets home from work and feigns shock (seriously, only feigns) that he has to serve himself and a kid dinner, the kid explains it like this: "Well, you're the man, aren't you?"
   
3. He knows which cat prefers which catfood. Like, they both eat the expensive gourmet stuff out of the foil astronaut envelopes designed to get catfood juice on your fingers, and both will eat the chunky stuff, although one prefers it with gravy and the other in aspic. The dead cat preferred the paté type, which both live cats boycott. Especially the one with vegetables and cornflakes.
   
4. The birds have three bird feeders, but only eat out of one, ignoring the remaining two, which have been full of the same food all winter, although all three are right next to each other.

He tells her this. He says, maybe am I doing something wrong? She says, you're talking like a blog post nowadays. He says, no way.

Well, that's finally settled

Maybe now "President" Bush's liberal critics will finally shut up about whether he ever went to the dentist while "serving" in the National Guard. Picture here.
(We must admit, however, that it does leave open the question of whether he flossed, not to mention did he regularly apply one of those little rubber pick things).

My question, though, is: What's up with George Will's toupee?

Crime and punishment

Prize? What prize?

The limericks were all very good. I loved them all equally, but finally managed to narrow them down to a three-way tie:

Mark and Marjorie win for managing to incorporate all the rules (LOTR, psychologist and parasite) and still adhere strictly to the limerick form:

An orc with a raging psychosis
Said "Doctor, what's your diagnosis?"
The doctor said "Orc,
you eat too much pork.
I think you just have trichinosis."

Liz (who gave no URL) wins twice for rhyming "sucker" with "fucker" and for calling me a "perfect, post-modernist man" (twice)

A trendy French shrink named Lacan
Thought love added up to rien
But construct or not,
You're incredibly hot,
My perfect, post-modernist Man.

An earnest young doctor named Beach
fell madly in love with a leech
that little blood-sucker
was such a hot fucker
that heaven seemed quite within reach.

Last but not least, Joeri wins with his tapeworm entry:

A Diphyllobothrium latum
(A pseudophillidean tapeworm)
can grow to 10 meters
among raw fish eaters.
It can make a sturdy man squirm.

Congratulations, everyone.

Third party

Hugh Hefner would make a good presidential candidate. I'd run on a ticket with him (he'd need someone for the family vote).

Happy World Salmonella Day

It takes longer than four hours for unrefrigerated home-made Chinese food to go bad, right?

Oh, yeah

Almost forgot. We had a poetry contest going, didn't we.
You were all so brilliant, I just can't decide. I'd send you all a bug button, but they fall out of the cheap envelopes I use.

Sorry, Mrs. Ceiling, I thought you was Gail

Remember that hair product commercial where young guys mistook moms for their daughters, because they had such young hair, thanks to [product]? One of them lives on in my mind. Occasionally it pops up, like some nefarious Internet trojan opening a window and I see this teenaged football quarterback tackle a mom; they roll in the grass, he gets a look at her face and goes, "Sorry, Mrs. Robinson, I thought you was Gail." Maybe he doesn't say "was", maybe he says "were" but I had to write "was" to get his Oakie accent across. Gail's mom seems flattered and gives her hair a little toss.

I tackled altogether too few moms back when I was a teen, and now it's too late. Imagine I tackle some mom; she's not going to buy the "sorry, I thought you were your daughter" excuse, is she. I'm just guessing; I haven't tested this.

You're in a bad mood, one says.
He's been in a bad mood since yesterday, another one says.
He told me he likes being in bad moods, the youngest one says.
Thanks a lot, he says to the youngest one.

She had been in a bad mood herself, you see. And I was trying to tell her that she didn't have to pretend to be happy. That the mood could, possibly, work itself out faster if she just lived through it. That's what I get for trying to explain to a six-year-old that I like being melancholic.

That's what I call it. I can't call it depression. If you're depressed you can't go to work, you can't get out of bed in the morning. Dishes pile up in the sink. The cats catch their breakfast in the goldfish bowl. What I have is at most this low-grade depression, this melancholic state that keeps me, at most, from realizing my true potential. Which is probably a blessing in disguise, because first thing I would do if I were galactic emperor is implement forced sterilization of jerks who cut you off in traffic et cetera.

So instead I choose to mope around.

Not all the time, of course. There's a cycle. There are the peaks where I stand there looking at the veins in a leaf going, "wow." Telling my kids, "look at those clouds! Just look at those clouds, would you."

And look. I realize my writing is not going to win me the Miller Lite literary prize or anything, but I enjoy doing it and I think being melancholic helps me there, because blah blah outside looking in blah blah frame of mind.

And the real lows are few and far between. There was one depressing unemployed winter I slept on a friend's condemned couch in the condemned house he rented, occasionally getting up to eat instant noodles. There was last night, and a couple other nights this week, where I just couldn't get to sleep.

I read Gamma a story once where a papa bear goes from bed to bed to car to bed to sofa to chair all night and finally falls asleep just before his alarm goes off. I didn't realize that his insomnia was rooted in depression. The author of that book was probably a seriously depressed person, come to think of it. You have to wonder, sometimes, don't you, who are these people writing my child's books? Like, "Mom's Jelly Donut" by S. Freud or something.

I should take a walk, I thought at one point. And I remembered that my father had gone on long walks when he was the age I am now. Hours-long walks at night, in the dark. Now I understand why.

What do you do when you can't sleep at night like that? she asks.
Stare at the ceiling, he says. Stare at the ceiling and try to sleep.
If you're trying to sleep, you have your eyes closed, another one says, splitting hairs.
Yes honey, he says. He stares at the ceiling through his eyelids until it grows uncomfortable at the attention and shifts around, tossing its hair coquettishly. Around three he finally falls asleep. Around five his alarm goes off and he wakes in a short bed in a pink room with a Shakira poster on the wall and a panda bear night light.

Escape artist

Not only did I wake up cranky and still fail to find a way to center my design in msie5.5 (etc etc) without centering the text as well, I have just been informed that the Bug is apparently able to escape from a cheap paper envelope in transit, or at least the buttons are. If you ordered a Bug button and all you received was a torn envelope, let me know and I'll resend. Teh rest of you, move along. Nothing to see here. (unless you ahve some css tip for centering my container div other than using a cheesy center tag).

Limerick contest

Make someone's Valentine's Day special: enter the third annual VD limerick contest. Even if you don't, you really should link it on your weblog too. Then it gets onto Blogdex, you see, and someone stuck for a poem for their sweetie notices all these great limericks, and the rest is history, see?

Plus, you could win a Bug button. They're going fast, BTW. I had a hundred made last week, and have shipped out half of them already.

They seem to be popular in the Low Countries, and Oakland/SF. The guy at the post office is starting to wonder what's in all these envelopes making the tinny kaching-kaching sounds going all over the world.

The red wire or the blue wire?

I'll be horsing around with the design today so don't worry if something goes fffft. Or zzzzzt.

Fear

The light was good this morning. I left the house later than usual, so the sun was up. Also it was colder than yesterday and the sky was nearly clear, about a quarter full of cold-looking snow clouds, so rather than crappy grey drizzle (albeit the snow falling on the vineyards up the hills around Vienna was a pretty sight) we had great contrast today and good color saturation, with the color balance skewed a little towards the blue part of the scale. The woods weren't woods, they were armies of individual naked black trees set apart by the snow on the ground and when the passenger train zoomed past it made no sound. That drew attention to the noises in the car: mostly just Anner Bylsma playing Bach on an old cello from the Smithsonian, along with an occasional grunt from the driver, the steady rumble purr of a small diesel motor; now and then interactions with other drivers such as "oi, oi, oi," or "go for it, dude," and a couple medium-length streams of filthy invective. Now and then a chortle, or even chuckle, over the ticker-tape of wisecracks running across the inside of my forehead.

The light was good this morning, and being cold the air didn't stink around the animal cadaver processing plant. I suppose they process them into animal feed, a thought which really puts me off my steak, until I see it there on the plate in front of me and it looks so delicious... also we only buy organic beef, so that's more ethical, right? Except for the killing animals part.

The light was good... that was a close one, I almost lost the narrative thread there for a second. Listening to Bylsma play Bach. My point is, a professor in college mentioned a person should read a novel twice, once when (s)he's younger than the characters, and once when older. For the perspective thing. And I was thinking, listening to a good recording of a good musician playing good music on the instrument you're learning is interesting in a similar way. How when I first heard this CD, I thought it was very nice. Then when I could play a bit, it blew me away and I thought (and still think) it was the pinnacle of human evolution - good musician playing good composition on good instrument, what a convergence of brilliance.

See, you hear more every time you listen to it. Now I hear his perfect intonation and rhythm. The beautiful, rich tone of the instrument. That twangy "wrwrwrrrrang" thing you sometimes get on the strings (my "A" string tends to do it most) that I always thought was a mistake, like too little pressure on the bow, but Bylsma doesn't seem to mind. Maybe it's in the nature of the instrument.

And I know, if I keep it up, I'll hear more next year.

Skiing last week, I learned something about fear and how it wrecks anything you do. If I'm afraid while I ski, I fall down. If I'm not afraid, I don't. This doesn't mean that fear is never useful. It's fine to be afraid beforehand, I think: this would keep me from attempting an expert-level slope I could never manage. But once you start, fear has outlived its usefulness.

It is the same with any process. I mentioned this to my musician daughter, but she didn't seem impressed by the insight. Likewise my cello teacher, when I said once you're in the music, you have to be in the music, playing it, not thinking about it. Fear is not the issue for Beta and my teacher that it is for me, I guess. For me this is a big epiphany: raised by an overprotective mother, fear has been the driving force in my life, the foundation of most of my decisions.

On the final day of our stay in the mountains, riding back down in the gondola with the kids, Gamma was enjoying the view and I mentioned how my acrophobia as a kid would have prevented me from enjoying a gondola ride, or from even getting on a chair-lift at all. I would have been terrified. She found that hard to believe. I used to have nightmares about freeway bridges (the Markham bridge in Portland, Oregon, especially). Walking up the stairs to our holiday apartment, I pointed out to her that I would have had to crawl up those stairs at her age (6) since you could see through them (they were horizontal steps of concrete, open at the back, bolted to a single beam up the middle). She found that interesting, in a pathological way. I didn't mention that I wouldn't have been able to go near the railings, or any of the other things that I won't list here.

I didn't really overcome my fear of heights until Beta needed someone to go parasailing with her a couple years ago and asked me. (It was fun.)

Fear was everywhere, and still is to be honest. Fear of insufficiency, fear of people that keeps me from making friends or being friendly to strangers. Like that Avril Lavigne-type girl ahead of me in line at the supermarket yesterday when I was buying water, fancy Italian bread, cheese and hazelnut waffles for lunch (shopping when you're hungry is always a bad idea). Skinny, blonde, muddy jeans, buying milk, oatmeal and something else healthy. Hair in her face. She looked at me and I saw she was pretty, with strong eyes, and looked away until she looked at something else.

Inside any ongoing process there is no place for fear, not while skiing or playing music or living. You may already know this, I'm just starting to figure it out.

Annual metamorphosism.com Valentine's Day Limerick Contest

Announcing the First Annual metamorphosism.com Valentine's Day Limerick Contest, which is the third contest of its kind since we also had the Feral Living Valentine's Day Limerick Contest two years ago and last year, which I see the Internet gods have been kind enough to leave online, so far.

Rules:

• You may enter as often as you wish
  
• Leave your entries in the comments to this post
  
• Deadline is Valentine's Day, 14 February 2004
  
• Winner gets a Bug button if they want one, as well as admission to the pantheon of past Valentine's Day Limerick Contest Winners

More rules:

• We did philosophers last year... let's see... entries this year must include a reference to a well-known psychiatrist/psychologist, or a parasite (Latin or vernacular names okay).
  
• Extra credit for Tolkein reference.

Candy hearts courtesy of Acme Heart Maker.

Bug buttons/badges

The Bug buttons are here. If you want one, send me an e-mail with your mailing address and how many you want.

Things you learn skiing

1. Fear and crashing correlate positively: the scareder you are, the more you crash.
2. It is possible to fall on your back hard enough to see stars.
3. My father-in-law is nearly 70 and skis like a god. He says only scaredy-cats fall onto their backs.
4. Likewise, the less scared you are, the less you crash. If you grit your teeth and go for it, it helps.
5. It is possible to go from hating skiing to loving it in just three days.
6. The food they serve in the lodge tastes good but makes you fart.
7. If you do enough skiing, you can eat all you want, and drink all the beer and schnapps you want, and not gain weight.
8. No matter how good you think you are, as soon as you congratulate yourself, a 5-year old Austrian child zips past.

I had a great time. I did not injure myself particularly. Everyone said how proud of me they were. My father-in-law the snow god even said, and I quote, "Mig isn't so bad," which meant a lot, as he takes his skiing seriously.

There was one slope that scared me a lot, but I made it down a few times and it ended up being fun. The first time, though, basically what happened was I looked at it, fell onto my back, saw stars, then heard the "sshhhhhshshshshsh" sound of one of my skis (both of which had disengaged themselves from my boots) continuing on down the slope so rather than lie there feeling sorry for myself I had to jump up and run down after it in the hopes of catching it before it went off the cliff. My other ski had parked itself up the slope. I eventually caught the first ski and as I trudged back up to the second ski Snow Ranger Alpha (ten feet tall from that angle) swooped down out of nowhere, picked up the other ski and gave it to me, asked whether I was okay and zoomed off, leaving me to wonder whether she was a hallucination, and how I was going to make it down the slope.

She did the Snow Ranger thing a few times: An old man lost his cap and she swooped down, picked it up and gave it back to him very theatrically. Snow Ranger Alpha, keeping the slopes polite. I spent the last day skiing with Beta and noticed she has the gene: a little girl lost her ski pole and Snow Ranger Beta swooped down and returned it to her.

Gamma spent 5 days taking ski lessons with a bunch of other little kids. I assumed she'd have my klutziness, but she fit right in with all the other Austrian kids: they prefer to ski down most slopes in a straight line, in order to make it to the lift first. They raced a slalom on their final day and Beta and I watched and figured we'd have to comfort her when it was over, but she came in third out of nine kids and got a medal, which now hangs on her wall with her framed certificate.

It was fun. I went there expecting it to be and it was. The weather was a little too warm, so the snow got a little mushy, but it was still fine in the mornings or on shady slopes (the rest of the family got tired of my obsession with the temperature). Now they're expecting weather to get cold and snowy again, so people going next week will have good skiing too. I got to go to the lodge up at the top of all the slopes, a very old-fashioned Austrian ski lodge, and hang out with my father-in-law and wife and Beta and a lot of other people. They spent what seemed like an awful lot of time in there - I'd have expected them to do more skiing. But if you get tired, you can't ski for shit anymore. It really is safer to get more rest like that. And the lodge is really great, with the rough-hewn timbers and the fireplace (actually a Kachelofen) and the beer tastes good.

I was also able to get over my fear of (slightly) steep slopes, and of my old nemisis, the t-bar lifts. (For those of you unfamiliar with a t-bar lift, it is a cable that runs up and back down a slope, with t-shaped things hanging down, attached to spools attached to the cable. You stand beside a partner, grab a "t", stick it under your asses, half a "t" per ass, and let it pull you up the slope. At the same time, the lift, which is animate, wants to you to tangle up your skis and fall down in an embarrassed pile, after which it will knock you on the head with the "t", adding injury to insult, while all the other skiers watch the show. This particular ski resort also had gondolas and chair lifts.) One day, riding up with Beta on a t-bar lift, I was telling her about my observation that skiing was a lot like playing music - once you were on a slope, like playing a song, you couldn't quit for anything - you were stuck inside it, in the flow of the thing and had to maintain the right speed and rhythm until you were finished. Then it occurred to me what a tiresome person I must be to be stuck on a ski lift with and apologized for philosophising, but she hadn't been listening anyway.

One day a military helicopter was hovering next to the lodge, waiting to land. I was skiing towards the lodge, watching the helicopter, wondering what it was waiting for - why it was hovering rather than landing. It was waiting for me to get out of the way. As soon as I got out of there it landed on the snow and a VIP came out.

[PS: Their website is here, and they have a cam, which either shows or is taken from the lodge I mention, not sure since it wasn't working when I checked.]