On the Bottom Half

Student Fingers

So Mom and I spent the day together. There were three highlights to today: spending it with Mom, getting new skates, and going skating at the freshly opened Bower Ponds!

The skates are Reebok 4Ks, size 7. But the interesting bit of this story is what happened to my hands when I tried to lace them up in the store. Now, as unCanadian as this makes me feel, I am a poor skater and never really enjoyed it in the past. However, with 'age', I've realised that I'm interested in skating and hockey and I've resolved to learn how to play sometime in the future when I find the opportunity, but adult novice hockey is a little hard to come by in Canada, if you know what I mean. However, I may have mentioned a while ago that I'm looking into a league in Melbourne, which, rather unsurprisingly, is made up almost entirely of Aussie novices and Canadian expats. The number of arenas in Australia is probably countable on your own two hands, but there just happens to be a concentration of them about 5 minutes up the road from my place in Oz. I digress... My hands, yes.

The hardest work a pair of geologist hands seem to do nowadays is punch away at the forgiving keys of the standard 101-key keyboard now so famous and ubiquitous in the modern computer-centric epoch. So, from stage left arrives student-geologist Kyle trying on a new pair of very stiff skates and in his attempt at lacing them, he gets blisters! Left middle and right index. How pathetic, one must ask. Then this evening, the family all went skating at Bower Ponds. How exquisite. A pleasure impossible in many parts of the world: skating outside, hot chocolate, stars, and family - all in one go!

At least the skates were very difficult to tighten... Waxed laces and stiff leather. Forcing my Japanese hands down the crevices of my car a few days previous was a concerted attempt to harden these little digits against such transgression.

That was a job for non other than the great, unduplicatable, treasured, ACTRS Quilt and Car Shop in Olds. My car, after a little poking around, revealed a worrying bit of wear where the anterior rad hose was wearing on the battery (I like that sentence). After draining the coolant, we spent the rest of the evening replacing the hose, which in the case of my car meant no fewer than four hose connections (all that in a single, molded bit of rad hose)! Wild these newfangled front wheel drives... We followed that up with a bit of belt detective work and discovered a worrying state for the water pump belt. There's only two belts in the car, the big serp belt we replaced just after I got the car, and this one, unbeknownst to me, is hidden under some neatifying molding on the top of the engine. It is the original belt (now 7 years and 133000 km old), so I guess it doesn't owe me anything.

Yesterday evening I spent as Santa Claus for the Weatherford Company Christmas party. My brother asked if I could do it, to which I replied that I'd make a pretty insubstantial Santa, to which he retorted that they've got a belly on order. That made me think how great it would be if bellies could be ordered and returned with such efficiency. It was a really good experience, though I had misgivings about it at first. There are kids that truly believe. It's wonderful to be the receiver of such innocence, a quality that I fear is increasingly becoming rare for ones of such extreme youth. Several teens I've seen around now are such self-obsessed, cellular-toting narcissists of the most profligate wealth. It is so very frustrating to see when there are so many better and greater things that they can do with their promising lives. Join Cadets!! (Sorry, that's a bit shameless; even worse, in fact, after talking about getting new skates :-) I digress...

This weekend I'm off to St Albert with the family to go see more family. It's wonderful to be so popular! It's like some sort of anti-high school. Should be fun!

In space news, Discovery landed safely after yet another spectacularly successful mission, STS-116. The station is completely rewired and ready to receive the next set of critical components of the truss system. YEAH NASA!!!

Other events these past few weeks were a kidlet's Christmas band concert in Olds; meeting my new niece and nephew, both cute and precious of course; tobogganing down the hill, what a rush!; the dentist, yeah clean teeth!; a ride in the Bro's new H2; seeing everyone; ... Life's pretty good, most of the time!

Lastly, I've started reading a little book called 'For One More Day', which is another Mitch Albom book - the same author who wrote 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' and 'Tuesdays with Morrie'. It's a bit heartwrenching to go into detail here, but suffice to say that it relevels your perception of time - most especially that spent with people important in your life!

Merry Christmas to all! May the season find you at peace, in love, gracious, and thankful for the many and valuable gifts life provides.

posted by Kyle @ 00:09