The Comic Relief

Its time i introduce my story-telling's best character : My father.  My father provides much of the eye rolling, exasperated sighs and comic relief in my family and most of my stories.  He's a lovely, mildly demented, loving 80 year old man who ADORES his grandson and would be up here every day if we let him.

So this weekend he came up with my mom for a visit so Rob and I could go out for dinner and for a ski and they could spend some quality time with Toby.  We had a great time with them and on the Friday night we decided to play some cards.  Which is EXTREMELY good for my dad's brain...when he remembers what game we're playing and how to play it.

We decided to play "Crazy bridge" which is also known as "Oh shit". It differs from bridge in that its always no trump and you have to declare how many tricks you're going to take and get that many exactly or you don't get any points.  My dad would do well at betting on how many tricks he'd get, but halfway through the hand, without fail, he'd FORGET that he only wanted so many tricks and just start trying to get as many as he could.  When we'd point this out to him he'd either say, "WHAT?!?!? This is a CRAZY game..." or occasionally, "Oh, SHIT!!!"  The card game sure lived up to its name.

By the end of the night we realized that we didn't have to keep score for dad - -at the end of each hand when the rest of us figured out if we'd gotten the number of tricks we'd predicted, we just announced to dad (in excited voices), "You got 5 tricks!!!" to which he'd say, "Did I?  Oh, GOOD!"  He had a good time.  We know that, because (as usual) he asked us if we'd like to move back home with them.  Not this year, dad.  But thanks for the offer.

Rob and I had a fantastic day skiing with Care and Pete yesterday.  Care's parents generously gave us guest passes to Georgian Peaks.  Its really neat to be able to go skiing in Collingwood on a WEEKEND and not wait for hours and hours in line.  It was cold, but nothing that those crazy handwarmers and a beer at lunch couldn't fix.  

Speaking of the magical hand warmers- -those things are incredible.  I kept those magical hand warmers in my gloves all the way home and marvelled at their ability to keep heat.  What is IN them that makes them juts the PERFECT temperature for 10 whole hours!?!??! WOW!!!  I wanted to make a blanket out of them for night time...or put them in my coffee mug to keep my coffee warm for 10 hours...as i was fantasizing about all of the magical things I could make out of the mysteriously-warm substance that was in them, my daydream was rudely cut short as Rob-my-environmentally-friendly-to-a-fault-husband pointed out that it was PROBALBY just some sort of chemical reaction.  And probably a really SIMPLE one, too.  AND LIKELY those two 4x4cm little bundles of joy were EXTREMELY toxic for the environment because when we threw them in the landfill the magical chemicals would seep into the ground and poison fish and then baby bears would eat the fish and then DIE from the crazy chemicals.  All because I wanted to have warm hands while skiing.

I have a feeling my days of skiing with warm hands are over....  Although I may keep a secret  stash of mitten warmers in a secret location...along with REAL light bulbs and wrapping paper and those crazy candys that EXPLODE in your mouth.  And one day Toby can find it and it'll be like a TIME capsule of environmental NIGHTMARES of the past.

You may be wondering how beer at lunch kept us warm.  And if you are, you're probably not a very good beer drinker.  So maybe you're reading the wrong blog... But I GUESS I can see your point.  There's nothing really quite as nice as a beer after a hard morning of skiing.  But for some reason, (maybe it was the altitude?  We WERE skiing on a mountain...) we all got a little tipsy after our 1 beer at lunch.  And that made us feel warm.  But more importantly, it added a little "je ne sais quoi" to our skiing...which was fun for the first few runs.  I knew it was time to call it quits when I was going down the hill thinking, "Wow-  -I seem to be going fast...maybe its because I'm not turning... its so much easier just to go straight down and not waste energy on turning....speedy speedy...."  So we called it a day.   A great day.