When in the right mood, both girls love to “read” their bedtime stories to me. Vivi has only been able to “read” an entire book a little while, but this is her favorite, Eric Carle’s Brown Bear, Brown Bear.
Vivi Reading from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.
Closing the parentheses they opened the other day with their early-morning weirdness, the girls are presently playing a just-invented game called “Squirrel” which consists entirely of their sneaking up to me, making tiny little squirrelish peeps, and then running away at top speed when I look over and say, “Oh, hi, squirrel!”
Cold weather forced the cancellation of the race which I anticipated doing on Saturday. I know, I know: canceling a ski race due to cold weather? Yeah. It even happens to the pros.
But I partly made up for this gap in my last week of preparation for next Sunday’s City of Lakes Loppet by skiing a nice out-and-back loop in the Lower Arb. The conditions were great, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun, but the best part of it was how great the Arb looks on a sunny winter day.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Today, I started my three-week-long my “racing season” by skiing in the Crazy Carleton Classic Relay, an annual event staged by the college’s ski club. The CCCR sends three-person relay teams out over a rolling 3,000 meter (or so) course in the Upper Arb that’s quite amenable to the classic-technique restriction. The race is always fun, but this year – the third time I’ve skied it – was the best: the organizers had things down pat, the course was well marked, we had good weather, the trails were freshly tracked by our friends at St. Olaf, and a total of ten teams showed up (or, like mine, were formed by skiers who didn’t have full teams). Some of the teams – but not mine – took the costume idea to heart. Perhaps next year I’ll ski in a wetsuit, or a bathrobe. I won’t ski, as one team did, in remarkably thorough garden gnome getups.
Needing to get back home as soon as possible so that Shannon, still sick, wouldn’t have too long with both girls (thanks for letting me go to the race, babe!), I volunteered to ski my team’s first leg. Having neither classic skis nor any decent classic technique, I expected to doublepole the course, but since I’ve skied these trails dozens of times and have done a lot of doublepoling since last winter, I knew this would be fine. And I was surprisingly jazzed up to race, partly from regular adrenaline and partly from doping myself with a Johaug: a can of Coke adulterated with a few shots of espresso. I will definitely drink this concoction before my next race, but never when I need to go to sleep within the next eight hours.
The start was slow, and at least one person fell right on the line, but I managed to doublepole to the front and get away up the course. At the top of the first, longest hill, about 750 meters in, I was temporarily well clear of the field. Then I hit the ensuing downhill, which was drifted over and didn’t agree at all with my half-assed wax job. I had to doublepole down the slope and then up the steady but gentle rise on the other side. There, at the 1.5km mark, I was passed by a young woman who was doing a great job of kicking and gliding up the hill. I dropped in behind to rest and discovered that my doublepoling could easily keep up with her on the uphills, but that she could easily get away on the downhills. Note to self: put on temperature- and snow-appropriate wax.
We traveled together for the next 1.5km, covering some rolling terrain, a few long flats that were good for recovery, and then out onto the last bit of the course, which went down a short hill, up a longer climb (how this works, I can’t quite explain), and, pretty much from the top of that hill, more-or-less straight to the finish. Again, she zoomed away from me on the downhill, but I got back on her skis on the climb and used some doublepoling to get past and clear again, for good. I tagged my second-leg teammate with a thirteen second lead. She headed out well, and I called it a day.
I had to head out soon thereafter, but according to the final standings, our team eventually finished second, after our anchor was caught by a woman who turned in the second-fastest overall leg of the day (and fastest by a woman) – almost two full minutes faster than my time. Not that results matter that much, but it was nice to finish high! In addition to being a lot of fun, the race was a good intensity session for me. I had my heart rate up over 160 beats per minute for the full 16 minutes, and peaked at 92% of my maximum. Moreover, I felt like I could have both pushed a lot harder, and would have gone faster if I had waxed appropriately. Coulda, woulda, but I still feel good about the likelihood of being able to ski well in the City of Lakes Loppet, exactly fourteen days from today.
Thanks to the combination of good bedtimes for the girls, decent snow cover, and (relatively) warm temperatures, tonight I could finally ski my all-time favorite trail in the Lower Arb, which runs from the trailhead on Highway 19 near the West Gym out along the river to Canada Avenue. Year round, it’s the perfect length (a 6.8km/4.2 mile round trip) for either a short out-and-back workout or a longer session – out-and-back more than once or out, then back along other trails elsewhere in the Arb.
Blah blah blah, the real reason I like this route is that it’s so beautiful, especially in the winter, especially in the dark, and especially tonight. There was the huff-huff of breathing and the sssssh-sssssh of the skis, but there was also the snow falling continuously, shadowy trees looming above, the bare-looking oak savannah, the iced-over river, a trail shared by raggedy ski tracks and footprints and cut across by animal tracks, a few open spots where the wind happily blasted me, a few glimpses of glinty eyes off in the underbrush… Even the train whistles in the distance contributed to the experience of effort and solitude.
Truly incredible photographs of Norway, all ca. 1900, from the U.S. Library of Congress (via Ruth’s Multe Music blog).
This evening, as she girls were lounging in the tub and I was trying to actually, you know, bathe them, Julia stalled me by saying, “Daddy, turn on a different album of me.” She meant that I should suggest a different set of songs for her to sing, but it’s honestly a pretty good summary of how the weekend – which was one of the best in months – was absolutely ridiculous with noise of all sorts – talking, singing, shrieking, chattering, screaming, crying, coughing. Here are four of the more lucid excerpts…
I.
Saturday night, Julia called me urgently into her room just after bedtime. When I came in, she whispered, “Daddy, I found a mushroom in my bed.” I was sure that I had not heard her right. “A what?” She whispered back, “A mushroom. Not a real one. A mushroom from the play kitchen. Genevieve fed it to me when we were playing hospital in my bed. Can you take it?” I shook my head and took the little round piece of wood and left.
II.
As I was playing with the girls upstairs on Saturday morning, Vivi shouted, “I be right back,” and headed downstairs. She bustled around the living room for a few minutes, then came back up with some new Little People to add to the little scenario she and I were sharing. Julia, occupied in another corner of the playroom, said to me, “Daddy, what toy did Genevieve bring up from downstairs?” I picked them up and said, “These little dolls.” A few seconds passed, then Julia asked again, “What toy did Genevieve bring up from downstairs?” I held them up again: “Honey, these little dolls – the ones I’m showing you.” She didn’t turn to look, and then after another few seconds, asked a third time, “What toys?” Exasperated, I said, “Honey! Look! These little dolls!” She finally turned to look, and said, “Oh. I wasn’t listening.”
III.
While we were playing upstairs on Sunday morning,Vivi went over to a (yes) nativity scene which Julia had carefully arranged a few days ago, and started shifting the wise men around. Julia stopped what she was doing and ran over, saying, “Vivi, Vivi, Vivi, don’t touch those! Those are mine!” Vivi kept right on moving the wise men, even turning her body so that Julia couldn’t get to the toys. Losing it, Julia whined, “Daddy, Genevieve isn’t doing a single thing I’m telling her to do!” I avoided saying, “Join the damn party,” andd instead said, “That’s okay, honey. She’s a different person than you, and she wants to do different things. She doesn’t need to do something just because you want her to do it.” vivi, still rearranging the nativity sceen dolls, looked over at Julia, grinned broadly, and said, “No, I don’t.”
IV.
After a few viewings of A Charlie Brown Christmas last month, Vivi started borrowing Lucy’s line, “Okay, okay, quiet down here!” It’s always pretty funny to hear her say it, but Sunday she zapped me with it as I rather brusquely urged her and her sisters to get moving toward naptime – “Okay, okay, quiet down, Daddy.” She even added a sly little smirk. Point taken, kiddo.
I think the Sex Pistols (what’s left of ’em) are writing Carleton Security Services’ campus warning signs now:
God Save the Camry!
A partial list of the girls’ activities at dinner tonight:
I snuck out of the house this morning to do some intervals on the Arb trails. Last night’s sleet had, predictably, turned the barely-skiable snow into rock-hard ice. The brilliant sunshine made up for the terrible conditions.
I found this picture on the blog of a Norwegian pro skier. It reminds me of the childhood days when we would sled off the roofs of the buildings on the farm where I grew up. We got a lot of snow back then, and Grandpa would use the tractor to push it up next to the garages and sheds. Perfect for big, high speed sledding ramps.
Today was my first ski of the season in the Arb, a nice session tooling around the only good snow in the Upper Arb. I was happy that my arms didn’t fall off, since this suggests that I might have a chance to get in decent skiing shape for the the City of Lakes Loppet. Having my arms fall off would have definitely impeded my ability to ski in the race.
Just as exciting is that tomorrow will see the culmination of the third Tour de Ski, a multi-stage cross-country ski race that is one of the two high points of the World Cup. I’ve blogged embarrassingly extensively on the Tour in previous years on my previous blogs and this year on the “Nordic Commentary Project” that I share with another ski fan. Suffice to say here that tomorow’s last event is the hardest one in skiing, a race up a steep ski hill, the Alpe Cermis, in northern Italy.
Here’s the overall stage, 9k for women and 10k for men:
Here’s the big climb itself:
The first man and the first woman to the top of the Alpe Cermis are the respective winners of the Tour de Ski. Last year’s race was good, but not as good as this year promises to be: for the first time, both the men’s and the women’s titles are up for grabs. I can’t wait to see what happens. (And I can actually see it this year: NBC’s “Universal Sports” service is webcasting the men’s and women’s Final Climbs shortly after the races end.)
Here’s a few minutes of an average evening at our house.
(Warning: Includes toddler nakedness and sisterly thumbs-on-lens. No sugary treats were involved in the making of this motion picture.)
Vivi Runs Wild from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.
No points are awarded for the correct deduction, based on the visual evidence presented here, that not five minutes after this video, the subject dissolved into a colossal crying fit.
It’s never too late for a little Christmas caroling, is it? (Try and follow along to the lyrics!)
(Apologies to Charles Wesley. There’s madness to this Methodism.)
The Singing Tassava Sisters from Christopher Tassava on Vimeo.
That was quite a holiday. Both girls were up before six, giving us the first real taste of a too-excited-to-sleep Christmas morning. This made for a long morning, to say the least, but at least the girls had a good supply of toys with which to occupy themselves. I broke the monotony by doing my now-traditional (i.e., two years in a row) Christmas Day run – all the way to North Dakota!
Beyond their awareness of today being Christmas, the girls didn’t even know the half of it: the real trove of presents was saved until the afternoon. Both girls reveled in another stack of presents, and both received at least one toy that was, as Julia said (unwittingly embodying toy-marketers’ dreams), “Just what I wanted!” No, not another Bible toy. Better – princesses.
The Bible toy went to Genevieve, and she loved it. I gotta say, it was pretty cute when she named all the animals and retold the Deluge story in her own little way.
As the girls played, the grownups did away with the vast amounts of packaging. Sickeningly, we filled a 15-cubic-foot box with wrapping paper, boxes, inserts, and god knows what else. I spent a good ten minutes undoing all the %#)&#%& wires that fixed Vivi’s ark into its box. While she played with the ark, I hooked all the wire segments together and then measured the resulting super-wire. Here is that 16 feet of wire, coiled up for the trash. What fraction of the world’s steel is tied up in this crap?
