Blowing & Drifting

Yesterday afternoon, as Julia ate her second afternoon snack (about 90 minutes before dinner), I said, "You're so hungry, you must be having a growth spurt!" She stopped crunching her hummus-covered rice cake to look up and ask, "What's spurt?" Before I could answer, she smiled her clever smile (made somewhat less clever by the rice-cake crumbs spilling out of her mouth) and said, "Spurt sounds like Bert! Spurt Bert!"

Tonight when I arrived home, Shannon told me that Genevieve had been successfully rolling from back to front all afternoon. I accordingly plopped her down on her back and waited not two minutes before she stuck her little legs straight up in the air, grabbed her toes to form a very tippy triangle, and then turned her hips so that she rolled right over onto her stomach - temporarily trapping one hand under her torso, but pleased with the new view. Julia and I clapped for her, and Julia called her "Roly-Poler."

The other week, I got my right hearing aid back from the hearing-aid gnomes. It's not working right (ha!). I've already had to have it looked at once, and those adjustments (too arcane to both describing) were partly successful. But yesterday and today, I've been noticing a strange and annoying phenomenon: anytime I'm near a fluorescent light - and especially when one is turned on or off in my presence - the right aid pops and hums, clearly picking up some sort of interference. It's de-light-ful! I can't wait to try to explain it to the audiologist and see her try to use her fancy computer program to make me feel less like a malfunctioning android.

I didn't notice any naked undergrads on campus today, but in making a surgical strike on the oversized/folio stacks in the library, I did see what appeared to be an inordinately large number of students sleeping at desks, in easy chairs, on couches, and even at a tiny study carrel. From the way the faculty are taking days to return emails right now, I know that profs and students alike are really suffering, but honestly, sleeping in the library strikes me as somewhat beyond the pale. Next time I see some sophomore snoozing in the stacks, I may just drop a pile of books or steal his iPod or something. Purely to build character in the youth, of course.

Well, loyal readers, I think you will soon collect on my wager with the god of the sky. According to this map from Weather Underground (already no longer available online, sadly), north-central Rice County received between six and eight inches of snow over the weekend, about half what the disasterologists on the news predicted. My backyard sure didn't get that much accumulation, thanks to the blowing & drifting, but the wager clearly stipulated that Northfield was the category of analysis, so there you go.

If tomorrow evening isn't another labyrinth of crying it out, I'll make the video and post it tomorrow night. Or maybe I'll wait and see if we get a little bit more snow this week, as forecast by those schmooks who missed the last forecast. Stay tuned.

It snowed on and off all day today, but it wasn't exactly a blizzard. The winds did create, just outside our patio door, a magnificent drift about ten feet long and three feet high. Ski Man is buried somewhere inside it.

The winds figuratively also blew Genevieve out of our bedroom and into the guest room, where she'll stay until an eventual move into the bedroom, currently solely inhabited by Julia, a.k.a. the Singer of the Loud Nighttime Songs. <fingers crossed> We'll see how this first shift goes. </fingers crossed> It's a bittersweet milestone, marking the fact that baby Gigi's already old enough to be elsewhere at night.

On the other hand, I know Shannon's happy to see impending end of the all-night milk bar (and the immediate end of waking at Gigi's every snuffle). With Gigi in her "own" room, we can also enjoy full use of ye olde master suite again. Among other things, this means that I don't have to get dressed for work in the kitchen anymore. It also means that we can use the shower at night. And this, combined with Gigi's improving ability to sleep through the night and with the nice snowfall, meant that I could go out and ski a bit tonight. I did about a dozen laps of our "backyard." I was out there for about 30 minutes, in which time I fell on my face twice, and encountered a tiny but surly black mouse. I've skied many a kilometer, on snow skis and roller skis, but never before come so close to creating roadkill.

Well, the storm is not quite living up to the hype, and I doubt I'll have to make good on my wager from Thursday, but we are getting some snow. The evening news even referenced this blog by name! I had to go over to St. Olaf for a conference this morning, and by the time I was ready to head home, the car was almost entirely covered in half-inch thick ice glaze. The ice and sleet thickened to snow by midafternoon, putting Ski Man in serious trouble. Watch the full slideshow to see how he got himself into this mess.

The men's pursuit at the Nordic Ski World Championships (video) didn't come down to the mass sprint that it might have, but only because the brutal downhill corners of the course at Shirahatayama, outside Sapporo city, proved to demand more than many racers could provide. At the 25km mark, 20 racers were within fifteen seconds of first place, including American Kris Freeman - who, like many others, saw his chances for a podium spot vanish in a crash. Said Freeman, "I liked the course a lot but the downhills were a little ridiculous. For a mass start you don't need to do stuff like that; the first time down the classic course, there were literally sharp pole fragments raining out of the sky from the crashes. You just don't need that." Freeman nonetheless managed to finish 19th, suggesting he is prepared to race well in the 15km skating race later this week.

The big lead group hardly shrank until the race entered the last 1200 meters, when six racers - including three Germans - got a four-second gap on the rest of the frontrunners. As that group approached the stadium, Alexander Legkov (Russia) dropped off the back and then, just after a shallow climb, Norwegian Petter Northug made a bizarre beginner's mistake - planting his pole inside his ski - and crashed headlong to the snow. He jumped up immediately, but the foursome - the trio of Germans, plus the Italian Pietro Piller Cottrer - was long gone, with Tobias Angerer in front by five meters. Rounding the final corner, Jens Filbrich fell back, leaving the race to just Angerer, Piller Cottrer, and Axel Teichmann, who stepped to the outside and surged to the front with his idiosyncratic short-poling stride. Teichmann was clear of Angerer almost instantly, and pulled away all the way to the line. Angerer took the silver, Piller Cottrer the bronze. Northug finished fifth, just behind Fillbrich, and then fell sobbing into the snow.

Sunday, the women race in their own pursuit event over the same treacherous course. Given the likelihood of even more numerous and significant crashes, the race could come down to a long solo breakaway for the win. My picks:

women's 7.5km+7.5km pursuit

I'm quaking in my longjohns and extra-thick socks! So far, we have received two ten-second lashes of ice pellets. Ski Man is not pleased.

Oh, wait - a few hours ago we had a huge blast of lightning, of all things, and then a couple peals of thunder. I'm sorry, Ukko!

The National Weather Service report - why all caps, guys? - does frequently mention the alpha and omega of winter weather: blowing and drifting. I rest my blog. I'm going to use the internet to follow the live action in the cross-county world championships race being held in Sapporo in four minutes.

When I came home yesterday, I was informed that Julia was pretending to be Benny, the Grouchy Rat, a character in a Richard Scarry book Sesame Street video. All night long, she continued to be Benny. This morning, on rolling out of bed, the first thing she said to me was that she was Benny, the Sleepy Rat.

It's better than a mouse!

The first events in the Nordic World Ski Championships turned out just the way Norway likes it - with two golds. The men's and women's individual sprints, run in the classical or "diagonal" technique, clearly demonstrated which countries have the best sprint skiers in the world: Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The setting was, frankly, bizarre: the races started within the Sapporo Dome, went outdoors through a massive gate and through a long horseshoe-shaped route including two substantial climbs and descents as well as a series of sweeping corners, and then finished back inside the dome. Unlike most sprints, where the crowd is visible in the stadium if not all the way around the course, the sold-out crowd in the dome was mostly hidden in the shadows.

The women's final (available in its entirety via Estonian TV) lacked Marit Bjørgen of Norway, who has been the dominant sprinter in the world for five years but who failed to advance from her semifinal. In Bjørgen's absence, the "large final" featured current world number-one Virpi Kuitunen (Finland), Slovene powerhouse Petra Majdic, Swedes Lina Andersson and Anna Dahlberg, and Norwegian Astrid Jacobsen, as well as unknown Japanese sprinter Madoka Natsumi. During their introductions, all of the women smiled easily, looking loose and excited. Majdic, probably the most physically imposing female racer on the World Cup circuit, blasted off the line in her typical fashion and led much of the race, including both steep uphills. Top sprinters often try to lead their races from wire to wire, but the strategy leads as often to a late fade as to a win. Today, Majdic escaped everyone but Jacobsen, who hovered in second place, just off the leader's right shoulder. Rounding the sweeping left-hand turn into the finish straightaway, Jacobsen put in a miraculous burst of double-poling to pull up alongside Majdic, whose turnover and power were obviously decreasing, and then pulled ahead at the only moment it mattered - at the line. Kuitunen, the pre-race favorite, almost edged Majdic as well, but settled for third. Jacobsen had never before won a World Cup-level race.

Newell will race again on Friday in the team sprints, where he will be paired with Torin Koos, who today finished fifth in his quarterfinal. ("Fifth" was the position of the day for the U.S. racers: each finished in that spot in his or her respective last heat.) Koos and Newell will be long-shot possibilities for a medal in the team event. Americans Kikkan Randall and Laura Valaas both made it into the women's heats on the strength of very fast qualifying times, but neither survived her quarterfinal. Valaas and Randall will form the American team for Friday's team event, giving them another shot. My picks:

Last night, while Genevieve sat in the high chair and banged like a gonzo journalist on her "laptop," Julia and I engaged in a protracted session of her favorite word game, "What Sounds Like." It's pretty easy to play, really. She says, "What sounds like cat?" You say, "Bat." She might say, "What sounds like bat?" (the easy, early form of the game) or she might say, "What sounds like car?" (the harder, newer form). You respond, she asks, et cetera et cetera until the language-processing parts of your brain start smoldering.

This time, though, she threw something new into the game: nonsense. "What sounds like schmick?" she'd ask, putting a few more black beans on her fork. "Nick sounds like schmick," I'd say. This was harder because the adult mind - or at least mine - automatically runs towards rhymes that would be inappropriate to add to the game or her vocabulary. "What rhymes with crit?" (No, don't say the vulgar word for breast/the kind of small bird!) "What rhymes with sigger?" (Is she trying to peel back my white privilege, layer by layer?) "What rhymes with diamond?" (Errr...)

At least she punctuated this mentally taxing game with a few crazy sounds-likes of her own. "What sounds like banana thief [a character in a Richard Scarry book]?" As I groan out, "Uhh, banana thief sounds like cabana..." she cuts me off: "Thief sounds like teef [teeth]! Who is the teef thief?"

I was trying to get Julia into her pajamas tonight, and after a few minutes of dancing around me, I said, "Honey, we need to put on your pajamas right now." She immediately came over, asking, "Daddy, are you happy?" I said that I was very happy to be with her, but that I was also impatient to get her pajamas on. She stuck her arms out so I could get her top on, said, "Daddy is happy and I am making a concentrating face!" and screwed her face into a hilariously exaggerated, brows-knitted mug to show she too was serious about getting her pajamas on.

As if personal snowmaking isn't weird enough, check out the advice a former astronaut has given NASA about the best way to get around on the moon:

Apollo 17 astronaut Harry Schmitt said that future inhabitants of the moonbase should be taught Nordic skiing to travel around the moon, where lower gravity means large distances can be covered with minimum effort. "If you've ever done cross-country skiing you know that on a level surface once you get a rhythm it is very easy to move quickly over large surfaces," said Schmitt, one of the last two men to set foot on the moon in 1972. "Of course on the moon you don't slide, you glide above the surface, but again you use the same kind of rhythm. There's nothing to restrict how far you eventually go or how fast you go, other than your own strength."

Well, that and the problem of how the hell to wax for lunar dust.

The freestyle distance races at Changchun saw the best racers reach the top step of each podium. In the women's 10km, the winner was almost a foregone conclusion, and indeed Katerina Neumannova, the best freestyle racer in the world, demolished the field. With every other racer on course before she started, Neumannova immediately began putting time into the field - a whopping ten seconds at the 1.9km time check. She cruised in to win by more than a minute - a massive gap rarely seen in the World Cup and unlikely to appear again in the 15km freestyle race at the World Championships on the 27th. Behind the Czech veteran, Frenchwoman Karine Phillippot took second and Kazakh racer Svetlana Malahova-Shishkina took third, just a few ticks of the clock ahead of a surprising Chinese racer, Yuanyuan Li, posting her country's best-ever World Cup result.

With its bigger and more experienced field, the men's race devolved to the expected duel between German Tobias Angerer and Frenchman Vincent Vittoz. Youngsters Sergej Shiriaev (Russia) and Petter Northug (Norway) were in the mix as well, but at the finish Angerer took first, nearly 10 seconds up on Vittoz, who had another two seconds over his teammate Emmanuel Jonnier, taking his second podium spot of the winter. Shiriaev ended up fourth, Northug fifth. The top ten was an exclusive group, with three Germans, two Russians, two Norwegians, two Frenchmen and, in tenth, American Kris Freeman, posting his best World Cup result in a long time and showing the form necessary to vie for a podium in the the 15km at Worlds on February 28.

Heaven forfend that this blog contain much more nursery-school commentary, but my friend Jordan - she of the best photo of the month - sent a link to a post on Babble about the depravity of preschool admissions in London, and I must blog it:

Would you schedule a C-section in order to ensure your child will get one of 5 slots a school offers newborns each month? Would you fill out preschool application forms with an epidural stuck in your back? Would you start calling preschools at 5 weeks pregnant (essentially, as soon as the stick turns blue)? Or phone your desired school twice a day, everyday, for six months? How about sending flowers each week until your child is accepted? Or refusing to leave the preschool building until your child is secured a spot?

(Alas, the full Wall Street Journal article is only available to subscribers - the Type A's who would probably go to those lengths to get their tykes into nursery school.)

The World Cup cross-country ski races in Changchun, China, will be staged, strangely enough, on Thursday and Friday, rather than over the weekend, so as to create the longest-possible break before the World Championships start in Sapporo, Japan, next week.

By hosting a World Cup for the second straight year, Changchun is positioning itself as the center of cross-country skiing in China - a laughable statement now, but one which might matter in, say, five or ten years if the Chinese government decides to fund a crash program in nordic skiing. Changchun just hosted the Sixth Asian Winter Games (in which China won the most medals of every color, including several in cross-country skiing) and annually holds the Chinese Vasaloppet, the 50km counterpart to the bigger, longer race in Sweden (and two other Vasaloppets in Japan and Minnesota).

Given the difficulty of getting to China and the upcoming Worlds in Sapporo, the fields for Thursday's classical-technique sprints are very small. Only 35 women will compete (and fifteen are Chinese racers who are part of the "national group" that is permitted to start as a courtesy to each host nation but aren't likely to do well) and just 47 men. Few classical-technique specialists are racing on the women's side, so that podium should feature some unfamiliar faces. The entire Norwegian and Swedish sprint teams are due to compete in the men's races, though, so they should dominate. My picks:

World Cup cross-country racing is in the middle of a two-week hiatus while competition shifts from Europe to Asia, where the circuit will resume this weekend with distance races and sprints in Changchun, China, and then the World Championships in Sapporo, Japan, soon afterwards. The last races - men's and women's relays at Davos, Switzerland, on February 4 - were tightly contested, but only the women's race probably revealed anything about what will happen in the relays at Worlds.

The men's race was weakened by the absence of the top-level German and Russian racers, though the b-team from Russia made good. Starting his anchor leg in fifth place, more than 30 seconds off the lead, Sergej Shiriaev took off. Having turned in a phenomenal climb on the last stage of the Tour de Ski early last month, Shiriaev's speed was unquestionable, but the lead group of Italy, France, and the Czech Republic must have been surprised to see him bridge up - and all the more surprised when he had sufficient energy to win the finishing sprint, four-tenths of a second up on Italy and five-tenths up on France. (The Czech team finished 0.7 seconds out of first, and off the podium.) Ominously, Shiriaev started his leg about a second behind Petter Northug, Norway I's anchorman and the odds-on favorite to ski the last leg for Norway at the World Championships, but put a huge amount of time into Northug in cruising up to the leaders. If young-gun Petter can't keep up with Shiriaev, what'll happen when he's head-to-head with Legkov or Dementiev in a presumed sprint at Worlds?

On the women's side, the Swedish team dominated the event. Sweden has had a bad season so far, and the men's team is currently mired in strife between the athletes and coach over training, but the four women on the relay squad took no prisoners, leading the race at every exchange by the second. Charlotte Kalla, skiing the third leg, closed an eleven-second gap to Finland and then put more than thirty seconds into the Finns, knocking them out of the lead group and into an eventual third place. Kalla's leg was the fastest of the day by nearly ten seconds. Britta Norgren then outraced Norway's Marit Bjørgen over the five-kilometer anchor leg and took the win by a second. Italy finished in fourth, with emerging star Arianna Follis turning in the fastest anchor leg of the day. If the Swedes are indeed rounding into form, they will be contenders in the women's relay at Worlds, along with the perennial powers from Norway and the Finns, who raced in Davos without their ace, Virpi Kuitunen. On the other hand, the German and Russian teams performed quite poorly, boding badly for their chances at Worlds.

By the time the sun rose (at 7:20) on this fine winter's Saturday, I was not only awake, showered, and bundled up to the point of hyperthermia, but also in line at Northfield Nursery School for what might the most parental task I've ever done: registering Julia for preschool.

Registration started at 9:00, but ominously, the staff "opened the doors" at seven, so it was then that I rolled up clutching a too-small cup of coffee, the registration form ("***Children must be toilet trained before school starts***"), and a check for the nonrefundable $50 registration fee, which I'm considering an investment in potty training this summer. I was the tenth person to sign in; eight had signed in between 6:40 and 7:05, but the first two had put 5:45 and 6:10 down as their arrival times. Having sealed my place in line - and, given that there were 23 open spots in Julia's class, presumably sealed her registration - I joined the other early birds in a waiting area. I was the only guy, and one of only two people who were sitting alone. Clearly, the other moms saw this is a good chance to hang out without their children hanging around. A great deal of knitting occurred around me, and many more registrants (all women) arrived.

I leafed through a couple magazines and a book for the next hour. Just as I started to get restless, one of the nursery school staffers came through and announced that the registrar had just arrived, so they would be starting the registration process at eight, not nine. Why, I wondered immediately, didn't they just make the registrar roll in at seven, and skip all this foofaraw?

But we all queued up like good citizens and handed over our checks and forms. I got a little rush when the registrar said, "Okay, Julia's in!" All in all, it was a pretty easy way to initiate Julia's fourteen or eighteen continuous years of formal education. It's a bit ironic that her ability to actually start in the fall hinges entirely on her ability to pee in a toilet.

The plot of the book is simple. A little girl thinks there's a monster in the attic above her room. When her parents tell her she's just hearing some mice, she goes up there with cowboy boots and a lasso, captures the monster, and drags him to her parents' room. But before her parents can see him, he escapes back to the attic. (That always happens to me, too.)

Now, just glancing at the book I was worried that she might find it frightening, but just like the Berenstain Bears Ghost of the Forest book which she committed to memory in less than a week, she found this one more curious and engrossing than frightening. Indeed, for the past few days, she's added "Nightmare" to her daily posse of invisible friends, and uttered all kinds of crazy sentences like, "Nightmare is sitting wif us having soup for dinner" or "Nightmare is so sweepy; he just wants to go to bed and go to sweep wif no calling for Daddy Nightmare."

Julia and I made an epic trip to Cub Foods on Saturday to do the month's grocery shopping. She was in peak form for almost the entire 120 minutes it took - hilarious, animated, cooperative, curious. The only trouble I had was keeping her from walking across other shoppers' paths. A few incidents stand out, though. At first, she sat in our cart, which provided an excellent vantage point from which to note such engrossing sights as a "[s]miling face" on a USDA Grade-A shield painted on the wall about a thousand feet away. Seeing the produce from just above the shelves was pretty cool, too. She was especially taken with the big display of red cabbage, aka "purple yettuce."

Soon enough, Julia got bored of riding in the cart, even though she was very helpful in choosing apples, potatoes, avocados, and other items and hurling them bruisingly into their bags. So I let her down, and she trooped along with me through the store. In the Hispanic-food aisle, she found a massive jar of mango slices in juice, and yelled delightedly, "Those are some funny pickles!" Seeing Elmo on an endcap inspired her to belt out "Elmo's Song" for aisle after aisle, modifying the song so that Daddy, Mama, Genevieve, Julia, Big Bird, Oscar, and a bunch of other fwiends were mentioned in addition to the Big Red One. In one aisle, she suddenly darted away from me, exclaiming, "I see Sesame Street! I see Sesame Street!" She was mildly disappointed when she realized that it was just a logo shaped like the familiar Sesame Street sign. Her mood improved shortly thereafter when, from the back of the store, she spied a small Cookie Monster balloon (noticing the trend yet?) all the way across the store near the checkout lanes.

Inspired by Jordan's use of YouTube, see how Julia's "fwiends" usually make the journey from upstairs to downstairs. (Sorry - there's no good sound.)

(No stuffed animals were harmed in the making of this video.)

Yesterday, as I changed Julia's diaper, she occupied herself by attempting to match the fingers on one hand with the fingers on the other. To her considerable surprise, she succeeded, and said excitedly, "Yook, Daddy! My fingers are holding hands!" Later that day, she was trying to do it again, but this time she mismatched her hands. Looking confusedly through the web of fingers at me, she wiggled the two unmated fingers and asked, "Daddy, why don't those two fingers have friends?"

The day's two hilly distance races in Davos turned out quite differently. After starting slowly, Virpi Kuitunen (Finland) accelerated over the last three kilometers of the women's 10km to win by nearly 12 seconds over Olga Savialova (Russia), who had the best time at every split except the finish. In a duel for third, Marit Bjørgen (Norway) edged Katerina Neumannova (Czech Republic) by 0.6 seconds. The win pushes Kuitunen closer to clinching the World Cup overall title, as she is now more than 400 points clear of her nearest rival in the World Cup overall with eight races remaining.  And though Savialova, Bjørgen, and especially Neumannova are clearly in good form for the World Championships, the races there are Kuitunen's to lose. She could (and perhaps should) medal in every event, and anything short of three golds would be a disappointment.

The men's 15km race had an unprecedented result: a tie for first between Vincen Vittoz (France) and unknown Toni Livers (Switzerland), racing on home snow. Tight finishes are increasingly common in the mass-start events, but the "contre le montre" format of the individual-start events, in which racers leave at 30-second intervals and race more against the clock than each other, don't often lead to such tight finishes. But as Livers said, today he had "the perfect day" in his "home race." Skating specialist Christian Hoffman (Austria) finished third, indicating as usual good form just before Olympic and World Championship events. Vittoz's shared win put him in first place in teh WC distance rankings, ahead of Tobias Angerer (who did not race today) and Alexander Legkov (who had a horrifically bad race). American Kris Freeman finished fifteenth on the day, his best result in two seasons and a suggestion that he, too, is ready for the Worlds.

Julia's favorite bath toys are a foam cut-out family, including the nuclear family, a dog, and a rocking horse. They float, they stick to the wet tub walls, they're dyed bright colors - they're perfect. Usually, she occupies her time in various bath-mat-centric activities: putting the various people to bed underneath the bath mat, pretending the dog is lost in the "weeds" of the bath mat, and so forth.

Tonight, she stopped her play to hold up each person, the dog, and the rocking horse, and name them: "Daddy's name is Daddy. Mama's name is just Mama. Sister's name is Julia. Baby sister's name is Genevieve. Doggy's name is Max [the same name as the dog of a family we know]. And kitty's name is... is... Bathmat."

Yesterday, my audiovisual deprivation finally ended: the day's mail brought me both new contact lenses and my right-side hearing aid. Huzzah! Long live peripheral vision and the ability to hear high-pitched sounds.

Biking to work this morning, I saw for the umpteenth time numerous footprints in the still-unplowed bike lane and encountered a guy jogging slowly down the lane toward me. Why do people run in the road? The sidewalk is open and nearby. Do they like the frisson of oncoming traffic?