Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.
Ukko be praised, we really are getting some snow! At dinnertime tonight, the grass was showing through in our backyard and Ski Man's noggin had reappeared from his drifty home. By ten he was gone again, my ski tracks were mostly filled in, and our patio screen door was caked in ice and snow.
Downside: Shannon needs the car tomorrow, so I'll have to bike.
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."
Yesterday, the women's individual-start skate race at the Nordic World Ski Championships in Sapporo adhered to its script, with the world's best skater, Katerina Neumannova, winning handily. Today, the men's race threw the script on a bonfire. A short but intense snowstorm struck just as the "red group" of high-seeded skiers was about to start, wreaking havoc among the favorites and putting the gold and silver medals around the necks of two utterly unexpected skiers. The win went to Lars Berger (Norway), a moonlighting biathlete, who had started in the first half of the field - usually a no-man's-land of young, slow, inexperienced, and/or "exotic" skiers with no chance of placing. But Berger is a great skater - one of the fastest on the biathlon circuit - and he turned in the fastest splits at every time check. Finishing second, 35.8 seconds behind Berger, was Leanid Karneyenka (Belarus), an unknown's unknown who was the third man out of the starting gate and who had never before started a World Cup race. Only the bronze went to someone predictable: Tobias Angerer (Germany), who by dint of starting last fought through the end of the storm and into the clear for his crucial final lap. His last 1800 meters were substantially faster than either Berger or Karneyenka, putting him on the podium.
And while Angerer's performance is perhaps the race of the championships (on a par with Norwegian Frode Estil's winning silver medal in the men's pursuit at Torino after breaking a ski and a pole in a crash at the start), the best-race honorable mention should go to Canadian Brian McKeever, who is legally blind yet raced to 24th, the best North American result. The poor American showing led head coach Pete Vordenberg to mystifyingly decide to skip the men's relay in the hopes that the men can focus on the 50km mass-start race on the last day of the championships.
The U.S. is fielding a women's team (including great blogging skiers like Kikkan Randall on the scramble leg and Laura Valaas on the second leg) on Thursday in the 4x5km relay. The event is usually highly competitive and even cutthroat, since national pride, not individual results, are on the line. My picks, after seeing that Kuitunen is going to go for Finland and that Bjørgen's results are so bad that Norwegian coaches are publicly blaming each other for them:
women's 4x5km relay
1) Finland, 2) Sweden, 3) Norway
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.
As Rod Stewart sang when I was at a painfully formative age, "Oh, no! Not again! It hurts so good, I don't understand. Precipitation!" That last word might have been different, actually.
Anyhow, the disasterologists here in the Cities are again in full-blown ohmygod mode, predicting another giant storm. They hedge their bets carefully, always prefacing their comments with weasel-phrases like "according to the models" (why are they asking models about the weather? aren't their [the models'] heads down all the time, snorting cocaine and petting chihuahuas?), but when it comes right down to it, they're saying that we're all doomed... to get another six to twelve inches of snow between Wednesday and Friday.
Ukko, I await your command. My skis are waxed, and with unbelievable defiance, I flouted the townhouse association's rules by leaving them outside! At night! On the patio! Rebellion, thy name is me.
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, the women's 10km individual-start skating race at Sapporo turned out just the way it was supposed to: Katerina Neumannova (Czech Republic) crushed the rest of the field. She started last, led from wire to wire, and won by 26 seconds. Olga Savialova (Russia) and Kristin Størmer Steira (Norway), who bracketed Neumannova's second place in the women's pursuit earlier this week, were her main competition in the 10km. Savialova raced intelligently, accelerating over the two-lap race to climb from fifth to third to second at the finish. On the other hand, Steira nearly blew up in her attempt to set fast splits, dropping from second at five km and third at 8.3 km to fourth at the finish, five seconds from bronze. Italian Arianna Follis, a rapidly improving racer, showed equal parts maturity and ability by steadily increasing her pace and rising from eleventh to fourth and then into third at the finish, earning her first-ever World Championship medal. Neumannova has already said that this championships and this season are her last, but she is going out on top.
Neumannova had been the favorite to win the 10km at Worlds since the season started, but the winner of the men's 15km, to be run on Wednesday. is far harder to predict, with a gigantic 121-man field (taking a full hour to start!) and a dozen or more possible winners. The three podium spots are unlikely to be separated by more than a few seconds. My picks (repeated from yesterday's post):
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.
While walking from the office to the car this afternoon, I was surprised to cross the path of a Carleton student skiing along through the fresh snow. Except for his boots, he was totally naked. He passed in front of me, skied all the way around the Bald Spot (the open area at the center of campus, not a euphemism for something), casually greeted some other students walking along the sidewalk, and then went past me again as he headed back to his dorm. He had some really good boots and skis (again, not a euphemism).
The other day, I was giving Genevieve a bath when I heard Julia come down the hall, dragging our old-school Fisher-Price goggle-eyed telephone. Half-turning from the tub, I saw that Julia was actually carrying the phone, and that she had the long pull-cord in her mouth. I laughed and asked, "Who are you calling?" She gave me a bored look, said, "No, I'm playing the saxophone," and walked back out, tinkling all the way.
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.
As expected, the women's pursuit at the Nordic Ski World Championships in Sapporo did not see a huge pack hang together until the final kilometers, though neither did it see the long successful escape that I hoped for. Rather, a half-dozen racers broke away early in the second leg of the race, run in the freestyle or skating technique, and created their own race-within-a-race for the medals (video). Kristin Størmer Steira (Norway) led for most of the last phase of the race, trying to use her climbing prowess to lose her pursuers, especially the Russian veteran Olga Savialova, who cannily drafted Steira for almost the entire second half of the race. Behind them and some fading frontrunners, Czech Katerina Neumannova steadily erased a five-second deficit. With 2500 meters to go, the Czech skier made contact with Steira and Savialova and the hanging-on German Evi Sachenbacher Stehle. Savialova immediately surged to the lead. Sachenbacher Stehle tried to follow, but the effort was too much, and she soon fell back to fourth, barely hanging on to the front trio and obviously tired. At the last time check, on a steep curving hill, Savialova was visibly stronger than her chasers, but could not escape on the subsequent descent. Steira tried to attack on the next small uphill, but Neumannova responded and stuck to Savialova when the Russian accelerated around the final corner and into the finishing straightaway. Neumannova tried to swing wide, replicating Axel Teichmann's successful gambit the day before. With power to spare, Savialova easily matched Neumannova's pace, maintaining her lead all the way to the line and taking the gold by a half-second. Steira was 2.1 seconds back in bronze, Sachenbacher Stehle a distant fourth. Neumannova is clearly on form to race well - and I think to win - in the 10km freestyle race on Tuesday. But Savialova will be a force in that race, too, having earned at Sapporo a championship to match the gold she won at the 2003 World Championships.
Beyond Savialova's return to form, the story of the day was Virpi Kuitunen's shocking withdrawal from the race. My pick for the silver medal, Kuitunen's DNF demonstrated that her bad back may plague her at these world championships and into the last phase of the World Cup season. A favorite for podium spots, if not gold medals, in all three remaining events, Kuitunen may now not be able to go at full power.
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 Finns (and those hangers-on, the Estonians) have wife carrying, but by god, the U.P. has outhouse racing.
(Thanks, Dad!)
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
1) Katerina Neumannova (Czech Republic), 2) Virpi Kuitunen (Finland), 3) Justyna Kowalczyk (Poland)
At this early hour, it doesn't look much different outside than it did last night. There are still bare spots on the sidewalks, for snowing out loud. It's still too early in the "storm" to call it a bust (or a hoax by the weathermen), but we'll need to see ludicrous rates of snowfall for this to pan out. At least it's windy!
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.
If the opening individual sprints events at the Nordic World Ski Championships showed that Norway had great sprinters, Friday's team events demonstrated that other nations, including some surprising entrants, could field top-notch teams.
The men's final (YouTube) featured contenders such as Norway, Germany, and Italy as well as the Czech Republic and Canada, two teams with rising sprinters. At the last handoff, a whopping six teams were still in contention. (Pre-race favorites Norway were well behind after a terrible crash, and Sweden had crashed out of its semi-final.) Italy's Cristian Zorzi - "Zorro," a phenomenally fast and savvy pack racer - assumed the lead and controlled the pace by alternatingly accelerating and slowing. As the pack wound through the final curves before the stadium, Zorzi had cut the lead group to five - more racers than even the ultra-wide finishing track could accommodate. Only Russia's Vassili Rotchev, a deadly finisher, could match Zorzi's speed, and when the two men stretched for the win, not even the clock could tell them apart, giving them the same time down to the tenths of a second. A review of the finish-line photo showed that Zorro's left boot crossed first, giving Italy a surprising win. The Czech Republic's Dusan Kozisek won the race for the bronze medal by 1/10th of a second over Germany's Axel Teichmann. All told, the top five finished within one second of Zorzi's time - an excellent sign that the championship's marquee race, the men's relay, will be an exciting event.
The women's final (clip of last leg), which included all of the powerhouse teams and all three medalists from yesterday's individual event, was a less competitive affair all the way through. The ten teams were winnowed down to four contenders by the first of five exchanges: Norway, Finland, Germany, and Sweden. By the final exchange, Sweden had fallen well behind Norway's Astrid Jacobsen (yesterday's individual-sprint gold medalist), who handed off to Marit Bjørgen. Leading Finland's Virpi Kuitunen and Germany's Claudia Künzel-Nystad out of the Sapporo Dome, Bjørgen used her customary jump-step climbing style to maintain a narrowing lead. As the course flattened and wound back toward the stadium, Kuitunen and Künzel-Nystad made their break, taking a clean line through a big S-curve to pass and brutally drop the Norwegian. Kuitunen's smooth skate stride kept her clearly ahead of the German all the way to the line, where she took the win by 7/10ths of a second. Bjørgen finished third, 3.1 seconds down - a respectable placing, but not one that will inspire confidence in her speed on a presumed anchor leg in the women's relay.
Though the team sprint events, in running well over 15 minutes, are considerable endurance tests, the true distance racing starts on Saturday with the men's pursuit, a still-novel contest in which athletes complete the first half of the race (15km for men, 7.5km for women) in the classical style, then switch skis and poles to race the second half in the freestyle technique. Owing to the way the change in technique equalizes the field, pursuits often come down to sprints among numerous racers. In fact, the last men's pursuit that did not end with a pack rushing to the line was the "pre-Worlds" race at Sapporo in March 2006. That race was won handily by Sweden's Mathias Fredriksson, ahead of Norway's wunderkinder Petter Northug (an exceptionally strong pursuit racer) and Swedish teammate Anders Södergren. I don't think Fredriksson will be back on the podium, but the other two will be:
men's 15km+15km pursuit
1) Tobias Angerer (Germany), 2) Anders Södergren (Sweden), 3) Petter Northug (Norway)
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!
Minnesota is atwitter with the Giant Huge Massive Unbelievable Storm that's due to start on Friday night. From the Strib on Thursday night:
I'd love to get a good blizzard, but I doubt it'll live up to the hype. In fact, internet, I'll wager that this Big One won't be. If Northfield gets six or more inches of snow between noon Friday and noon Monday, I will cavort in my shorts (and shoes!) in whatever snow is piled up in our backyard. If I don't subsequently die of exposure (to the weather or to YouTube), I shall go skiing. Come on, Ukko - show me what you got!
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:
A sociobiological process designed to unequivocally demonstrate to the parent that the universe's preferred mode of humor is cruel irony:
"Tonight, my parenting experiences including spending three hours reading Ferber on cultivating good sleep habits in your kids - but also going upstairs twice to talk to Julia, who herself spent two hours singing and talking, unable to sleep, and who ended the evening with a meltdown, only falling asleep until two and a half hours after 'bedtime.'"
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?"
The Nordic World Ski Championships start tomorrow in Sapporo, Japan. The first event - the individual classical-style sprints - begins at 5:30 p.m. in Japan (1:30 a.m. central time in the U.S.) The fields are massive, with 83 men and 71 women on the qualifying lists, including lots of "exotics" - skiers representing countries which don't typically send racers to events. There are, for instance, Portuguese, Romanian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Turkish, Korean, Irish, and Greek racers, as well as one each from Kenya and Brazil.
Needless to say, none of those racers will make it onto the podiums for either the men's 1400m race or the women's 1200m race. In addition to the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, German, and Italian skiers who are good bets (and I do mean "bets" - the Europeans wager on both the men and the women!), six Americans are racing. With some good recent results, Kikkan Randall (Alaska) can be considered a long-shot for a medal in the women's event, but a top-10 finish is possible or even likely. Her teammate Laura Valaas (Washington) is competing in her first elite international event, but who knows? If she skis as well as she blogs, anything could happen. The four American men are led by Andrew Newell (Vermont)and Torin Koos (Washington), both of whom have had excellent results, including podium finishes, in recent World Cup races. Those veterans are joined by Las Flora (Alaska) and Chris Cook (Wisconsin), who have some familiarity with this level of racing, if not (yet) the results.
According to Koos, "the Sapporo sprint course seems better than most. There’s 30 meters of elevation gain spread out over two climbs," meaning that neither raw climbing strength nor raw sprinting power will suffice to do well. Some combination of those attributes, plus the finesse needed to race in a pack and a good dose of luck to avoid being stabbed with a pole or knocked off course, will be key in both today's individual races and tomorrow's team sprints. Notably, the sprints will occur indoors, in the massive Sapporo Dome. Indeed, location is the biggest wild card for this event and for the World Championships as a whole, and could be an advantage for the Americans, Canadians, and I suppose the Brazilian. The World Cup usually entails racing in Europe among Europeans, but these worlds, occurring on what might be called neutral snow (or at least a place where jet lag and cultural discomfort should be equal), might be just the place to see some excellent North American results. My picks:
women's classical-style sprint
1) Virpi Kuitunen (FIN), 2) Marit Bjørgen (NOR), 3) Petra Majdic (SLO)
men's classical-style sprint
1) Jens-Arne Svartedal (NOR), 2) Tor-Arne Hetland (NOR), 3) Andrew Newell (USA)
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.
Sunday, I took Genevieve in with me when Julia decided she was "wakin' up!" Sitting down next to Julia on the edge of her bed, I put Gigi on my lap so she could see her sister. Julia always makes Genevieve very happy, and this time she leaned as far toward Julia as possible, smiled her craziest grin, and then yelled delightedly, "Gaaaarrrrr!" Julia bounced happily, exclaiming, "She's talkin' to me! What did she say?" The precise meaning was obscure, but the gist of it was, "I love you, Julia!"
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.
After her bath, Julia likes to run back and forth across her room while I try to get her into a diaper, apply some lotion to her scaly arms, and wrangle her pajamas over her arms and legs. She literally dances past my outstretched arms, enjoying being elusively naked. It's actually pretty funny and fun, and tonight she hilariously told me, at each stage of the process, that "Julia and Daddy are having a diaper fight! Julia and Daddy are having a lotion fight! Julia and Daddy are having a pajamas fight!"
Genevieve isn't coining names for parts of the day, but she has lately become utterly enamored of a little Leapfrog music toy.
Banging on the keys elicits short songs, single notes, or the names of shapes and colors - all of which she finds hilarious and engrossing. And from our angle, sitting at the kitchen table while we eat and she plays, it looks like she's a journalist trying to meet her deadline. "Get away from my highchair! I'm trying to finish this goddamn story on wooden versus plastic toys! So help me god, if you interrupt me again, I'll spit up all over your shoes. And I might anyhow."
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.
The evening with Julia had two verbal high points. First, expanding on the fact that she didn't want any Tabasco in her pasta sauce (I hadn't offered!), she said that she liked "some hot foods, like sauna machana." I had no idea what she meant, but as she kept repeating it, trying out different combinations of sounds, and then hit finally on "chana masala" - which we had for dinner several months ago. Second, when I asked her what she did at "toddler class" this morning, she fixed me with a tired look and said quietly, "I don't wanna talk about it." I guess that's better than, "Nothing," but not by much.
Genevieve did her best to keep up, but of course her utterances weren't exactly verbal. Still, she peaked when she noticed the cat sneak past. Being an inveterate lover of the cat, Gigi grinned her biggest grin and then exploded into a massive barking laugh that sounded a lot like Sabine's rather piercing meow - and which sent her scampering right back out of the bathroom.
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.)
Racing in front of 5,000 spectators in Changchun, the Norwegian men's team dominated the 1300-meter classic sprints, putting five racers into the six-spot "large final" for the podium. Coming to the line after 2:30 of racing, the field had been reduced to three leaders, and from that group Ola Vigen Hattestad eked out the win by 2/10ths over Borre Næss and 3/10ths over Tor Arne Hetland. The win was Hattestad's first-ever World Cup gold. It's a mark of Norway's stature as a sprinting powerhouse that Hattestad's not even on the team for Worlds. With his 60 third-place points, Hetland narrowed his gap to Jens Arne Svartedal in the World Cup sprint rankings. Disappointingly, Americans Torin Koos and Andy Newell failed to qualify for the semifinals (though Newell's third-place time in his quarterfinal heat was faster than Hattestad's final-winning time!). Sweden, the other well-stocked men's sprint team, put one racer into the final (he finished last) and three into the small final, showing that they too are ready for the Worlds - though not quite as ready at Norway.
Like the sprints, the distance races on Friday feature small, relatively weak fields. In most races, the top 30 finishers earn World Cup points, but only 29 women are entered in the 10km freestyle (only 16 of whom aren't in the Chinese "national group"). No more than five are truly world-class racers, so it's Katerina Neumannova's race to lose. The men's race should be much more competitive, as the field includes some of the best freestyle racers, andbutI think young Russian speedster Sergej Shiriaev will take his first win. My picks: