Hello and welcome to the world of your favorite blogger, at least my closest family's favorite blogger... the one who is wondering if anyone else is feeling that uneasy restlessness that comes at the change of the seasons. One hears plenty about spring fever, but what does one call the malaise that strikes at the butt-end of summer?

Maybe it was the arrival of another issue of SKI magazine. Maybe the fact that ski and snowboard gear, snowshoes and cross country skis are cropping up in shop windows at the rate of dandelions in the spring. Maybe the snow that has crawled down to the hills just above our house, turning the peaks that dusty gray of snow covered pines. It's gone now, from all but the crags on Buffalo and along the Gore range, and it still clings to the peaks of Gray's and Torrey's, the two fourteeners visible from our bedroom window.

Once I have nothing to ride toward, this late in the season, when dark comes early and catches me off-guard still ten miles from an artificial light source, I forget about the sexy Stumpjumper. Besides, the damage to my bike, resulting from the crash on the vid in my last post, was more lasting than the damage to me. I tweaked the left shifter, and adjusting it has not helped. I am afraid the damage is internal, so as the last of the new pink fades from where the scabs fell off of me, the bike is still in a bit of pain. She protested our ride last night, and has demanded a trip to the shop. It was the first ride in two weeks.

Oh, but I have replaced her with a fad, something I do every fall. After the trails become muddy, I revert to the nineties. And now for an explanation, and a digression.

Some of you know this, some may not, but I have a long and lasting relationship with skating. I know this sounds trite and cliche, but the first time I realized what it felt like to be weightless, exhilerated and free, was on a frozen western Kansas cow pond. My grandpa Jim, having discovered his passion for steel melting into frozen water many years before I was born, reclaimed his youth on those same cow ponds. When I remember those times, they are so tangled with memories of him they become him, all smiles, earflap hat, brown carhardts. Sleds with runners, kids spilling off all sides. Hot cocoa from thermoses. Buckets overturned for seats. More buckets marking the sides of the goals in impromptu hocky games. My dad ground off the bottom tooth of my toe picks with each new pair of skates, and Grandpa sharpened them every time the dust blew across the ponds and dulled the blades. I imitated him, jumping over cracks in the ice, finding that perfect center of curved blade to allow an ever-tightening spin, practing until I could cross one foot over the other while making a turn.

Then the nineties hit, and I was a teenager. Ice skating was still the best part of winter, even the skating that had to be done quickly, because the ice never stays around long in Western Kansas. One developed a sense of when it was ok to be on the ice, groaning under one's weight, cracks creating starbursts, and when one should make for the shore and not look back, lest the shattering ice catch up. Moonlit nights on the lake, scorched hot dogs and subtle flirting, jeans worn under skirts to ward off the chill... it was pure fun. But with the popularity of inline skating, we saw the potential to take those scrapping, sweaty, savage hockey games to a whole new level.

They wouldn't let the girls play touch football, because of the touch part of it. They let us play soccer, because it is a no-hands sport, and for some reason, basketball was ok, too, even though forearms frequently brushed skin. That's as far as Mennonite sports go. No prizes, no competitions, and no intentional physical contact between members of the opposite sex. But our youth group did not take that into consideration as one by one, the girls dove into the boys' street hockey games. We body slammed, elbowed, kneed each other for the puck. One has not felt pain until one has been a goalie in a dress, stopping slap shots with bare forearms and shins. I went home from those games black and blue, dripping sweat. By the end of those evenings, I had been informed of the color of my panties several times by team members. The first friendly connection I felt with my future husband was the night we could not stop tripping over each other, sprawling on the concrete floor after hooking skates while chasing the puck.

Instead of games, some evenings we took our skates to the roads, until late one evening we scared the lights out of a neighbor, who drove into the herd of us and swerved, careening through the ditch, coming to rest facing the opposite way, blowing a tire in the process, and stopped, sobbing and convinced she had hit one of us. In our defense, we had started out at the church yard, and were hurrying back to beat the dark, and we so nearly made it that the woman's panicked careening came to a stop beside the church. We knew better than to be on a county road which was often traveled at speeds upward of seventy MPH after dark, and in another five minutes, we would have been safely off of it.

The funny thing about many mennonite kids is, they have incredible artistic abilities which they have no idea how to express. The energy output that some secular children would put toward dance, writing, painting, composing, is released in woodshops, welding shops, of course in singing, and only once in a while, on skating. Some of us twirled, jumped, even on clumsy rollerblades, but we tried to do it only among those who wold not mock us.

And then the nineties turned on us. As Y2K came, someone fired a shotgun into the air, and someone else switched off the lights on our midnight street hockey game inside the machine shed. We skated outside and saw halogen yard lights still burning on the horizon, in surrounding farmsteads, and knew that the world would not come to an end so easily, after all.

But rollerblading would. Our street hockey games got shut down shortly thereafter, by parents worried about either the excessive bruising experienced by their daughters in a full-contact sport, or about the fact that it was a full-contact sport. By that time, many of the girls had already opted for the sidelines, the games having become too rabid for all but the toughest girls and the guys. My girlfriend/cousin and I were still playing every game when they pulled the plug.

And like that, it died. Broken hockey sticks gathered in drifts in the corner of the machine shed, until they were carried out to the trash. Forgotten pucks sat among metal shavings and dust under toolchests. Everyone hung up their rollerblades, and I doubt many of them have been put on since.

But mine have. I pulled them out three years ago in the fall, and every fall since. The brakes are gone, and the wheels warped from so many hockey stops, but I can fly down the hills on the county-wide rec paths under turning aspens and chattering squirrels, and remember what it felt like. Skating makes me remember what it felt like to be that person- seldom a good thing, but sometimes, a reminder that there were some very good times.

And this year, I replaced them. At least the boots. These are comfortable shoe-type boots. I put my old wheels and bearing in them, because I payed a lot of money for those bearings and to buy a skate with comparable bearings already in them would cost more than my present (as in, no longer future) husband would see though paying.

They have not been merely for fun. On days that I only need to work in the office, not drive to Keystone, I rollerblade to work, enjoying the feel of fresh, crisp air, burning thighs, and of one more day without making my vehicle leave a carbon footprint. I can be there in 45 minutes, powered by the best biofuel I can concoct- the quinoa and apple I have for breakfast.

Digression over. I have traded two twenty six inch wheels for eight 90mm wheels, and I feel like pure nineteen ninety five doing it. I have not yet reached the age where it is expected of me to be outdated, so it is a little hard for me to adjust, but I am having too much fun to mind so much.

At work, I am beginning to pull all blankets, comforters, pillow shams, bed skirts, mattress pads, shower curtains and rugs for dry cleaning. I am beginning to see satin, tassels, and brocade in my sleep. I have been pulling our 12ft trailer behind my jeep lately, pulling this unit, setting that one back up. I have made so many bunk beds my knuckles are raw from scraping them inside bunk bed frames. That is what I should be doing right now, except that I am sitting here at my kitchen bar, waiting for my ipod to charge. It is the only thing that makes me able to keep my sanity. My own personal power pack. I have listened to all my songs until I am nearly ready to hunt down the artists performing them and "do stuff" to them, I am so annoyed by them all. So I have turned to podcasting.

I have found Escape Artists, and the podcasts they produce. Escape Pod is sci-fi short stories, Pseudopod is horror short stories, and Podcastle is fantasy short stories, by very talented writers, studio produced and performed by people as varied as the stories themselves, always with voices that perfectly match the story. As I have pulled mattress pads over mattresses, folded blankets, hung shower curtains, and carried heavy feather ticks up four flights of stairs, I have also traveled between galaxies, confronted absurd human hang-ups and fears, conversed with jellyfish, met beautiful Lady Death and dragons who are grateful to their slayers, because dragons cannot die of old age. I have laughed till I almost cried at neurally enhanced k-9 officers, and laughed at myself wanting to cry about robots with human artists brains and defunct manipulators unable to hold a brush or a chisel.

And now I must run along, hook up the trailer and go back to keystone. Lunch is over. Frau is snoring and wheezing, dreamiong cat dreams, and I wish i could join her.

Oh, yes, we are keeping Marci's cat while Marci vacations in the Caribbean. Frau is a... well, I don't know what they call them in cat-talk, but in people talk, it rhymes with itch. She is an ungrateful, twelve pound walking terror, who responds with a rusty howl when one looks in her direction. Don't get me wrong, she has her sweet moments, as do most of us itches. They make up for her dour attitude the rest of the time. The first few days, I made her stay in the house, which caused an even more marked decline in her attitude, but yesterday she escaped while I hunted for my keys, so I left her fuzzy sourness outside for the day. I'll admit to being in a bit of a stew over it, convinced she would not return, and I would have to explain to Marci that I had lost her cat. But when evening came, she was ready for me, waiting outside the house, happy for such small items as cat food and a couch, and a human lap. Bobby said "I told you so", and sang his rendition of "the cat came back", adorable in spite of- or rather, because of, his off-key version with his own words, created to apply to the situation. "I told you so" made me scowley, but "the cat came back" made me giggle. This morning I gave Frau the option of a day outside, which she took me up on, then eyed me suspiciously from a distance as if she expected me to make a lunge for her. By noon, she was done, and now sleeps soundly on my couch, leaving drifts of cat hair in her wake.


I wish I could be a cat. Sleep in the sun, stretch luxuriously, be fed and waited on. Ok, that would work for now, maybe, to battle the effects of fall fever. The sad truth is, I am anxious for the snow to fall. I am going to hate myself for saying that when the cold is settling in my bones, when nothing can make me warm, when my skin is so white it is blue and we are so busy I cannot find an extra moment to enjoy the snow, even if it weren't so freaking cold, when a left hand turn is impossible and so is braking. But right now, I can almost feel the carves begging to be released from my legs, the bumps twitching in my knees, the cornices falling away under my board.

I have missed you, Winter. Don't get me wrong, I still love to hate you, and there will be days I will scream at you when you come back, but when you are not here at all, what am I supposed to do?

Actually, it's not winter I hate. It's what winter brings- a never ending job that allows me no time off to enjoy it. I could so be a ski bum, if not for a problem most ski bums deal with- being broke. I am afraid our Mr.B. would not see through supplying me with the fundage needed to really do winter right.