It was a snowy blustery day but it didn’t deter us from a family dinner. Whole chicken on the gas grill, eggplant parm, spaghetti with pesto, garlic bread, and salad. And a perfect amount of food was left over so I don’t have to seriously cook tomorrow.

This morning, the GG blew all of our snow (not really a whole lot) plus a few of the neighbors’ with his frickin’ big yooperland blower. The plows came along in the afternoon (ON A SUNDAY!) and made multiple passes up and down the street. I wouldn’t have wanted to be traveling the freeways today but around town it was pretty darn good.

My daughter listens to a podcast called Scotland Outdoors and a while back, they were talking about x-c skiing and mentioned lessons on how to do it. My daughter (who is braver than I am) sent in a comment about that. She mentioned where she lives (Ann Arbor) and how she often listens to the podcast while driving to our cabin in Michigan’s yooperland, where many Scot immigrants landed including a branch of our fam from Caithness via Cananananada.

And then she talked about how when she was a kid, her parents (us, that is) put her on x-c skis as soon as she could walk. You’ll figger it out, we said. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say she was skiing as soon as she could walk but our kids met their first skis by the time they were two or so, depending upon the time of year they turned two.

Note that a two-year-old is not necessarily ready for five hours of skiing every day for a week. Or whatever. I will never forget the time I made the dreadful mistake of telling my other daughter (the day after a very successful day of skiing) that we would just do the “little kid loop”. Nope. That wasn’t gonna work. It wasn’t quite a tantrum but I picked her up, skis and all, walked into the ski ranch, and turned in her rental skis. “We’re done for the year!”, I said. Bob, who owned the ski ranch and had kids of his own, totally understood.

Anyway, Scotland Outdoors apparently liked my daughter’s message enough to read it in one of their podcasts.

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