Most of a hockey game & cold Sunshine

It was still proper cold on Friday night (-20ºC) as I wandered the few blocks west to meet up with work-mates for pizza before we headed to the hockey game over the road at the Rec Center.  The hockey in this game was much better than the previous game I had been to - much faster & open, I was quite enjoying the play.  Unfortunately, when you go to hockey games they spend more time not playing than on the ice.  After the first period (of which there are three, each twenty minutes long) they brought out the Timbits (Tim Hortons must sponsor local hockey, as timbits are little balls of donut goodness that must be made from making the hole in donuts) for a little game.  These were five or six year olds having a little game in the centre of the rink - & possibly the cutest thing I have seen in a long time.  Most of them looked about as good as me on skates & spent a lot of the time dragging themselves off the ice.  It was hilarious.

The second period was pretty good also, even though we were losing (I think this game was a dead rubber - last week of regular season before the playoff & all that) & then came another indeterminable interval.  In two hours we had seen forty minutes of the game - which is just retarded, in two hours you can get through eighty minutes of rugby or ninety minutes of football (soccer).  I'd had enough of the waiting & snippets of bad songs, so it wasn't difficult to persuade me to pop around to a workmate's house for a drink or two - which was a pity, as the game was interesting.

For the second day in a row, it started off at -30ºC so I wrapped up with five layers of icebreaker (& outer layers of course) before driving up the hill to get (snowboarder) Alex for a morning at Sunshine.  For a long weekend, it wasn't overly busy (probably something to do with the frigidness).  I think I've been spoilt this year - I wasn't enjoying the lack of fresh snow & the hard pack was just plain slow.  Nonetheless, it was a gorgeous clear day & we had a good seventeen or so runs in between popping inside to warm up.  Alex thought I would handle the double black diamond South Side Chutes, but I wasn't overly convinced.  But a bit of encouragement is a good thing, so we ended up at the top of the chutes where there wasn't a lot of snow & plenty of rocks that slowed my entry down a bit/lot.  Looking at the map, I think we dropped in to Far Side - which wasn't too bad.  I had one of my little backward falls coming out of a turn, but managed my way down with some long turns.  The snow was friendlier in the bottom half & we passed the camera around a bit.

The chutes run in to Eagle Creek, another black diamond run that is first a pleasant little road-ish ski before dropping in to the much skinnier creek canyon - this was good fun as it was twisty & bumpy.  Avoiding the cliff face (where apparently someone went over unbeknown to them, landed heavily & broke their back) we were eventually back at Goat's Eye base station.  A couple of nice runs down Scapegoat & we'd had enough of the cold - so we headed home.

Some kind-hearted & smart person had got Megan the wonderfully titled "Killer Bunnies" card game for her birthday.  That's amusing on many levels with the obvious Monty Python reference (there's also a weapon called the Trojan Bunny),



& my fear that the plague of domestic bunnies that have infested downtown Canmore will one day turn crazy & started jumping at people's throats.  The game is quite amusing with many different cards ranging from the Cyber Bunny, the Ebola Virus, Large Prune Danish & so on.  I'm still not completely won over as the winning of the game pretty much comes down to a lottery & the rules & cards are somewhat ambiguous.  Still, it's a bit of fun.