Winter Sports - I've done that

By Kerry Schafer 

 These days, my participation in winter sports pretty much consists of sweeping the snow off of my truck and bringing in firewood. But it was not always so. I grew up in Canada. You may begin the hockey jokes immediately and I'll have to admit that you're probably not far wrong. I will also point out that the official National sport of Canada is actually Lacrosse. If you don't know exactly what that is, don't worry - most Canadians don't either. I have never seen a game and don't know anybody who played it or followed it. As for hockey? Well, that's a different story. When I was a kid, every Saturday night the music for Hockey Night in Canada would play from the TV and my Dad and my brother would be engrossed. And I would go off to read a book or do something else, because I really didn't care to watch. I did get into watching later, though - I was living in Edmonton during the time of the Great Edmonton Oilers Dynasty. Hard not to get sucked in when the home team is full of characters like Gretsky, Kurri, and Anderson, and they're winning every game in sight. But then my beloved team split up, and I had a problem: it turned out I was in love with the individual players, not the team itself, and what's a girl to do when her favorite players are on opposing teams? As with so many other things, I found hockey much more fun to play than to watch. We made a skating rink every winter. Well, technically, my brother and my Dad made the rink, but I took my occasional turn at helping with flooding it. For those of you who have no idea, flooding the rink means standing around in the freezing cold with a garden hose, running water over the frozen surface of your rink. Back yard rinks don't have a Zamboni. In all honesty, I wasn't totally crazy about playing hockey - I've never been much for any sort of team sport, mostly because I'm just not that good at anything. Messing up on your own time is one thing, letting down the team is another. However, I pretty much idolized my big brother, who was three years older than me, and developed an "anything you can do I will definitely try to follow" attitude pretty early on. So, on cold winter afternoons or evenings when I was lost in a book in front of the fire and my brother's friends all showed up to play hockey, it would often go like this. "Kerry, we're a player short." "I'm reading." "Come on, you can read later." Really, it didn't take much convincing. I was a teenage girl. I mentioned my brother was three years older, right? And I was being begged to come out and play with the boys. Yeah. My arguments were feeble and few. I could more or less handle a hockey stick, but I lacked the passion for the sport that would have made me really good. So mostly I got stuck playing goalie. If you're really good at the goalie thing, this is a challenging and very important role, so please note that I'm not dissing any goalies out there. For me, the philosophy was more that my team would do their damn best to keep the puck away from my net, and then hope like crazy that I'd manage to stop anything that got by the defense. If you've never experienced it, by the way, it is quite intimidating to have a large male on skates converging toward you and your unprotected net ready to slapshot a puck at you. Pucks hurt. I know this by experience. I managed to stop a fair number of pucks, many of them with my shins and once with my thumb. I don't suppose I mentioned that for the most part we played without equipment. Skates and a stick were the only real requirements. Yeah, we had rules that prohibited hard checking and puck raising, but there's only so much you can do. People get caught up in the game and pucks will fly, no matter how good the intentions. The time I stopped the puck with my thumb? Yeah, it was probably broken. And yes, I finished the game, and no I didn't go to the doctor. But I did get a little bit of special attention from the really cute guy who shot the puck, who happened to be somebody's cousin visiting from out of town. Always, there are rewards. 

Winter Wonder

Winter --- sports. Huh. That anyone is talking to me about sports amuses me. So lets broaden this out and call this a post about winter activities. Snow is no stranger to me. I was born in Alaska in December. Some of my earliest memories are of building snowmen with my father. I seem to recall a few snowball fights and snow down my back. Dad broke his leg in a couple of places skiing in Alaska. The doctor told him he was lucky to be able to walk again. That was the end of skiing in our household. I've never even tried it.

Winters in Las Vegas centered around rock hound trips into the hills. Snow wasn't an issue there. Yes, the high desert gets freaking cold, but it rarely snows. We just went on riding bikes, breaking open rocks to see what might be inside, and playing hide and seek with the other kids in the neighborhood.

Hands down, the winter sport of choice in Arkansas was going out with my grandfather on the tractor and pushing hay bales off the trailer for the cattle. Good times and great skill on grandpa's part - turning a necessary daily chore into great fun for the kids. All he had to do was drive the tractor and yell, "Now!" every once in awhile. We thought it was cool, because the cows would see us coming and start mobbing up. It was a game of chicken between the kids and the cows. Would they grab a mouthful of hay from the slow-moving trailer before we could pitch it to the ground? Or would we get to send the bail tumbling for the cows to have to dodge? It was pretty clear the cows thought of it as a game, too - until the bail hit the ground. Then it was all business.

The real winter games came in Iceland. Sledding was huge, yes. But the big thing was a game a bit like curling. You stood on one curb and tossed your bookbag, sending it sliding across the icy road. The bag would hit the opposite curb, rebound, and if you'd gauged the strength of your throw just right, the bag would slide all the way back across to you. If you didn't, you had to toddle out into the icy road to fetch your bag. We perfected the art of snow forts and several front wars out there in the snow and dark. The problem with Iceland is that winter can be deadly. Several days a year, we wouldn't be allowed out of the house or out of school at all because of the severe, dangerous weather. At those times, winter activities meant dressing up and going into Reykjavik. There was an enormous greenhouse heated by the geothermal springs. They had green, growing things, a restaurant inside, birds and other animals throughout - it was a warm, colorful and alive place to hang out when the weather was terrible. And the Northern Lights. It was a great game, watching the cloud cover for a break to see if you could spot the moving lights in the sky. Granted. The aurora can be active year round - and frequently is - but the extended hours of darkness during winter at the Arctic Circle gave us more opportunity to see it.

At this point in my life, snow is something to be dealth with rather than enjoyed and that's too bad. At least Seattle doesn't *usually* get dumped on. When we do, activities all center around making sure we have enough fuel and food to wait until the stuff melts. This winter, which has been just brilliant in terms of weather this year, we've sailed. We've hiked. Most winters, which involve lots of rain and wind, we spend indoors playing computer games. Not this year. I've sent more time chasing cats around the docks than I'm spending inside. That might all be coming to an end, though. The 's' word is being mentioned for this weekend...Wonder if there will be enough to build a snowman on the end of our finger pier?

Winter Games

by Allison Pang

Much like my fellow Word-Whores...I'm not much of a winter sports person. (Unless reading by the fireplace counts.) I mean, I went to school in New Hampshire for four years and lived in Massachusetts for a year after that and...never went skiing once. Or ice skating.

(Hockey games? Went to them *all* the time. Seriously, it's the only sport I can bear watching for longer than 5 minutes. Probably because it's fast. As opposed to football, which is complete snoresville.)

And really, the thing about going to school in New England is that there's usually a ton of snow. Or it's freezing. All the time. So while there was plenty of sitting around and drinking warm things, there were also lots of random events involving snow.

Like impromptu snowball fights.

The sort that involved hundreds of people. Wandering around at midnight. Chucking snowballs at each other. And dorms. (One actually got out of control enough that authorities told everyone inside to the dorms to stay away from the windows. Peeking pretty much guaranteed there'd be an ice ball hurled at you...there were a fair number of windows broken that night, unfortunately.)

The occasional dorm-room sledding shenanigans involving a hill, mattresses or a dining room tray and lots of drunk people? Yes. (One of my friends took a drunken dining hall tray ride...right into the mostly frozen stream one night...kinda killed the vibe since it was probably at least 10 below. And yes, I said mostly...he broke through and got soaked.)

And quite honestly, nothing beats walking home from the bars at 2 AM and catching campus police doing donuts in the empty commuter lots.

Good times.

Winter Fun -- In A Mug!

by KAK  

I love winter ... as long as I don't have to go out in it. Watching the snow fall as I sit beside a crackling fire with the bairy heast snuggled beside me and a balloon of Yulitide Brandy catching the glow of flames? Perfection.

Taking said bairy heast out into the blizzard and sinking up to my girly-bits in the snow? Erf.  Watching same bairy heast frolic in the snowmageddon? It'll make me smirk and laugh ... and be utterly grateful I'm not a musher.


Cribbage Tourneies? Quiddler Bouts? Clue Parties? Name the board or card game and I'm in ... inside. I'm all about the inside and the warm and dry. Inside is closer to the bar. When else do you have Hot Toddies? Mulled Wine? Hot Buttered Rum? Hot Hairy Cider? Irish Coffee? I could go on...

But I'd rather you did, dear reader. What is your favorite cold weather libation?

Love, and Other Indoor Sports

by Jeffe Kennedy

I grew up in Colorado so, yeah, I know about the winter sports. Even though I was never much of an athletic girl, I skied and ice-skated. I made snow-forts and snow-tunnels. In high school, I was even a member of the cross-country ski club, which is far less competitive than it sounds.

I still have my own set of cross-country skis. In our early years of dating, I taught David how to cross-country ski and we went most every weekend.

I think that's part of living in a heavy winter-weather climate. You either embrace winter sports or you spend the winter going slowly crazy indoors.

Now that I live in Santa Fe? Not so much.

Oh we get snow, as you see above. Then, in a day or two, it all melts away. But there's the ski area above town. And Taos and Angelfire. We could totally go skiing if we wanted to . Do we?

Oh no, no, no.

I remember back in Girl Scout camp, a girl I met signed everything "Love, and Other Indoor Sports." I didn't quite get it and she informed me that it was dirty. This was around the same time that another girl told me the song "Afternoon Delight" was dirty. I didn't understand why. She said "rubbing sticks and stones? making sparks? rubbing YOU?" I was still confused. Not that I didn't know all about sex at that point - but the metaphor totally escaped me.

"Love, and other indoor sports," has likewise stuck with me. Now I get the implication, that the love is making love, and it can be as athletic as you like, etc. But I've found I've discovered the joy of indoor sports. I love to cozy in and write and read while the snow flies. I'll save my enjoyment of the outdoors for gentler weather.

Love,

(and other indoor sports)

Jeffe