PopWars

You can see the “different strokes for different folks” patterns in this freshly groomed Horseshoe Road photo. We got out there just as the groomer whizzed by on his snowmobile. He drags a roller that leaves the ridges. The skate skiers, the ones who stand up straight and whiz by, make the X like patterns in the snow with their long graceful stokes. Most people ski like Peggi and I, it’s more of a trudge and we ski in the long narrow ruts.

It was beautiful out there this morning, fresh snow, blue sky, full sun and all that but yesterday in bitter cold and high winds was even better. We skied up to the lake and looked out the white caps, as far out as we could see, and the lake was roaring as the big waves crashed against the ice formations along the shore.

We try to do a big loop and take a different route on the way back. At a hill Peggi asked, “Which way should go?” and I said it doesn’t really matter because we will eventually wind up back the same elevation,. That old, “What goes up, must come down” thing which used to be a truism. But then I wondered if there is any such thing as a truism any more.

We had already skied through the woods, around the perimeter of the golf course, up Horseshoe and around the loop overlooking the lake when Peggi suggested skiing back along Eastman Lake. It was so beautiful here we stopped every 25 yards or so just to look around.

I don’t think my mother ever subscribed to Better Homes & Gardens but she was getting it near the end. Probably for the same reason we recently started getting copies of Vogue – something to do with our demographic and because we subscribe to The New Yorker, another Condé Nast publication. We had switched my parents’ mailing address to ours so we could stay on top of their bills and all these years later it s still fun to find something addressed to them.

I would rather have been watching the Darby between Barcelona’s crosstown rivals but family comes first. Instead of giving a sport where huge men, clad in armor, crash into one another a unique name Americans called it “football” and they changed the name of the world’s biggest sport to soccer. We gathered at my brother, Fran’s, place for the Super Bowl and had a good time. But I was surprised how hard it is to pay attention to the game.

While European football runs 90 minutes, two 45s with no interruptions, this sport with 60 minutes of play time took about four hours to conclude. We were thrilled to hear Wreckless Eric’s anthem playing in Expedia’s Ewan McGregor ad but with so much noise between tiny snippets of play I kept losing track of the game.

We are between storms. The temperature was in the mid forties today, it supposed to start raining soon, the temps will drop overnight and then we’ll get some serious snow. So instead of skiing we walked up the the lake and then out onto it. Something like the surface of the moon.

Two buck with large racks crossed our path as we cut through the woods across the street. We stopped skiing for a few minutes to just look around and witnessed a hawk swoop down to pick up a live animal and fly with it to a nearby tree. It looked like another bird in its clutches bit it was hard to tell.

These soft delivery bags were sitting in the snow at the end of Hoffman Road about a week ago. The big hill across the street that leads down into the woods is getting a little slick so we drove down to the end of Hoffman Road and skied out onto the golf course from there. These bags were still sitting in a snow bank. I imagine someone stole the contents and dumped the bags.

Our UPS driver is back in action. He delivered a package of frozen fish from the Pacific Northwest and I had a chance to chat with him. He was anti vax and got hit hard with Covid. He was out of work for a few months and told me he was certain he was gonna die. His 70 year old mom got it too and she died. Holding back tears he told me he’s still mourning her.

At sixteen degrees the wind out on the golf course was a bit much so we ducked into the woods and followed the trails around the course. There a few hearty souls out there. We followed the western shore of Eastman Lake up the big lake and then up Horseshoe Road where we had a good view of the whitecaps out on Lake Ontario. With a few inches of fresh snow on the ground the conditions were excellent.

The rough water builds the most interesting formations along the lake. Maybe tomorrow we’ll cross Lakeshore Boulevard and ski along the lake.