owie.

Argh. I slipped on some ice (it was buried under freshly fallen snow! A couple of centimentres of snow aren't supposed to be slippery!) on my walk to the streetcar this morning, and the first point of contact with the ground was my elbow — right where the bone is. It hurts. I put an icepack on it when I got to work, so it looks like it's not going to swell too much, but I'm going to have a lovely wallop of a bruise soon.

This has lead to the discovery that I use my elbows a lot. I like leaning on things, apparently. Like when I'm just scrolling through web pages. Or when I'm eating my lunch at my desk. (It's true: I have no table manners when I eat by myself, in my closed office, with no one else around. I think that's fair.) Or just sitting idly by, propping my chin up with a hand.

This has not helped my feeling that, lately, I have been a wee fragile flower. I have had a lot of accidents — aches, really — within the last few months. All of them have been minor — the worse was a recent lower abs/groin muscle strain that made being upright fun for a couple of days — but it's been almost constant. I feel like my curling teammates must think I am the most delicate person ever. I always have some sort of injury when I show up: usually shoulder strains from climbing but also, once, a left pec strain (yeah. Don't ask). And then there are the myriad bruises and scraches.

The thing is, given what I do, it all does make sense, when I stop to think rationally about it. I climb once or twice a week; I also curl. I've been climbing harder routes (5.10d+), and the climbing gym has recently started on its cycle of "let's make routes that are great for people who are over 6 feet." (We actually know who is setting some of these, and he's 6'4", so I'm not exaggerating. He doesn't set routes for little people.) So, I have to be more careful about overextending my shoulders; that's just the nature of the exercise, but when I'm really into a climb, I forget. That hip bruise? I went ass over tea kettle at curling the other day, and landed solidly on my hip. That'll do it. And, speaking of curling, mid-back and shoulder strains are not unheard of when you first start sweeping.

But still, there's the nagging feeling that I am just being delicate and weak. I mean, I really fell in love with climbing because it made me feel fit and strong, not ... fragile and broken. I feel like there's been some sort of bait-and-switch.

(Or maybe I'm just too stupid to stop when the stopping is good.)

travelling bug

My Paris Moleskine CityBook
I don't know what it is about February, but I always get a little bit restless around this time of year. It might just be because we're still in the deep freeze of winter, with Christmas in the past, and I need something to look forward to. We like to travel in May — it's around our wedding anniversary, which is nice, it's warm enough to be enjoyable without being hot, and it's not quite the high tourist season, so hotels and flights are a bit cheaper and attractions are slightly less busy (although I hesitate to see what happens at the Louvre when it is busy. Or the Eiffel Tower. Ouch) — so February is a nice time to start planning. So maybe habit is involved as well.

Last year, this was sort of ameliorated by the fact that we took possession of our house in early February, so we were in the midst of renovations and being broke. Having a new house is exciting (and account-cleansing), so we agreed that the 4-day trip to Las Vegas in the summer was going to be our 2010 trip.

And we did do that. Of course, you also know that I broke around the middle of August and we ended up in Reykjavík in early September. The only thing I regret is that we stayed only one week instead of two — even an extra three days would have let us go to Akureyri, up in the north — but that just means we're going to go back. (Okay, I do have one other regret: the lack of an extra €450 or so lying around so we could take a day trip to Greenland. But that's more of an I-would-also-like-a-Maserati kind of regret.)

All of which is to say, I am feeling antsy and want to go somewhere. We were planning on staying put in 2011, and concentrating our resources for something really spectacular later on, but I don't know if I can hold out that long. I'm not a patient person. So I'm thinking something on a smaller scale (i.e., on this continent) — Montreal? Quebec City?

... San Francisco?

documenting

So January was kind of a bust, post-wise, and it looks like February won't be much better. In my defense, though, Januaries are hard: there's never quite enough time to recover from Christmas (especially since, being an introvert, I require time to recover from the vacation that I take at Christmas), then my birthday and, generally, the Chinese New Year come in rapid succession. Also, this year, I've been sick. And, to top it all off, it has been, as you may or may have not noticed, freaking cold outside.

(No, my house does not feel any warmer, and no, we have not turned the temperature up — but I do now have throws and blankets strategically placed in every lounging area of the house.)

Also, iPhoto has been eating my photos lately. I'm usually in a hurry when I upload them, and so do not necessarily check, and don't realise that the relevant photo has gone poof! in the meanwhile. It's very upsetting. Today, for instance, you are missing a sunrise that I jubilantly took last week — not because it was a particularly lovely sunrise, mind you, but because I could see it. It is no longer dark while I wait for the streetcar in the morning! I felt like the moment needed to be documented.

Other things that we felt should be documented:


There is a little bit of foreshortening there, but you get the idea. It has been roughly a year since we took possession of our house (we didn't move in until the end of the month, but we took possession at the beginning of February, 2010— which reminds me, I had vertigo from the flu then, too). This is about how much beer we have gone through since then. This is particularly impressive since I don't drink beer, so this was consumed by only 50% of the household (+friends). I can only assume that the +friends helped a great deal.

One thing I did help with?

This is all of the wine we went through this holiday season:


Lest I be accused of not pulling my own weight in alcohol (or something).

Meanwhile, the clock has turned over onto the Year of the Rabbit, which I'm fond of because 1) my mother is a bunny, and 2) bunnies are cute. (I did not say I had good reasons to like it, although honestly, doesn't everyone feel kind of sorry for people who have to say that they are rats? I mean, really. If you have to be something, it's good luck to be something that's cute and fluffy, not vicious and a rodent.) Normally I wouldn't even mention it, except that it leads us to the next photo:


We were eating in Chinatown on the weekend when a very small parade went through, with the dragons peering into the windows of each business/restaurant. It was fantastic. Technically speaking it was barely a proper parade — generally there should be at least a few people making up the body of the dragon, not just the dragon head, and there ought to be some very vigorious drumming and dancing and such — but it made me happy. When I was very little, and still in Hong Kong, our apartment looked down onto the street and we could see the big dragon demostration every year. I used to love it, and it's one of the few things I remember (and miss).

So. Year of the Bunny. Starting off pretty good, I think.

crazy cat lady

I think I have somehow become the crazy cat person in my in-law family. I don't really know how this happened. True, I do have two adorable, fluffy, bratty cats. But so does my mother-in-law (plus one dog), and my father- and stepmother-in-law (plus two dogs, and two donkeys). And I do love my cats, but not in an obsessive kind of way. I mean ... they're cats. So maybe it's the absence of the plus dog?

Anyway, the reason I say this is because, for the last few years, I've been getting cat-related Christmas gifts from my parents-in-law. (Also Christmas gifts for the cats, which I don't really understand, but whatever. You know: do they know it's Christmastime at all and all that.) So, recent gifts have included a-cat-a-day calendars, little magnet bookmarks with sepia-toned kittens on them, a DVD set on how to train you cat (really, really too late for that), really ug-tastic ceramic Christmas stocking hooks shaped like (again) kittens ... you get the gist.

This year, I got a kitten wall calendar. A calendar! Full of kittens! Kittens gamboling. Kittens frolicking amongst the daisies (no, really). Kittens being fluffy and cute and not at all in a sarcastic kind of way.

The thing is, I actually use wall calendars in my office. I do a lot of letters where a response is required within x number of weeks, so it's really convenient to be able to look up and figure out the response date without jumping into Outlook or similar. But I refuse to be the kind of person who has a non-ironic kitten calendar up. That path leads to ... Laura Ashley paisley and teddy bears, and that is not a handbasket I want to be in. On the other hand, I really do need a calendar.

So finally, last week I broke down and bought this:


(It was either this or golden retriever puppies. Or Twilight. The universe hates me.)

Yesterday, one of the managers walked into my office and noticed the calendar, and remarked that her (teenaged) daughter has the exact same one.*

... I just can't win.

* She also remarked that it was a slight improvement over last year's choice, which was ... Twilight. Really, I couldn't make this stuff up.