Need for Speed

I just wanted to state for the record that I love sledding, and I am so glad that Soren finally likes sledding. It snowed all day today, and we went out to the hill down the street and spent about an hour going up and down and dodging all the kids who choose for some reason to climb back up the middle of the hill where everyone else is trying to sled instead of going off to the side. It was sweeeet!

Also sweet was the sledding Chris and I got to enjoy at the Proctors' house in New Hampshire. They have a perfectly good sledding hill right in the backyard, with a nice steep part at the beginning and a long slope that can lead you right to the back door on your last run if you happen to be as talented as I am. Sure, it feels a little disrespectful to stand in front of the old cemetery at the top of the hill and yell "FIRE IN THE HOOOOOLE" as you charge onto your sled, but no actual hauntings have been reported yet. There's even a bonus feature where you get to shoot between a couple trees at the fastest point, but without the actual risk that you will run into a tree trunk and get a bruise on your leg that somehow seems to exceed the size of your leg. Which may have happened at some point on a different, perhaps ill-advised, trail on the property which was roughly hewn from a former logging road in 2004. I've tried a few times to share a photo of the bruise in question, but iPhoto crashes every time I try to export the picture. I guess iPhoto has better judgement about these things than I do.

A bunch of the New Hampshire crowd, including Chris and me, coincidentally got LED headlamps for Christmas, and we discovered that there can be no higher purpose for headlamps than sledding in the dark. It'll be a few years until the kids are ready for that kind of thing, but I'm really looking forward to it!