Wasabi-coated peanuts

I was introduced to these today. Wasabi is also known as "Japanese horseradish," and it's a well-deserved name. These carry quite a punch. Here's my step-by-step experience with eating wasabi-coated peanuts:

1. Upon biting into a couple of the peanuts, your first impression is that a horse has kicked you in the mouth. Your lips burn so much that you think they're going to fall off, and your throat starts to constrict.

2. As these sensations become even more intense over two or three seconds, you spend a few moments wishing for a quick death.

3. The agony subsides fairly quickly, and assuming you live through steps 1 and 2, the peanuts are actually pretty good. I recommend them. Just be prepared for a life-changing experience the first time you try them.

Again

We took the kids skiing again today, and I got in some more runs down the hill. I'm slowly remembering what I knew before, although I'm not trying to get into any kind of championship form. It was cold and windy today, so we only stayed for a couple of hours. It's amazing how drained you get after just a little while out in the cold and wind. A good day overall.

Ugly but okay

I survived my first ski day. It wasn't real stylish, but it was good to get out there. I just trudged up the bunny hill a few times and skied back down. It started to get snowy, cold, and foggy after a while, so that was enough for today.

Between my MS and my 40s, my legs aren't the same as they were when I was in my teens. I can't always trust them to do what I want. It'll take me some time to figure out how far I can push them. (If you want to look on the bright side, though, I'll bet there aren't many people who can ski seventeen years into an MS diagnosis, so I'm grateful for that.) I'm also trying to adopt to the new type of skis. The new skis turn much differently from the old ones. The ankle bugged me a little after I was done, but I didn't notice it much while I was skiing, so that was good.

All in all, it's safe to say that I won't be getting back to the level I was at when I was a teenager, but I want to get back to the level where I can get down a hill in one piece. And I defeinitely can't have my kids showing up me, can I?

Not today

I woke up this morning, looked out the window, saw the snow that had accumulated and was still falling, and said to myself, "I don't think this is going to happen." Sure enough, the weather is bad enough that the little bunny hill I was going to visit isn't operating today. It's only open for three hours a day on weekdays anyway. I'm at work as usual right now. We'll see how things are tomorrow.

Skiing tomorrow

I'm going skiing at the local bunny hill tomorrow to see what I can still do. It'll only be for a couple of hours. Here's hoping . . . .

Life's too short to be smart

I'm going to do a really stupid thing tonight and stay up for the Vikings game. It starts at around 12:30 a.m. Switzerland time. If the Vikings win, they'll be in the Superbowl. I haven't ever been a die-hard Vikings fan, but it's been kind of fun to see the 40-year-old Brett Favre lead the Vikings back to greatness. I've already warned my boss that I'm anticipating some sort of car trouble or train schedule difficulty that will cause me to be late for work tomorrow morning. You only live once, right? And I'm not getting any younger. Might as well go for it.

If I get to bed at 4:00 in the morning, I can get three hours of sleep before it's time to get the kids ready for school. I've worked on three hours of sleep before. Or maybe I can snooze for another hour or two and then make it to work.

We're still alive

There's just not much to report. The kids go to school, I go to work, Stace cleans things and unnecessarily makes our bed every day, and so it goes.

We got Tanner's annual health report back from the school. He's in the 50th percentile for height and in the 10th percentile for weight. When you combine those two facts, his BMI puts him at least as low as the third percentile. (The charts don't go any lower than the third percentile.) So his existence continues to be tenuous.

Well then, Prague it is

The kids have a one-week break in school for Ski Week during February. (It's a Swiss thing.) We'd planned to do some actual skiing during Ski Week this year. But then a gang of TRGR employees decided to haul their families off to Prague for a few days, and we've decided to join them.

We'll be staying in a hotel that's adjacent to Europe's largest water park. It will take some effort to get the kids out of the water park to actually see the rest of Prague, but we'll have to do it. I'm all for water parks, but it's not every day that I'm in the Czech Republic, and I want to see what there is to see. This will be my first visit to a former Eastern bloc country. I've got some work to do before we go; I don't think my Czech is very good. Anyone out there speak Czech?

Day 23 of 23

Oops. I just realized that I forgot to report on Day 22 of 23. Sorry for all of you (and by "all of you," I mean Mom) who check several times a day to see if there's an update to my blog.

We seem to have survived the break. Lindsey is going through what we call a "devil phase," meaning that she's possessed by Satan to an even greater degree than usual. She throws fits about everything and starts yelling and crying at the drop of a hat. Tonight, she struck a bargain whereby she would be able to finish watching an episode of Zach and Cody (in German) rather than reading stories. After the episode was over and it came time to enforce the bargain, she tried to back out and started demanding stories. No way. We held her to her bargain. Choices are supposed to have consequences, right? Well, she unleashed her inner Mephistopheles to the extent that her parents needed to impose punitive measures, meaning that she won't be watching Zach and Cody (in German or any other language) tomorrow. She's calmed down now and seems to be going to sleep, or maybe she's silently knocking down the walls in her bedroom. Either is equally likely. Whatever.

I'll just mention that her knack for construction continues unabated. Yesterday, she built a finger puppet for herself. It's amazing what she can do with a little paper, some tape, and a few staples. Today, she built me a welder's mask out of paper and staples. I have no idea what possessed her to do that. I expect her to build her own car by the time she's ten.

In my final ankle update, I'll report that for the first time yesterday since the fall, I went up and down my hillside steps twice, which had been my usual exercise routine before the injury. That's about 900 steps. My legs were pretty much jelly after I was done because they haven't had a workout like that for five weeks. I've got some work to do to get them back into shape. I still feel twinges in the ankle from time to time, but it's healed enough that I'm ready to take a shot at skiing sometime in the next couple of weeks. We'll see if I'm still any good. I'm going to assume I ski like a beginner until I get evidence to the contrary.

Day 21 of 23

What's the biggest speeding ticket you've ever gotten? In Switzerland, if you speed flagrantly enough or often enough, your ticket can be based on your net worth. Switzerland just set an all-time record for a speeding ticket: $290,000. The guy was caught going twice the speed limit. His net worth was something like $20 million. The bottom line was one whopper of a speeding ticket.

We've only gotten one speeding ticket during the past year, so we've improved dramatically from our first months here.

Day 20 of 23

Stace took the kids skiing today at a nearby bunny hill. They had a great time. I've got to get myself out there before too long.

We're thinking Amsterdam for spring break but haven't settled on anything yet. I've spent more hours than I can count at the Amsterdam airport, but I've never set foot outside of it to see the rest of the city. I hear it's nice.

Day 19 of 23

Today, I'll just say this about the absurdity of everyone using their own electrical outlets and power voltages: it's insane. Tanner got an iPod Touch for Christmas. We got it in the States because it's much less expensive. Its adapter has a U.S. plug, so to charge it in Switzerland, it needs a Swiss adapter. Swiss power outlets are, of course, different from the outlets used in most European countries (and the Swiss wouldn't have it any other way), so here's the order of adapters we used to charge Tanner's iPod in France because we don't have a U.S.-to-European adapter: iPod plugs into American adapter, American adapter plugs into Swiss adapter, Swiss adapter plugs into European adapter, European adapter plugs into outlet in wall.

Someone's gotta do something about this.

Day 18 of 23--Paris

Tanner and I are back from our long weekend in Paris. First off, thanks go to my very understanding wife, who allowed me to spend our twentieth wedding anniversary in Paris with Tanner instead of with her. I'll make it up to her when we hit #30. (But as I frequently remind her, how much better can I do than actually allowing her to move to Europe?)

So now, the trip. Luckily for us, this wasn't a flight to the United States, so we got to skip all of the extra security hassles and we still got food on the flight even though it's only about a 50-minute trip. (I'm not looking forward to my next trip to States and being body-searched, run through a scanner that digitally removes my clothes, and told to sit without moving for nine hours with my hands visible at all times and not even thinking of going to the bathroom.) I will say that the Paris airport is as crazy as I've heard. We survived and managed to board the correct train to Paris.

I've learned that one of my favorite things to do in European cities is to figure out how to get around the public transportation system. I've had the chance to figure out Helsinki, Vienna, and now Paris. It's a lot of fun. Riding around with people while they go to work or run errands gives you a better sense of a city than sitting on a tour bus or crowding into some place like the Eiffel Tower. So after two train rides, we popped out of the underground system near our hotel and boom, the Eiffel Tower almost smacked us in the face. Our hotel was about a ten-minute walk from the Tower. That was pretty cool.

Things got a little interesting at the hotel. Due to some confusion with hotels.com, we ended up in a room with one double bed rather than a double bed and a twin bed. We were able to get it resolved for the rest of our stay, but I spent the first night getting elbowed by Tanner.

The first full day of our stay was the outdoor day. We started out the day at the Arc de Triomphe. We spent some time at the museum inside and walking around on the top of the Arc. I'm particularly thrilled about how the angle of this picture highlights my double chin.








Here are a couple of shots from the top of the Arc:









As most of you probably know, the Champs-Élysées is a famous street that goes out like a spoke from the Arc. I got a lump in my throat as I viewed the following sight:





By golly, America may have fallen on hard times, and we may all be speaking Chinese before the century is over, but as long as we can put a McDonald's on the Champs-Élysées, I won't lose faith completely.

(Random insert: Here's the Champs-Élysées at night.)





That afternoon, we went to the Notre-Dame cathedral. I could spend days wandering through old churches. Tanner doesn't quite share my passion, but he was game for a while.





That night was Eiffel night. I'm glad we already had tickets, because the lines for tickets were huge. It still took us an hour to get up there even with tickets. We went all the way to the top this time. It was quite cold and windy from up there, but the view was spectacular. I was too cold to get any decent pictures, so you'll just have to use your imaginations.

The next two days were devoted to museums. We first hit the Louvre because it was free that day. (It's free once a month.) We knew it would be seriously crowded, so that first trip was more of a Louvre fly-by in which our purpose was to check things out and get a sense of the place before we came back the next day for our serious visit. We ended up spending a couple of hours looking at sculptures and Italian paintings. We decided to get the Mona Lisa out of the way that day. It's not like we didn't already know what it looked like, but how can you go to the Louvre without checking it out? It was so crowded in front of the Mona Lisa that I had to lift Tanner up so he could see it.





We then went to the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie, which, as the French words imply, is a science museum. They had an exhibit there in which we could follow the process of doing the forensic analysis of a murder scene. There were different labs where we could learn about fingerprints, odontology, DNA, and stuff like that. There were also lots of other fun science experiments. It was relatively English-friendly, too.

Our last day in Paris was a study in contrasts. We started out again at the Louvre, this time for real. Tanner likes sculptures more than paintings, so we spent more time looking at sculptures, this time from ancient Greece. We saw the second Louvre cliche, the Venus de Milo. We did look at some paintings and kind of bumped into the Mona Lisa again by accident. It was much less crowded, so Tanner got a better look. I think he was expecting it to be bigger. We then spent some time looking at Egyptian artifacts, which I didn't even know were there.





Around mid-afternoon, I gave Tanner three choices: stay at the Louvre for the rest of the day, go visit the famous Sacré-Cœur basilica (which you can see above in one of the shots from the top of the Arc), or visit the National Museum of Modern Art. He chose the modern art. So we went from the rather staid, formal air of the Louvre to the far-out, is-this-thing-really-art? atmosphere of the modern art museum. This being modern art, it didn't take me long to figure out the French-language warning that roughly meant "some exhibits in this room may not be suitable for all viewers." I started pre-screening areas of the museum before I let Tanner see them. Overall, though, it was fun.





And that was that. We got up early this morning and flew home. I think I've gotten a good enough taste of Paris. Now we need to figure out what we're doing for spring break.