Pages

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Leaving My Comfort Zone -- sledding

One of my goals for the year is to leave my comfort zone more often. It turns out this is one of Don's plans, too. I welcome suggestions. 

We recently had an epic snowstorm. To read about it on Facebook and to talk to people, we have never seen a storm like this one. Hyperbole at its best. It snowed from Friday night through Sunday morning, in the end dropping about 23 inches of soft and fluffy white stuff. When we lived on Plum Street in Trenton this would have been horrible -- where do you put 23 inches of snow when you don't have a front lawn or a driveway? In suburbia it is truly only a nuisance, albeit a pretty nuisance. Fortunately on Sunday the snow was still light enough to move. That changed throughout the warm week as the snow would melt somewhat and refreeze at night.

Here are a few snow pictures:







The drifts make it look deeper than 23 inches. We did see two plows get stuck -- one right in front of our house.

Don shoveled out our Little Free Library:


Back to the original topic: sledding.

Typically after a storm Don takes Ashley down the street to a retention basin to go sledding. He took her on Sunday after it stopped snowing. I took her on Monday. She showed me where "Dad" goes (which was not exactly where I would go). After going down once Ashley kindly offered me the sled. I believe the last time I went sledding was in in the late-1990s (right after I left a job with health insurance and was about to start a new job with new benefits on Monday, I went snow tubing in-between and had a friend's boot accidentally land on my nose, fortunately no damage was done). I hopped on the sled and went down without incident, and (alas) without photo proof.

Ashley went down a few more times. I moved to the bottom of the basin to take some pictures. She warned me she does not have a lot of control over the sled, so I would have to pay attention. Fortunately no crashes were involved.


We then switched places. She took pictures and I went down the hill. It was fun. The loss of control is a little jarring. There were moments when my life started to flash in front of my eyes and I had this sensation that I must be insane -- what if I get hurt, but nothing bad happened. 




Even after falling off of the sled, I got up smiling and decided to quit while I was ahead.


Cold weather and I are still not the best of friends. I would much rather be inside reading a book with the fireplace going and a cat nearby, but I proved to myself I can be a kid, if only for a few moments.

No comments:

Post a Comment