Month: March 2024

Much of my week happened here:

Mostly I have been reading and reading and reading, but I have also found time to crush The Mother at Monopoly (and chess),

and to tally the grades on her final exams:

I also check my email every morning if you want to send me one:

I have been getting out of the house more and more now. I enjoyed driving my RC truck and car in the sunshine:

It was nice and warm because spring has sprung:

I joined The Bigs for a work lunch with their colleague, Christophe, at the Victorian Cafe. I had the Victorian Breakfast (Dad’s eggs are better):

I visited the Humm Kombucha tasting room:

And, I was visited by Poppy (a 70 lb Old English Sheepdog). She’s awesome!

I’ve been burning through books at an alarming rate, so I made a trip to the bookstore to restock:

I’ve been developing a bit of a funky aroma, so I removed my bandages for a sponge bath. My incisions:

Our St. Patrick’s Day got a bit screwed up, but The Mother made a belated soda bread later in the week:

Here’s a breakfast for you. Soda bread avocado toast with ground lamb, over-easy eggs, berries, and cottage cheese.

Well, it started out like any other week. We had a beautiful bluebird day and my last race. I skied very well and placed 4th overall and then took some runs with Riley.

But, on our last run, I crashed. After a very long time, Ski Patrol came and took me in the sled to Urgent Care. Nobody thought my leg was broken, because I wasn’t crying and carrying on. They did not know I am THE EMMETT and I am that tough. I was more concerned about how Riley was going to get home than I was with my pain.

The folks at Urgent Care determined I needed to go to the ER and I needed to go by ambulance.

When I got to the hospital, the CUT OFF my clothes. At this point, I started to worry about how much this was all going to cost. An ambulance ride, new ski pants, long johns, oh my goodness. The Bigs assured me that is why they go to work, but I was not easily convinced.

I am pretty sure every doctor and nurse in the ER came by to tell me I got 4th place in my race and 5th overall for the season (they did not tell me I had been named the Mayor of Arc City as well, but the MBSEF head coach made sure I knew)! My good buddy Jameson’s dad is an ER doctor and his mom is an anesthesiologist and they made sure everyone knew I was there and to take very good care of me.

I soon had something else to worry about. Surgery.

Here is a before picture of my femur. YIKES.

Here are some after shots. I wanted to pick up some hardware from my last race of the season, though this is not exactly what I had in mind.

I was feeling pretty good after the surgery, but the night was rough.

In the morning, I felt better, but was ravenous.

I quickly mastered moving around on crutches and was able to go home by noon.

Now I’m getting used to my new, temporary reality. The Bigs made me a new dinner table. It’s not great, but it works.

I had a busy week.

On Tuesday it was paintball biathlon. We, luckily, given our winter (another 27 inches of snow this week), had a beautiful day.

While I was shooting targets, The Mother was ‘jogging’ home to make dinner. She seems to stop and take a lot of pictures when she is supposed to be exercising.

On Saturday, Jameson needed a ride to the mountain. It was pretty awesome to have a bud to ride to and from practice with.

I got my award for last week’s race before the start of training. Disappointingly, there were no gift certificates to Mountain Burger handed out with the medals like there were other times. I love Mountain Burger.

I did get a cool pin, though.

Jameson and I are like two peas in a pod. Here we are with our noses buried in books on the ride home.

On Sunday, it was snowing again. We went cross country skiing at Meissner and went to check out the snow dragon.

Here I am enjoying the Meissner dragon 7 years ago.

This week we had Korean Tofu Rice Bowls, made with crispy gochujang tofu, steamed rice, spicy cucumber salad, and kimchi. Topped, of course, with a fried egg.

While I had a sad lunch of ramen noodles at the mountain on Saturday, The Bigs had wraps with brie, spinach, apples, and skirt steak.

This week I had pickled onions The Mother bought at the store. They were OK, definitely not as good as The Nan’s, so I decided to make my own – using my Complete Cookbook for Young Scientists. Red onions go from being deep purple before pickling to bright pink after pickling due to an interaction between a molecule in the onion and the vinegar.

Bachelor got 38 inches of snow in the past 7 days. This is me on Saturday. It was deep.

Here I am with Jameson looking for our line.

We enjoyed the powder in the morning and raced slalom in the afternoon. The Mother was unable to get any good pictures. (Though she did better than the Other Big, who only managed to get a 23-minute video of the inside of his jacket pocket.)

But that doesn’t matter. The only picture that matters is the one of this scoreboard that shows me coming in 6th overall and 4th out of all the boys. Top 5 men get on the ‘podium’, so another goal met.

Because skiing in deep powder from 9 am until 3:30 pm on Saturday didn’t seem like an exhausting enough day for The Mother, I decided on Sunday we would backcountry ski.

It was a gorgeous, cold day.

We did four runs in amazing, deep powder. Everyone, even the much maligned Mother, was all smiles.

I’m now starting to understand why The Bigs love powder days so much.

Nothing special about this dinner…except my amazing sweet-potato-fry log cabin…