Greetings, sports fans.

Your humble editor/observer of whatever-it-is in what passes for his small corner of the yooniverse reflects and ruminates on various things. Fortunately, few, or no pixures of the aggravating stuff. The banged-up beat-up stuff. (Yes, our local ice-hockey season recently started).

“Inuk-Yukka”

As EVERYONE knows, winter in its full blizzarding blustering glory has settled in. We’ve definitely ‘turned the corner’ from autumnal/equinox flavors into the short daze & long knight season. Below, the Grand Mesa, tire trax in the snow — out at “Bean Ranch”.

I often visit the original inuk-of-whitewater, serene in the frosty landscape.

Two cave critters soakin’ it up in the sunspot on the cave floor (under the dine-room taybul).

Another wintry inuk encounter …

This day (actually, Christmas Day) I went on a “ramble” — more like “a stumble” with our three beasts who haven’t been getting out much. Below, a transient reminder of my passing…

Foreground bush, background Mesa.

Doggie snow-tracks. Doin’ what forest (or, in this case, wintry high desert) tiggurz do best.

My son (& his gal) pose between games of the Steamboat Thanksgiving Hockey tournament. She was starting center, and he was game-high scorer, gettin’ a hat trick. His hockey-supremacy was not long to last, being put on the back burner: a nagging back pain had to be “dealt with” soon after this — he is convalescing nicely, thank you, after repair of a herniated disc a few daze later.

Yeah, “poor kid” (he’s prob’ly older’n half my (ir)regular readers) — this back surgery thing should have been done months ago, but … he’ll recover (I think) and he’ll be (just one of) the terror(s) of the ice before ya’ know it. He had a problem with (couldn’t feel) one of his feet. I helped cheer him up by suggesting an Oscar Pistorius approach, if things came to THAT. He pulled out his tablet and within a minute pulled up a pixure of some figure-skater’s “skate foot” and lower leg. Well, if there’s a FIGURE SKATER out there doin’ the Oscar Pistorius thing, my son could be “the Oscar” of his hockey league.

Kinda funny, and reverse-coincidental: in mid 2010 when my town’s ice rink CLOSED (bankrupt, bad business practices, other complications) and my so-called career temporarily ended, our son finally started playing regular organized hockey.
Now that he can’t play (hopefully for just a couple months or so) my local temporary facility opened and I’m the seasoned, beat-up, banged-up veteran of two games. The worst beating was when I got out on the ice before the first game, skated around, swatted at the puck, then decided to practice skating backwards. Immediately I caught the heel of a skate in a hole and crashed down, hitting the back of my head. So badly and clumsily that my glasses were scrunched and I spent the entire game trying to unbend them so I could see. I DID put in the contacts for the next game.

The rest of my life isn’t any better.

Happy new year, everyone!