Through an uninteresting series of events, I found myself more or less alone today, Christmas Day. No, don’t weep for me: I spent a very enjoyable Christmas Eve surrounded by family, and that “more and less” is an important modifier. Because really, the fact of the matter is that spending a holiday with some of my best pals (i.e. dogs) doing something we all enjoy (i.e. scootering) isn’t a bad way to celebrate the day. Although I really want to get on my skis, although we have been forced to endure a brown Christmas as the frosting on the cake of a brown, stupidly warm December, we grabbed those brown lemons by the horns and made some brown Christmas lemonade.

I think the dogs enjoy it maybe even more than I do. The dogs LOVE it. It’s funny, when we meet people on the trails, if we stop to chat (which many people want to do) almost everyone comments about how happy they look. I think people who think that these sports are cruel need to spend a day on scooter, sled, or skis and see these dogs go. This is the face of a dog who has just spent the last 15 minutes whining in agonizing anticipation at the back window like a kid waiting to open those Christmas present while she watched me load the scooter and gear into the car and has now parked herself at the back gate. Clearly, she is miserable at the thought of heading out:

I wasn’t 100% sure that the state park would be open today, but it was (and there were kind of a lot of people there). I had rigged up my GorillaPod on my bike helmet’s visor, which I thought was very clever until I put it on and realized that I couldn’t really safely take pictures with it up there. So I decided to revisit an idea I’d had earlier this summer: Video recording a whole run from start to finish. Partially because I was curious about how long our runs really were (watches, along with umbrellas and sunglasses, make up the Trifecta of items that I constantly lose or break so I never quite know what time it is or how long something takes) and partially because I wanted to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. When I first tried it, though, the ratio of bad and ugly to good was a bit too disheartening and I gave up before we were even out of the parking lot. But not today. Today I was committed. Because today was Christmas, a time of new beginnings… and also because my GorillaPod was already on my head and I didn’t feel like fiddling around with it. So off we went to capture whatever we were going to capture.

I warn you, it’s fairly long, and I’ll be surprised if you make it through the whole thing. The whole reason I didn’t make this post until Christmas Day was almost over is because it took hours to upload, so I understand completely. But I’m putting it here anyway as a testament to how far we’ve come and how far we have to go. A testament to successfully going On By TWO squirrels, especially sweet since our last encounter with a darting squirrel left me with misaligned handlebars after the dogs ran the scooter into a tree after I abandoned ship in fear of my life. A testament to Gee and Haw, and Whoa and Wait and Easy. A testament to me getting better (baby steps!) at cutting out the jibber jabber, to untangling tangled lines, to better starts, and even a testament to off-camera poop. Enjoy, if you dare. And if you have a lot of time to kill.