There's not too many things in this world that scare our son, who started skydiving in high school. But when I described seeing skiers and boarders speeding across a mountain lake near Frisco, Patrick's response was, "Geez, THAT'S dangerous."

I don't know, paraskiing looked like fun to me. Besides, you don't need to buy a lift ticket.


More paraskiing pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/Katharine.Gillette/Paraskiing

John Updike died today.

When I heard the news, I was transported back some 30 years to a small classroom at Case Western Reserve University. The building was so old that the afternoon sun shone on hardwood floors as Updike read his poetry to a tiny audience.

The writer was on campus to see an old friend, a professor at CWRU. I don't know why he read only poems that day, and not selections from his better-known novels or essays. Although I saw in the Times obituary that John Updike was a tall man, I remember his features as rather elven, his eyes twinkling, his skin flushed and rough with psoriasis. For a famous writer, he seemed shy and profoundly pleased by our response to his work.

I vividly recall Updike's tender reading of his poem "Dog's Death." This prosaic account of the sudden loss of the family puppy contained one hauntingly luminous line:

Saturday afternoon, we headed back down to the National Western Stock Show to watch the "Stock Dog Trials (Intermediate Sheep)." We'd never seen herding dogs in action, except for one late fall afternoon when a young Merlin, our first Bouvier des Flandres, tried to round up a flock of Canadian geese.

"Intermediate" was a gentle overstatement of the herding capabilities of most of the border collies in this round of trials, which involved three sheep, one dog, and one dog owner in a large arena. Each dog had to herd the sheep through a gate, around a post, and into a pen in four minutes or less, following the voice, whistle, and/or hand commands of its owner.

We watched the competition for two hours, and perhaps two dogs made it through the entire sequence. Many more were DQ'd for biting the sheep; as the announcer commented, it's pretty hard to claim innocence with a hunk of wool hanging out of your dog's mouth. To be fair, though, some of the sheep trios sent into the arena were more sheeplike than others, i.e., they huddled and ran together as a 12-legged unit, making them easier to herd. One collie drew a group of sheep that included an animal with an independent streak. This particular sheep kept running off in an entirely different direction than the other two, leaving the young collie clearly flummoxed.

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On this final weekend of the show, the traditional ranchers had departed with their cattle, leaving the stockyards to specialty stock: Miniature Herefords, Texas Longhorns, Scottish Highland cattle, and Tibetan yaks.

The Miniature Herefords looked just like their full-size counterparts. The Texas Longhorns were impressive, but ill-tempered: One stuck his head through a slat in his pen and butted me with one of his horns while I was taking pictures. (I couldn't help but wonder, as Carrie Bradshaw would say, if that was karmic payback for all the mean things I've said about a certain Texan over the past eight years.)

The Scottish Highland cattle (affectionately known as "Highland coos", "shaggy coos", "toffee coos", or "hairy coos" in parts of Scotland*) appropriately bore the red hair of their native countrymen.


But it was the Tibetan yaks that I fell in love with. Smaller than wild yaks, these domesticated animals are, one owner told me, mellow and friendly. They're so sweet, in fact, that many people keep them as "pasture pets." The adults are imposing and exotic looking.


If I had the space and the money for a "pasture pet," I would have adopted the four-month-old yak on the right, who had the curly, shaggy coat and shoe-button eyes of my Bouviers, and the calm, cheerful demeanor of the Dalai Lama.

* Wikipedia

From today's Denver Post, as part of its continuing coverage of the National Western Stock Show:

One of the biggest stock show scandals was in 1972, when it was discovered that the grand champion steer, Big Mac, was not a black Angus but a white Charolais. Shoe polish and paint and conniving Iowa cattlemen-owners were the culprits.

For two weeks in January, Denver returns to its cowtown roots.

We're in the midst of the National Western Stock Show, which draws cattle ranchers from as far away as Maryland and Saskatchewan. There's a stock parade through downtown, rodeos, the Colorado Fiddle Championships, and lots of what my brother referred to as "cubby hats" during his brief, improbable Western phase as a toddler. (Footwear note: Real ranchers favor boots with a rounded toe and a low heel over the pointy-toed, high-heeled numbers.)

Although other livestock get brief turns in the show's spotlight, the stars here are the beef cattle, huge beasts with impossibly long eyelashes and breed names such as Hereford, Black Angus, Red Angus, and Limosin. ("They're big, they're black, but you can't rent 'em for your high school prom.")

You can purchase a whole bull, featuring a sign which would be equally useful for those who still believe that Iraq had WMD's.


Or, you can see Larry or Trent for a little bull-to-be.

Our books reflect who we are and who we have been . . .

Alberto Manguel
The Library at Night

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The books that I loved most last year (listed in the order in which I read them) fell into one or more of the following categories:

A. They were peopled with characters ranging from mildly quirky to wildly eccentric.

B. They generated in me a mix of admiration and pure envy at the author's ability to turn a phrase.

---

She concentrated her separate thoughts darkly, because if anyone was expecting her to become the wind beneath their wings, they could jolly well look ahead to a fiery crash, no survivors.

Nancy Clark
The Hills at Home

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C. They made me snort with laughter.

D. (Mildly embarrassing) They were non-fiction "dog books."

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer)
• The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett)
• One Good Turn (Kate Atkinson)
• The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon)
• Good Dog. Stay (Anna Quindlen)
• The Used World (Haven Kimmel)
• Grace (Eventually) (Anne Lamott)
• Forward From Here (Reeve Lindbergh)
• Wit's End (Karen Joy Fowler)
• The Monsters of Templeton (Lauren Groff)
• Dog Years (Mark Doty)
• The Library at Night (Alberto Manguel)
• July and August (Nancy Clark)
• The Hills at Home (Nancy Clark)
• Woof! Writers on Dogs (ed. Lee Montgomery)

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As it was, they would often come upon her in odd unfrequented corners of her various dwellings, spectacles on the end of her nose, notebook and pencil beside her. [The Queen] would glance up briefly and raise a vague, acknowledging hand. 'Well, I'm glad somebody's happy,' said the duke as he shuffled off down the corridor. And it was true; she was. She enjoyed reading like nothing else . . .

Alan Bennett
The Uncommon Reader

It didn't seem like a big deal when I hit a patch of ice and fell skiing at Arapahoe Basin ("A-Basin" as it's known to locals) on New Year's Day. I picked myself up, finished that run, and even did one more before before calling it a day.

By the time we got home, though, I couldn't straighten my right arm or bend it enough to touch my shoulder. And there was that teeny-weeny matter of excruciating pain, which is how we came to spend nearly four hours in the ER on the first day of 2009.

There was too much swelling around my elbow to get a clear image, but the docs said that the pattern of swelling on the X-ray was indicative of a fracture of the radial bone. Depending on what the orthopedic specialist says when I see him on Tuesday, I could be off the slopes for over a month.

In the meantime, I refuse to let Alison have one of my newly prescribed Percocets for her residual aches and pains from skiing. (She's 25, for God's sake, how many aches and pains could she really have?) I also wish that there had been a little less ice and lot more powder at A-Basin on Thursday, so that my landing could have been as soft as Patrick's was at Keystone last Sunday.