Life in Cowtown

One major advantage to living in Calgary is the proximity to some of the best skiing in the world. Since I just started skiing a year ago, I’m still discovering the hills here and in BC, and that’s about as fun as winter can get. Yesterday I took a day off work and hit the slopes at Lake Louise.

Louise is a beautiful mountain, huge – with four peaks and an obscene amount of terrain to cover. Their gondola and many chairs move skiers quickly around the mountain and the lines are never long, even at the peak of busy weekends. The scenery is spectacular. One of my favorite things to do is to take the top of the world chair and ski down the back side of the mountain. It’s very quiet there like in a splendid cathedral, and the majestic mountains on all sides swooping down into a large bowl that is so pure and white that it hardly looks possible. It’s hard not to feel awe at the forces that created it, and not to feel insanely lucky at being able to see it with a ride in a chairlift.

Sometimes the skies are overcast, and the bottom of the valley is covered by clouds. The surreal feeling of watching quiet majestic peaks around you rise out of the swirling gray clouds is intoxicating. I literally feel like pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming this phenomenal landscape. And when the winters feel too long, and the summer oh so far away – obscured by another foot of snow – I can think back on Louise and feel glad there’s still a few weeks of skiing left.

My interests range far and wide. I’m a classical generalist, or scanner for those familiar with Barbara Sher, and a bit of a speed reader. I’m not a trained or anything, I just naturally process information faster than many people.  This naturally translates into prodigious web surfing since so much information is found exactly there. Here’s just an example of some sites I visited yesterday:

http://2009.bloggies.com/ – to see which software to use to start a blog with
http://www.90dayreview.com/ - because I’m starting the P90X program on Monday, and it’s nice to follow in someone’s footsteps
http://www.ablithepalate.com/ - it’s one of the first food blogs I stumbled across way back when, and I wanted to see if it’s active again
http://www.amateurgourmet.com/ - a current food blog I enjoy
http://answers.yahoo.com/ - I was trying to disprove a stupid factoid that came in those forwards we all hate
http://www.bonsaigardener.org/ - trying to find some info for my mother who received a bonsai tree
http://calgarypolicenews.typepad.com/cps_recruiting/application_forms/ - just to see what exactly ARE the requirements to be a Calgary cop these days?
http://www.dailycoyote.net/ - to see what updates are around on my favorite coyote
http://dictionary.reference.com/ - I used the word ‘salient’ in a comment and wanted to make sure I used it correctly J
http://foodosophy.wordpress.com/ - where I left the comment above – a great restaurant review site spanning Alberta, BC and hints of the world
http://gardening.about.com/od/gardenprimer/ss/SeedStarting_4.htm - to learn about starting seeds for my first garden that’s going in this summer
http://www.greengate.ca/aboutplants/ - to visit the local store that will provide equipment to all the above
http://www.the-compost-gardener.com/soil-testing.html - one of the few local blogs on gardening
http://thepioneerwoman.com/confessions/ - to get my daily dose of happiness and sunshine
http://www.wikipedia.org/ - where would my life be without looking up some useless factoid or another as they come to mind?

Now, this is a small sample only, heavily edited for similar content and non-interesting content. It doesn’t include news sites both conventional and alternative, or massive blogs like dooce, dlisted and steve pavlina which require no intro. It does not include the few dozen sites which did not fulfill their search function despite being on top of Google’s lists. As thoughts travel through my brain, my hands automatically go to my keyboard and I find myself googling the item in question. And I have a great deal of thoughts – even if they’re completely silly. But our brains seem happy to harness the power of the ‘internets’, so I’m just glad and grateful to have this vast resource to draw on.

Which leaves me with the question, what DID people do at work/home/school before the internet? And how much exactly is our society being shaped by this amazing tool? We no longer have to know the dewey decimal system, although I’m sure many still do. We don’t have to rely on yellow pages, which they should really stop sending to my house. Google is now a verb, and wikipedia is a household name. I love books and read prodigiously, but order them exclusively online and read reviews online as well.

Yet at the same time I’m glad I am just old enough to have grown up in a time and country without widespread video games and computers.  Atari was brand new and super exotic when I was old enough to remember such an item, and very few had access to it. I’m very glad to have grown up without instant messaging and cell phones because it allowed me to be a kid in full use of my imagination. I know this subject is beaten to death, yet kids need activities that are without adult supervision, mildly dangerous, shady and spontaneous for optimal development. Building crazy forts (with actual toods pilfered from dad’s garage), building our own tire swings (which sometimes fell spectacularly), riding bikes all over the place (not just the park in front of the house), with the only rules to be home by supper made childhood magic, unique and fun.  I wonder what someone fifteen years younger than me would recall of their childhood days.

The reason this site exists is that my head is too full of interesting and useless information, and my house and computer have become a morass of sticky notes, saved drafts, notebooks, scribbles and books.

I need a place to memory dump so that I can free up space to fill my head with more of above. This blog as of right now, does not have a single unifying theme as I’m a person of many varied interests.