It is over a month since the first snowfall, but it is bitterly cold. So bitterly cold, in fact, that I waxed my skis today with polar wax - for the first time ever, hence quite the milestone. Polar wax is the lowest temperature rated wax available on the market - a market, you will note, aimed at crazy cold intense explorer people and all of Finland. It's minus twentyfive centigrade out right now. Pretty exciting stuff. We're all wearing intense equipment. In Philadelphia, where I spent part of my adolescent years, I was the only one with intense equipment. Now the streets are filled with people in intense down, boots, and that everpresent Canadian specialty, the toque.
The toque (mine's a bit less bright):
The coldest wax on the market:
George Clinton, 'cause funk ain't cold:
And finally, in sharp contrast to Parliament Funkadelic but no less awesome, the last stanza of "The first snowfall" by James Russell Lowell. You can find the rest of the poem
here, but really, the last four lines are by far the best.
Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her;
And she, kissing back, could not know
That my kiss was given to her sister,
Folded close under deepening snow.
