The season

Kicking Horse, Fernie, Sunshine, Marmot, Panorama, even Rabbit Hill and Snow Valley. All of these snow destinations are within 6 hours of Edmonton (and the last two are within a half hour and 15 minutes respectively...) I went out to the Northlands exhibition centre yesterday with Ken to the Edmonton Ski and Snowboard show and have subsequently been infected heavily with snowboarding stoke. I'm taking my board in to get a pre-season tune up at Sundance today (50% off special from the show), I've got my Sunshine Marmot ski pass (great deals on lift tickets at those two resorts), and I've got a goodies bag full of little offers to entice me to the slopes before the season really gets under way. I even managed to pick up a Giro Nine.9 helmet at an absolute bargain price because it was last year's model and they were trying to get rid of them. My care factor about looking suitably fashionable on the slopes disappeared a long time ago (I still maintain that the cross-overs over a flanny are perfectly functional and distinctive) and since I'd been looking for a decent helmet that fits my unusually shaped noggin for about 9 months it was like having an epiphany seeing the stack of helmet boxes with the words 50% OFF plastered on them. There is a foot of snow on our balcony that I'm going to have to scoop off sometime today, I need to get some new winter wiper blades for the car and I'm starting to realise that my fitness levels are perhaps not what they should be. It is definitely the season my friends...