Happy New Year to one and all

Not so much as hungover as “slow” – but as this has been my normal speed for a while, nobody seemed to notice or care. Weather not really cooperating – a mixture of snow, rain and slush – but at least it wasn’t too cold. Sat and chatted for a while before driving Dirk, Mrs. Ottawacker and Ottawacker Jr. to Lansdowne to visit the outdoor skating rink. It still shocks me that in a place like Ottawa, on New Year’s Day, when everything is closed, public amenities such as ice rinks are not universally open. Especially these days when climate change means the canal is no longer freezing over. There’s going to have to be a rethink of public policy sooner or later.
 
Other than that, Dirk managed to get roped into playing door soccer with Ottawacker Jr. He was a pretty tidy footballer in his time (well, he is German), and he managed to send Ottawacker Jr. for a loaf while taking penalties (see blip). No children were harmed in the making of this blip.
 
Then food. Only leftovers, but there were plenty of those. And wine. Plenty of wine. Then dinner. In the end, we made it till around 11.30pm, although I could have done with an earlier night. Having said that, these visits are golden – and it’s hilarious to see how the levels of my French and German deteriorate in a direct correlation with the amount I have drunk. When I was a student, it was the opposite way round – the more I drank, the better I spoke. Now I have achieved a certain level of fluency, the more I drink, the more I sound like Helen Keller singing karaoke. Slept rather badly. That’s also something I do worse than when I was a student…