la vie boheme

Tramping through the snow,

You can't hear a sound.  It's easy

To lose yourself here.

I maintain that snow is magical.  I won't go into the whole spiel about "oh, it's so beautiful and quiet and peaceful," mainly because I don't feel linguistically equipped to deal with it in a more convincing way than I've seen it done before, but also because there are adventures to relate!

So Georgia went in to see an orthopedist about her kneecap, and she managed to break it pretty much totally.  A normal kneecap seen from the top looks like a semicircle, mmkay?  Well, she broke it vertically on the right and on the left and horizontally between those lines (so it formed, like, an "H").  In the centre of the bottom of the H is... powder.  She shattered it totally.  :/  It's been interesting/amusing to watch her crutch around in the snow.  Yeah, so I'm totally insensitive.  :P

It's sort of funny, too: I guess it's not really the type of break that a cast can be made for, so she's been set up with a compression sock and a soft-ish brace-y thing.  I mean, when you break a bone, though, you of course want your sympathetic friends to sign it, right?  So later today we're going to bust out permanent markers and sign that sock.

There has been more sledding since then!  Last night I went out with some more friends to the same hill.  Over the course of the past few days, a lot of people have had this idea.  Whereas the snow was fluffy and soft on Wednesday, last night it was hard and slick and fast.  Pretty much any flat-ish object was suitable for sledding.  I felt like a proper college student as I whooshed over a ramp riding a trash can lid, and, later, a cardboard box.  Awesome.

It's amazing the amount of ingenuity that college students have for things like that.  I mean, friends and I have faked some pretty tasty meals this semester.  If we're missing an ingredient for something, we choose the sort-of-closest thing that we have to it and sub it in.  No fresh-cut tomatoes?  Well, we do have pasta sauce...

Oh, and, as a side note: spicy hot chocolate is delicious.

epic

I can't get enough

Adventure just for me, or

So it would appear.

Before I forget, here is one of the pictures from the ice cave: YAY ICE CAVE.

School was canceled today!  It was amazing.  IU hardly ever does this.  I got a text message at around 7am informing me that school was closed until noon, and one later saying that it would be closed the rest of the day (I signed up for this alert system thingy that they do.).  Of course the best choice on a snow day is to go sledding!  So I called Sean.  We met DOWNTOWN.  We settled on snow tubes at a place called Tri North, which is a middle school in Bloomington that happens to be on the city's largest hill.  Awesome!

Georgia came, too!  I was excited to spend time with her.  Jeff was busy with homework, and she was free, so it was good!  Also along for the ride were Alex (Sean's friend) and Kurt (Alex's neighbor).  Driving was pretty treacherous, but not for Kurt's Subaru with All-Wheel Drive.  :P

We get to the hill, and it's awesome!  About a dozen people have beaten us there.  We lug our tubes up to the top and start sliding down.  Then, as college students, we decide we need a ramp!  Of course!  So Alex and Kurt build a NICE LITTLE 2FT RAMP.  And it was good.  The only way to send two people down on a tube was crossways on top of each other, which Georgia and I were the only ones brave enough to try.

But there were better things to be found on the hill!  One kid had created a SNOW BIKE.  He had pulled the wheels off and REPLACED THEM WITH SKIS, which then made it easy to ride down the hill.  It cut through even unpacked snow like a dream.

Then we noticed that some kids had built a bigger ramp.  We were like, hey!  We have snow tubes!  Let's go!  So we WENT.  I know that I saw a guy catch more than 6ft of air off the end of it, and I had quite a lot of fun on it myself.  Then came Georgia's turn...

She managed to get turned around on the way down, and the moral of the story is that she landed on her knee and face somehow.  So we spent the second half of the day with Jeff in the ER getting 11 stitches in her chin and a bunch of XRAYS that revealed a broken kneecap.  Fortunately, she didn't also have a broken chin.  So that was good.  Bummer about some of the stuff she won't be able to do now, though.

But we did get a few good things out of the day.  I like the videos and pics from Sean a lot, for instance.  And Georgia's mom bought us all Panera!  And... Georgia, Jeff, and I watched the caves episode of Planet Earth.  Win!