Mum came to visit! So she got to meet Neil, and three years on Neil finally met some of my family (I ran into almost his entire family, one way and another, on my first visit to Penticton three months in...)
We did all manner of things Canadian and Ottawan - so far as you can when it's March and still minus 20*c... (Did i mention that it's cold out recently... ;) ) On the first couple of days I was working and she was acclimatizing, but after that we went for wanders around about, saw parliament and different bits of Ottawa, decided last minute to go to a hockey game, which was fantastic (apart from the bit where we lost in the last third...), and then we hot tub-ed and ate ridiculous breakfasts and generally museum-ified.
Mum and Neil at the hockey...
Rather quickly the time flew by and mum was off back to Montreal first (how did that go, mum??) and then Scotland for whatever the next step in the adventure is.
My next step this week was to take yet more (well-deserved) time off work to do something I've being meaning to do for a little while - get qualified as a ski instructor! This seems a little unattainable off the bat - like you'd need to be some fantastic expert. But actually all the CSIA require of you is to be at least a sound intermediate skier - i.e. there's nothing obviously wrong with your technique, which is a lot more doable. So I just spent the last three days practicing my best snowplow and transitions to skid turns... which is actually a little harder than it sounds - doing the basics not just correctly, but demonstrably correctly takes some time. Still, I got there in the end and hopefully improved my skiing, which was also being judged for three days, in the mean time... I don't have any pics, but on day one i came home soaked through after skiing in the rain for three hours, which is a pretty novel experience in Ottawa actually (Mum, the temperature broke 0*c!!!). Day two was a beautiful blue skies day, but cold, oh so cold, and on day three we got an unexpected half a foot of powder, which was fantastic for the three runs i actually skied in the morning, and not so ideal for doing beginner teaching in, which is what we were being assessed on that day, but c'est la vie - i'll take what i can get.
At the end of the course we had a nervous wait for the list to see who had passed and thankfully for my pride - working in a ski shop, I had passed.
The most exciting bit - I got both a certificate AND a badge - I've not been given a certificate/badge combination since i was about 11 :D Yeah! Woo snowplow!
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