Expectations - Nurhan's take:

Nurhan's take:

Now Newfies aren't the correct dog if you want to take long trips in the mountains, especially with snow... but as he's approaching the 18 month mark, and his bones should be strong enough to take short mountain trips, I decided yesterday to take him with me and get him to go well with folk on skis. This wasn't a complete success!


How we experience life has to do with expectations; often we experience wonderful things but because of our expectations we do not enjoy them as much as we should. I love skiing, and next to powder snow, Easter Snow (normally grainy balls, that really hurt when you fall in shorts), is great for top tours. My vision was getting Kin up to the top of a smallish hill and then having fantastic downhill blasting with smooth turns on lovely snow to play on... the reality was somewhat different...

As soon as we got on the snow, Kin took great delight in rolling around, tangling himself in the lead, which isn't so easy to untangle him from when you are on skis. - This wasn't that annoying, mainly owing to the first walk of the day Kin found the remains of a one time grill that some evil folk had left in a nature area near my house, and as it's a nature area they felt compelled to leave the grill and the fish heads, bones that they had grilled, Kin promptly rolled in these and did have a distinctly fishy smell for several hours.


 Also we have to ski through a hut area to get to the hill that I wanted to ski on; we have a running joke that the one time you see Norwegians on skis, is Easter, and yes folk were out in force. Added to that Kin wanted to sniff everything, having a 70 kg dog running behind you, whilst you are on skis, with the lead connected to you at waist level can have a rather destabilizing effect.

I had to keep him on the lead until we were clear of people as he was quite keen on meeting and greeting folk. Once clear of the tracks and with a hill to ourselves, I attached a running lead - this is basically a ~five meter long lead, that he trails behind him, theory being he's easier to catch if I have to and if he's about to go over anything that could affect his longevity, I can grab the lead and stop him.


Now last Saturday it turned out that he did get a cut on his front left leg, caused by getting in the way of the metal edges on the sides of the skis - sadly this didn't lead to any form of prudence:

and his preferred place was lying in front of you! Which was merely problematic when going up hill, but when coming downhill caused several wipe-outs so as not to hurt the little chap again.


Now if I had the idea of going up into the hills with my dog and enjoying the weather, yesterday would have been an awesome day.

But despite trying to teach him to go behind, even throwing meat behind me, and fending him off in front with the ski poles, I couldn't stop him from getting in the way, when he couldn't stop me by going in front, he ran behind me and tried to grab my legs with his mouth, he only mouthed, but the meaning/intent was clear.

Don't be fooled by this picture, food was involved in order to get him to stay there, and the skis are off! Behind him you can see some turns (we had the hill to ourselves which is quite gratifying when you look up and can trace your line by your ski tracks; and the locations where Kin managed to 'shoot me down').


When we descended onto less steep ground, I had to shed the skis altogether, or risk cutting his legs again as here I had to have him on the lead (owing to people), and he kept crossing in front of me, so we had to walk the last 1 1/2 km to the car on lovely skiable snow.


Now I had a glider in the car as well, and was wondering about taking a flight in Hunnedalen, before driving home. It would have taken me about an hour to walk up to the launch spot. I could keep Kin tied to the car, go up, fly for a bit and land in the car park next to the car (I've landed here before but that was in a Sea King SAR helicopter... but that's another story). But decied that I didn't want to leave him by himself, and elected to drive back via our (Jæren Hang og Paraglider klubben) main flying area Gjesdal as there were bound to be folk there, and I leave him at the clubhouse while I am flying and there are people around to keep him company - or at least that's the plan - on approaching I couldn't see anyone in the air. One HG (hanglider) derigging on the winter landing... streamer whipping around. 


Turned out that everyone had gone home or was done for the day. Geoff a HG pilot, kindly offered me a lift up top (so I could fly down and leave the car at the bottom), drove up; now Geoff has a 2007 ish Subaru Forester, and unlike my 2009 Outback, it does have a low range switch, which meant that he could drive me all the way to the take off without frying the clutch. The top streamer was whipping around. Wind was averaging around 7.5 m/s, and going up to 9 m/s. Great for HG, not good for PG. Could have waited for the sun to drop lower and then the wind would have come down into limits but then there would be no thermics and no wind lift so would end up being a five minute flight, after waiting 30 minutes to an hour... so Geoff kindly drove me back down to my car/clubhouse were Kin was quite happy to see me.


All in all it was a great day, but was out of kilter with my expectations.

Does have the side effect that today Kin is whacked:

In the last two hours he's moved from here, to 

here!


It's raining now, so the rest of my day is going to be spent cleaning (see black on wall above his bum-this is on all the walls) or continuing building a fence around the patio...