Snow day memories

I have had many good memories in the snow filled winters of Canada but there is one that sticks out in my mind. I was about seven at our family’s cabin in Panorama and had just finished a long day of skiing, or at least what I called a long day back then, and my uncle asked if we wanted to build a snow castle. We started construction of this at around five o’clock in the evening and worked through to ten at night and it still was not complete so we decided to hose the bottom layer and make it freeze overnight. When we came back out in the morning the bottom was a smooth glossy sheet of glass but the upper layer had frozen strangely and had a sort of terrace to it. We decided to build a multi floored ice castle and it took us nearly the whole day to get the top right and sturdy enough to walk on. While my cousins and I were working on this with my uncle my dad and brother both carved a massive ice throne into the front and had also carved intricate details into the shimmering surface. We stood back to admire our handiwork in the light that only a sunset in winter can give of and agreed to sleep in our newly built addition to the cabin, we didn’t actually spend a whole night in it because it got cold. This is of course before I became the survivalist that I am. In the morning when we had to leave the cabin and head back to Calgary for school the next day we have our castle the send-off it deserved by packing holes inside with fireworks to weaken the whole thing and then cutting a long circle along the bottom with shovels before bringing them crashing down on top of the ceiling and leaving nothing but broken ice rubble. But although there are no physical remains of the castle I will always remember it.

Have you ever laughed so hard you just wind up making no sound at all? Why yes I have.  I was staying the night at my friend Rogan’s house while my parents were out of town and after a long day of making videos for youtube we finally finished the day. Well I overslept the next day and Rogan apparently thought it would be funny to wake me up by throwing his cat into my sleeping bag. Well this thing clawed up my chest pretty bad so I leapt off the couch, still in the sleeping bag, and stumbled across the room. I bumped into Rogan and he fell backwards and straight down the stairs. When he landed in a heap on the main floor of his house he immediately got up and we both started laughing. He was just standing there totally upright and looking from side to side like he had no idea what just happened. And then we just both stopped making any noise and wound up looking like retarded walrus’ just standing there and slapping our knees until he fell over and I fell down the stairs into him.