Monday, November 16, 2009

Honey Mustard Flavour

"Hey," I wrote in the notebook where I write such things, "Do you think I should do a blog entry about sitting in a hotel room for two days eating potato chips?"

It's autumn in the north. You really can't expect much better than low cloud, fog, snow and freezing rain. I wanted to go out for a run, but the visibility was so poor, I was afraid of getting run over. Eventually the fog lifted to about 300 feet so people could see me on the ground, so I ventured out. I didn't want to run down highway 97, the Canada-Alaska Highway, as it has no sidewalk and still a fair amount of traffic, most of it heavy trucks, so I went down a parallel street. The thing is, in a small town on the Alaska Highway there aren't many long streets that aren't the highway. My chosen street ended at works yard, but there was a dirt road going beyond that, so I followed it. For the most part the ground was frozen enough to not be squishy, but then I got to a steep downhill and dug my feet in more. They came up like hooves, encrusted in massive globs of mud that didn't fall off even when I came out at the highway and ran along the pavement for a while. When I got back to the hotel most of the mud was still there. It stuck together better than most things I've deliberately glued together. When I attempted to wash the shoes in the bathtub I discovered some quite large rocks as part of the glop.

This really is the muddiest town I've ever been in. Even if you assiduously avoid walking in the snowmobile tracks, and try to stick to the sidewalks, you can't avoid the mud. There's mud on the sidewalks and one the streets, and sidewalks keep ending so you're dumped off into the mud. It's caked on everyone's vehicles and clothes.

I go shopping, replace the frozen vegetables and stock up on Hallowe'en candy (yay Rockets!) and potato chips. And I eat them. For two days.

6 comments:

CanuckFlyer said...

Geez, and I thought my day was productive...

Geekzilla said...

Trading in vegetables (albeit unintentionally frozen) for candy and potato chips... sounds like Aviatrix is going into deep winter hibernation!

By the way, what flavor were the chips? Barbecue? Salt and vinegar? Unimaginative traditional?

amulbunny's random thoughts said...

Pringles spicy guacamole and pizza are my kids favorite flavors.

I stole all the Willy Wonka Gobstoppers out of the candy bowl before Halloween.

Aviatrix said...

By the way, what flavor were the chips?

The answer is in the blog post title. Canada might have more potato chip flavours than the US, so you might not have recognized that as a valid response. but it is.

Geekzilla said...

Gotcha. I initially thought the title of "Honey Mustard Flavour" was in reference to the globs of mud and debris that were stuck on your shoe. I pictured sticky honey being the mud and grainy mustard seeds as rocks.

Aviatrix said...

I like it when the post title can refer to more than one aspect of the post. Sometimes I compose the title to do that. Sometimes I write the blog post to echo the title in more than the obvious place, and sometimes it seems my readers do that all by themselves.