screwed...

I went to the key shop at the mall today to get some little spikes for my running shoes. The top picture is $45 worth of tiny metal screws. I would like to know what the markup on that is. Of course they did include the fancy little tool on the left for screwing them in with a power drill. Maybe the tool is worth $42 and the other $3 was for the screws. Add that to the $200 I paid for the shoes here in the first place and these are turning into one expensive pair of Mizuno's.

I did my first XC ski outing of the year on Sunday. I stopped by Torstein's house and we went up to Skistua outside of Trondheim. There is just barely enough snow to ski on, so I'm glad I have cheap skis. It looked like they had groomed the trail at least once, but there were quite a few spots where the dirt was sort of sneaking through into the snow, and the downhills were basically a big sheet of ice as soon as everyone had snowplowed all the loose stuff off to the side. I did well for the first time out, at least for the first trip to the food cabin. After we got back to the car I realized I had left my little belt pack at the cabin. So Torstein said "well, looks like we're not done skiing yet". So we skied all the way back to the cabin a 2nd time and got my bag back. By the time we got back the 2nd time it was getting dark and I was getting a bit tired. OK, really tired. My little stick arms aren't used to pushing on ski poles for 3 hours yet. My legs felt fine though so after I got back home I went to the gym and ran on the treadmill. Then I was actually really really tired....


It's snowing a bit more today, I hope there will be enough soon to try my new skating skis but I don't want to ski on rocks and sticks with brand new skis so I won't take them up there until I'm sure the trails are clean.