Stuck

I'm stuck at home and getting a bit squirrel-ly. I did abs. I did stretching. I did try to go out this morning with Antonio G. and Edu but got a really, really bad feeling from the state of the Colmenar bike lane. The snow still hasn't melted enough to make the bike lane safe (I think we hit a glorious high of +3ºC today) and three kilometres in, I backed out.

Every fifty yards or so, it was the predictable mess: a stretch of ten, fifteen yards of crusty snow lying on top of scarred ice that was frozen solid to the bike lane. Had I been riding a hardier bike, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about plowing right over it, but it was not the job for a skinny tire. I kept thinking of the time Marty Vloet nearly scoured his left cheek off, wiping out on his bike behind the Kemptville Community Centre, Marty with the haunted eyes and precarious home situation, and how he howled in pain as my dad tried to help - and how Marty glared at me every time he saw me for the next two years, like I'd somehow caused him to hit the pack of ice on his low-slung, banana-seat bike.

No way, I thought. It's too early in the season to be asking for trouble like this and the last thing I need now is to do myself in.

"Sorry, guys," I said, thinking that, as a Canadian, my wasted efforts at trying to get through Toronto traffic in snowstorms might have given me a moral imperative, "I really don't like the looks of this. I'm going back to the Autónoma and taking the train home."

"I know what you mean - if this doesn't get better by Tres Cantos, I'm gonna take the train back," said AG.

"Okaybye," said Edu, pushing off.

I haven't heard from either of them, which means that it either went all right or they're both in hospital, too sheepish to make contact and say those words which would kill a Spanish man by instant strangulation: "You were right."

Not having heard from Yago yet (what was this thing about getting back to e-mail inquiries within 24 hours??), I assume that missing this weekend because of the snow and ice basically qualifies as force majeure. But I am going to buy a trainer tomorrow.

Which still doesn't help the problem of feeling like I'm sitting here, wasting my time. Which, realistically, I am doing. I have had four of my five meals. It's ten to eight and probably too late to go out and take a walk, which I've already done today. I could do something that's vaguely related to my wage-earning activities (like write those student reports for the Perfume Pump Company, or finish writing comments on the exams for the courier company guys), but that would mean surrendering to the fact that Tuesday afternoon at 1PM marks a six-month slog of juggling a full class schedule with the demands of training and that when classes wrap up, Quebrantahuesos will be over with.