It's snowing - rather fiercely, too. I'd provide proof, but I don't have my camera and the Hill Cam is down.

Edit: Our wintry sentence has recently been commuted to a blustery blanket of barely-liquid rain. I now fully appreciate the benefits of living a mere two-minute walk away.

Twisted my ankle last night at OGC - I pulled off a monkey vault over one of their balance beams, only to have my right foot make a supremely graceful landing in the weak spot between two mats. Oops. Of course, one might contend that this sort of thing is bound to happen when you leap, vault, and climb over everything in sight for fun. I don't disagree - minor scrapes, bruises, and sprains are relatively commonplace in parkour. Major injuries, however, are not; these usually result from trying to show off or exceeding one's limits.

Parkour is NOT a rooftop sport. I repeat: it's NOT a rooftop sport.

Unfortunately, the more spectacular manoeuvres garner the most press, with the inevitable result that teenagers court serious injury and death jumping roof gaps because they think it's parkour. It's not. Every single experienced traceur that I've spoken with says the same thing. It reminds me of the rules from our CTF games on the University of Waterloo campus:

"Don't cheat! If you get hurt, you're cheating. If you're cheating, you're likely to get hurt."

So - don't cheat on your training! The people you see leaping between buildings - and making it, every time - have the confidence, power, and consistency that come from years of diligent practice.

(As an aside: I see that there is a good level for demand for starting an informal CTF league in Waterloo. I'm game - if nobody creates this group before I get back to campus, I'll do it myself. In the meantime, there's always Manhunt.)

Where's the wifi? I might have to start frequenting coffee shops, especially now that I've got a bike up here.

Well, not quite - but I have started uploading my photos here. (Yes, my other account still exists.) So far, the Parkour album contains nary but a couple of shots of the OGC gym floor and various downtown Ottawa hotspots; I have yet to grab any action shots, which may disappoint those of you expecting to see photographic evidence of my accumulating injuries. I haven't quite started living by my camera yet, and routinely forget to bring it along for photo-worthy events. Hopefully the act of keeping this blog will change that!

Other than that: I'm back in Ottawa, this time with a bike, a djembe, and a mostly-finished computer in tow. If I ever figure out how to use all three concurrently, I'll let you know. (Maybe if I strap the tower to my rear pannier rack with bungee cords and excessive amounts of duct tape...)

I'm one week into my research internship here with the National Research Council's translation group in Gatineau. Like everything else even remotely connected to the federal government here in Canada, this is a bilingual environment; indeed, bilingualism is pervasive throughout the Ottawa-Hull region, and for obvious reasons. As such, I've been making a concerted effort to dust off my somewhat rusty French, left unused since my travels in Europe some four or so years ago. To finish off this post, I'll leave you with two tidbits of linguistic culture:

• pourriel: spam, from a portmanteau of pourrir (to rot) and courriel (email, itself an abbreviated admixture of courrier and électronique).
• The Québecois inherit from their Catholic past a legacy of religious-themed curse words. This famed stereotype has even reached far-off Mexico, where they are known colloquially as los tabernacos.

Other than that: I finally have a car, which is more or less essential if you want to do anything other than admire the vast snowbanks here in Gatineau. Google Maps can attest to the remoteness of my present location: searches for bars, supermarkets, and banks near here all turn up nothing within nearly two kilometres.