Saturday - Eggies and the Slush Cup

My Canadian Mom is a sucker for a kitchen gadget.  The latest one is "Eggies" which profess to be the easy way to make boiled eggs without the fuss of having to peel off the shells.  I thought this was funny and probably a bit silly, so I said we should try doing one.  Well, what a complete nightmare!  It would have taken us around 5 minutes to produce a soft boiled egg ordinarily, but this thing took probably about 20 minutes and was a complete devil to get clean afterwards.  In conclusion, I'd say that the natural shell of the humble egg is a thing to be celebrated and not "bettered"!!

In the afternoon we went to Martock hill to see some crazy nutters competing in the "Slush Cup".  It was quite cold but the sun poked through a bit and then it snowed some more.  The set-up at Ski Martock looks really good and John was itching to go skiing but I haven't tried that since I was 14 and I wasn't exactly a natural then, so thought better of that plan.  I imagine you can probably rent your kit there, but who knows?  I wasn't about to find out as I was happy to be a spectator.  We watched a fair number of competitors ski down the hill and attempt to cross the pond they had made especially for the event.  Apparently they dig it out every year and the event marks the end of the skiing season at Martock.  Thank goodness they had the Canadian Ski Patrol there otherwise some people would have seriously come unstuck.  Swimming isn't exactly achievable when you have skis,or worse, a snowboard strapped to your feet.  One or two actually made it across and there were some spectacular wipe outs which were very entertaining.  The water must have been extremely cold as you could see the shock on their faces when they ended up sploshing into the pool at speed.  ha ha!  John took some great video of a few coming down.  The youngest was a kid of 7 years old on a snowboard and he somehow managed to hop out of the pool at the edge and not go in the drink even though he didn't make it across the whole way.  That was really quite impressive.

Later on we went for a bit of a mooch about at the Mall in New Minas.  Zellers has collapsed which is on par with the demise of Woolworths at home, so that's really sad.  They close the big store in the Mall at New Minas at the end of March and literally everything in there is for sale, including all the racking and shop fittings.  There wasn't a great deal left in there when we popped in and it's really sad to see.  The Mall itself is pretty thread bare for shops too so it seems to be a bit of a global phenomenon.