Cure all

This weekend, McPie and I played in a local ultimate tournament for co-ed teams. Despite the preliminary weather reports calling for rain all weekend, we were blessed with conditions ranging from pleasantly overcast, to thunder and lightning in the distance, to downright hot, humid and sunny -- pretty much everything BUT the promised showers. Which was a nice break. At any rate, we played our little hearts out for two days (six scheduled games, and we picked up with another team that was short on players during our bye), in primarily hot and sunny weather. Not much different from most of the other five (!) tournaments I've participated in so far this summer. (Because I'm a total geek, I have taken the time to calculate that, including league and tournaments, I've played approximately 54 games of ultimate since the beginning of May, which averages 4.5 games per week, given that I've taken two separate weeks off - one for vacation and one for injury. And frankly, I'm not even that hard core, compared to some people. At least, that's what I tell myself.)

Maybe it was the culmination of a hard week of work and working out leading up to the tourney, or maybe it was just a long weekend thing, but despite eating healthily and heartily all weekend to support our efforts, we felt out of whack today - lazy and indolent, with a vast expanse of holiday Monday stretching out before us.

What to do?

In an unexpected flash of brilliance and energy, McPie quickly diagnosed our lethargy as an electrolyte imbalance brought on by too much fun in the sun, and set himself upon the task of setting us to rights. His prescription?

Poutine.

I was too lazy to protest. Me. Who has never indulged in more than three consecutive bites of poutine in her life, and felt guilty after each of those.

He immediately set out to La Pataterie Hulloise (conveniently located four blocks from our house), and returned tout de suite with two enormous styrofoam buckets of poutine, prepared in the classic West Quebec tradition: fresh squeaky cheese curds, fresh cut potatoes (really!) and salty dark brown gravy from a can. (They were actually size Medium, but they looked huge to me, of the three-bite-max mentality.)

I announced that I would never be able to finish that gargantuan portion of poutine. Ten minutes later, I was poking the bottom of the bucket, trying to concurrently spear the last curd and the last fry.

And now here I am, having mustered the energy to sit at the table and type for half and hour. We might even manage to go out for groceries....