The first real day of spring in Vancouver. Not today, of course, as it is chilly as November outside. On April 30. Warm breezes for the first time since early September. I am happily paying my taxes, so delightful a citizen to pony up right away, right by the time i said i would. how noble it seemed for something that so many have tried and failed to avoid.

Giving the government all that money had lifted my spirits and had me in the mood to give more. Tim Horton's offered me the perfect chance to treat my colleagues with a family pack of Timbits. I grabbed a box of them and a coffee and headed out into the mid-morning sun, convinced that life was good. The Canadiens had only the evening before defeated the Boston Bruins 2-1 to win the best of seven series in six games. It is not truly spring in Montreal until that happens.

Spring. My best spring ever had to have been 1996, in a place called Morgins, crammed into a valley next to the French border. Teaching a group of 16 year old American and Egyptian girls from Cairo how to snowboard. Days were spent jumping off a quarterpipe that we had convinced a groomer to build for us. It was a perfect vertical launch, with a soft and easy landing. ( I pulled my one and only 360 on this jump). My students were more interested in learning to be snowboarders than actually snowboarding. But that was okay with me, who saw my role not only as a snowboard instructor (a job for which I had no training; I had never even taken a lesson), but as the facilitator of their memorable vacation to Switzerland. If that meant 5 nights of drinking but snowboarding every morning then it was fine with me.

This ski camp for wealth expatriates and diplo-brats was run by alcoholics and lunatics, unable to find suitable employment that would tolerate their bizarre personal skills and excessive drinking. It is unpleasant to deal with people who are hungover all the time