The War of the (Bloody Big, Bloody Scary) Bears

Short Version:
Chores are very tiring.

Long Version:
As the world warms, the sea-ice upon which polar bears live will disappear. The bears will be forced to adapt in two main ways: First, they'll need to migrate to areas where there's more actual land instead of spending the majority of their time wandering about on the frozen seas, because less of the sea will be frozen; Second, they're going to have to adapt their diet, as there are far fewer seals swimming about on land than there are under the sea-ice. This means a probable shift to a plant-heavy omnivorousness, as there are few remaining land mammals available as prey which are large enough to satisfy the nutritional requirements of a predator of that size operating as a carnivore. This, scientists say, means war, against their bigger, browner cousins...

Grizzly v Polar.

At stake: undisputed enormous omnivore supremacy, and, perhaps, survival of the species.

Scientists say they've figured out the result already, based on skull and jaw strength: put your money on the grizzly ones.

Having said that, there is another way: Making Love, Not War. Apparently crossover bears were a favorite selective breeding programme of the Germans a hundred-or-so years ago, and recently there have been numerous sightings of what are thought to be bears born of polar/grizzly lovestorms wandering in the wild. Jury's still out on whether that should be exciting and cause for renewed faith in nature's ability to overcome the human obstacle, or whether we should all just go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads and wait for the world's scariest hybrid to come get us.

I wanted to write: "The bears are all asleep at the moment, of course; slumbering their way towards spring," but that would be untrue: bears don't hibernate. Their winter state, wherein body temperature drops around six degrees and metabolic rate is significantly lower than usual but they remain relatively easily roused, is called winter lethargy. Even so, we haven't seen hide nor hair of any kind of bear since we left Corvallis, where we saw the hairy hide of a small black bear draped over the arm of a couch. This means we've both restarted listening to music while running in the woods - we'd stopped doing so while there were critters bigger and grumpier than us meandering about seeking delicious foods. We've been doing a lot of trail-running, as we a) can't face the prospect of sitting on our bikes at the moment and b) have pulled all the ruined and/or worn-out components - which is pretty much all of them - off the bikes in order to reduce baggage weight on our impending trans-Pacific journey, back to NZ, where sunshine and warm seas await. And, of course, we've both been eating and drinking too much, so inactivity is not an option.

In between running in the woods (an activity which now includes not only cantering in an ungainly manner across icy boardwalks, but also falling face-first onto said icy boardwalks and sliding off their edges into half-frozen swampy mud puddles) we've been busy since we returned to Vancouver:
- Yoga. Thirty dollars gets you two weeks of unlimited classes. Nene's been at least once a day, sometimes more. I was banned for bad behaviour.
- Cooking. We have stove! No-one else has been allowed in the kitchen as Nene rediscovers the joys of cooking on something other than a single-burner propane-powered camping stove
- Movies. Nene's watched many, many films. Documentaries, boy-wizard adventures, historical romances... you name it, she's wallowed in it.
- Cleaning. Thanks to Nene, the Reaper is clean (and for sale). Our clothes are clean. Pots and pans and plates and cups are clean, tent and sleeping stuff is clean, everything that can be cleaned has been.

For those of you who've failed to pick up on the common theme, Nene's the one who's been busy. She's done pretty much all of the chores, apart from driving the Reaper to a carwash and sitting in it, reading, while the nozzles sprayed various liquids against the outside of the van, and the brushes whirled and the jets blasted air. Man, that was tiring! I needed a cup of tea and a lie-down when I got home, but settled for a beer on the couch in front of a sports channel playing on the wall-sized television.