Lovely weekend at Paul and Judy and Jamie and Willa’s house in Chelsea, Quebec.

Every winter, you may recall, their property turns into a wonderland of seasonal sports: Paul creates both an outdoor hockey rink (complete with boards, lights, a net and a plywood goalie) and a luge run. And each year the luge run gets more spectacular.

Willa and Jamie in their respective ice caves.

This year’s run is the best yet. A couple of years ago, the first corner not only bled some of your speed, but generally looked for other things to bleed or bruise. Now it’s pure acceleration.

We all had a ball. In the Olympic spirit, Jon launched almost every run with the series of beeps that you hear in downhill skiing events.

Killer g-forces near late in the run. Click for a QuickTime movie!

Here’s the entire crew setting up a complicated trucking shot, for the 14 second movie. Just an excerpt from The Making of the Chelsea Luge 2006 book that’s coming out next month.

It was also Jon’s first time in a hot tub. He’d been fretting about it for weeks, and all I wanted was for him to try it for a few seconds, especially given that it’s out in the snow. All that worry was for naught: he’s hooked.

The next morning Judy awoke us around 8 a.m. with a single sentence. “There’s a wolf in our backyard.” Well, we’ve all decided since that it was a coyote (go to this Wolf vs. Coyote guide and judge for yourself) that was maybe 20 metres from the hot tub Jon and I that had been in 12 hours before. Most of us watched (and snapped photos and video) in awe as it growled at crows and finished off most of a deer carcass, (Jon and Jamie slept through—no doubt intent on growing even taller and putting their parents in the poorhouse).

Click for a QuickTime movie of the coyote