Winter Tug of War

May 30th! What is May 30th? It is the School's Out 4Ever blogfest!

This is a winter story, though. Yep, snow in May.

My group of friends in cégep* were crazy and awesome, both. I was a part of the student's café and spent every single minute between 8 am and 6 pm that I wasn't in class there. Sometimes even minutes I should've been in class.

We did a lot of mad things in our time. The best of them, though, ought to be when we registered for the Winter Carnival's Annual Tug of War contest.

We had big guys at the Oxymel (that's the café's name). We could build a solid enough team, train a bit and have fun. After all, Quebec's Winter Carnival's is meant for kids, too!

We missed the footnote that said the army was in charge of organising this. This is what we were up against:

The man at the very back (you can only see his head) is Hugo Girard. He won the 2002 title for World's Strongest Man

No. It wasn't until January, when our team's captain had her first meeting with the organisation, that we realised what we were getting into. Imagine our surprise when she gathered the group, an amused and sadistic look on her face.

"You're going to kill me," she said. "All the other teams are made of military men, police or fire fighters. They're huge."

She could laugh. As captain, she didn't have to tug.

We went anyway, with out splendid "uniforms". This isn't an underdog story: we were crushed every single time. Well, except when they let Hugo Girard tug for our side. And that one match, at the very end, against the Navy team (they weren't as beef, and had the icy half of the terrain).

The animator kept teasing us. We had our vengeance when he asked us to pick any player to help us tug, and we demanded he did it (that was my idea and I am so proud of it. M'hahahaha).

This event was, without a doubt, the most fun I had all winter. We had all the other teams sign one of our aprons. We had snowball fights in the freshly-fallen snow. We were given consolation prizes and made friends with the Navy team (they were super awesome). It was humiliating, but in a way, that was the great part of it. We didn't have to be serious.

Our team was called the Carebears. We had silly aprons as a uniform. We chanted "Love and Happiness" as our 'war chant'  (it was Love and Dignity, but someone pointed out we'd lost dignity somewhere along the way).

 So, here, have a picture of my awesome team:

I'm second from the right, second row, with the stripped scarf!

Enjoy the summer! ;)

*Cégep is a special type of school we have here in Quebec that is kind of a mix between high school and university, which lasts two years and goes between the two. Our "high school" is a year shorter. It's complicated.