Canoooooooooooooooe
Went canoeing! With anacoluthon, listener, and shinshan! It was fun!
This was from a raffle prize we won at the Tai Chi New Year's dinner (where "we" actually means "Geneva", who was sitting at our table and isn't really big on this whole "outdoors" thing), for a free all-day lesson. The guy teaching was a nice dude. The only unfortunate thing was that he wanted another experienced person along as a spotter, so he brought his 40-something son... who we're pretty darn sure was fighting a monster hangover the entire time. And seemed to have the socialization of a 12-year-old. And was pretty much worse than useless in general. But hey, the instructor himself was pretty great.
Anyway, things started out a bit dicey as we arrived at his house just in time for an hour+ of pounding thunderstorm, so he got all of the talking bits out of the way while we hoped it went away. Fortunately, it did, and we had gorgeous weather as we went out a bit on Lake Crabtree for practice maneuvers. Then we went over to the Neuse river, which looked a bit worrisome as it was like four feet above its normal level and seemed pretty fast. But we decided to go for it, and it turned out to be a good decision, since once we made it to the middle of the river it was actually quite calm and relaxing. In fact, the instructor was complaining that it was *too* calm.. all the nice easy rapids he liked to teach on were completely submerged, so we didn't really get to practice anything fancy. But that's okay, is was fun and pretty; we also saw several great blue herons and some turtles. And the weather was still gorgeous 80% of the time. The other 20% it thunderstormed again, but eh, we pulled over, got wet, waited it out, and then the sun came out and mostly dried us off again.
So yeah, fun day. Though between this and spending all of yesterday on yardwork (since I won't be able to do any more of it for nearly a month) and house-cleaning (because I didn't want the house to be a complete disaster for shinshan house-sitting), I am going to be sore for a while.
This was from a raffle prize we won at the Tai Chi New Year's dinner (where "we" actually means "Geneva", who was sitting at our table and isn't really big on this whole "outdoors" thing), for a free all-day lesson. The guy teaching was a nice dude. The only unfortunate thing was that he wanted another experienced person along as a spotter, so he brought his 40-something son... who we're pretty darn sure was fighting a monster hangover the entire time. And seemed to have the socialization of a 12-year-old. And was pretty much worse than useless in general. But hey, the instructor himself was pretty great.
Anyway, things started out a bit dicey as we arrived at his house just in time for an hour+ of pounding thunderstorm, so he got all of the talking bits out of the way while we hoped it went away. Fortunately, it did, and we had gorgeous weather as we went out a bit on Lake Crabtree for practice maneuvers. Then we went over to the Neuse river, which looked a bit worrisome as it was like four feet above its normal level and seemed pretty fast. But we decided to go for it, and it turned out to be a good decision, since once we made it to the middle of the river it was actually quite calm and relaxing. In fact, the instructor was complaining that it was *too* calm.. all the nice easy rapids he liked to teach on were completely submerged, so we didn't really get to practice anything fancy. But that's okay, is was fun and pretty; we also saw several great blue herons and some turtles. And the weather was still gorgeous 80% of the time. The other 20% it thunderstormed again, but eh, we pulled over, got wet, waited it out, and then the sun came out and mostly dried us off again.
So yeah, fun day. Though between this and spending all of yesterday on yardwork (since I won't be able to do any more of it for nearly a month) and house-cleaning (because I didn't want the house to be a complete disaster for shinshan house-sitting), I am going to be sore for a while.