And now it's raining some more, just for a change.

OK, I'm a big fan of the Skeptic's Dictionary; I'm basically an intelligent, rational person.

I'm completely aware of the concept of false causal relationships & all that good stuff.

But y'know --

When it's a lovely warm night --

And your Yahoo paddling group have been emailing about lovely lovely plans for a lovely lovely paddle all week --

And you find yourself sitting in a dentist's chair with a jawful of novocaine and the dentist drilling away on your wisdom teeth while your head is filled with uncharitable thoughts of your friends who are out there enjoying themselves --

and then you leave the dentist's office to discover that there's a raging thunderstorm going on outside --

It's just tough not to feel at least a little witchy!

Note to anyone of the hold crew who's reading - I SWEAR on my Romany's little red dragon, I didn't do it!

Although I do have to admit that this made me a LOT happier about my choice of
evening for the appointment.

Now the question is - will this system ever move out? We have enough water! Reports were coming in on the Yahoo group that the flood has been almost completely supressed by the runoff -- the Hudson is tidal up to the locks at Troy, slightly north of Albany, but it's also the recipient of all the water that drains from the Hudson Valley watershed. The ebb is almost always a little longer and a little stronger than the flood - the more excess water is draining, the more that's true. There's a period that that happens almost every Spring as the winter's accumulation of snow melts & runs off. For that to happen in the summertime? That's pretty unusual.

The water in the Hudson is officially gruesome these days, too. I worked on the schooner on Sunday - the amount of crap (and I'm not using that word loosely) in the water where the schooner docks was about as bad as I've ever seen it (hm, although I think every other year or so we have a bad rainy spell & I say that - I guess it's always just a little shocking to see how bad it really does get, when it's so much better and cleaner than most people would believe most of the time. There was a mallard duck swimming around near us at one point, grazing on the algae that grows below the waterline of the floating dock we moor to - I felt so sorry for that bird. The stuff we make those animals swim in - ugh.

Keeping my fingers crossed for a decent 4th of July - working on the schooner as usual on Sunday, then have paddling plans for Monday & Tuesday - hope the rain gods choose to relent!

One last note, then it's off to bed - just one more word about the Atlantic Kayak Tours Expert Center (yes, I'm linking again - too lazy to put it in the blogroll tonight & want to make it easy to find - Dan at Adrift at Sea made a very good point about that in comments yesterday - they've actually got quite a bit of stuff that's just good solid general boating information in there along with the kayak-specific topics. Definitely going in the blogroll soon.