Funny link time!

This totally cracked me up (speakers on please!).

Thanks Omer!

Another teaching "gig" in May...

well it looks as though I will probably be teaching at HVO's Hudson Valley Kayak Symposium...

Once again went through this whole damned round of self-doubt...this is a bit more formal than any of the stuff I've done since leaving Manhattan Kayak. Plus they want me to help out with a "Women on Water" class, which is a curious thing for me because although I am definitely a women (wait, let me look...yep) and I am frequently found on the water I have never spent a lot of time thinking about the woman aspect of the whole thing. Guess it's time to start thinking though. I did explain to the organizer that I've always taught paddling without really differentiating between the genders & that I honestly wasn't sure where to start in on a gender-specific approach - actually one of the things I really like about paddling is that it really is a sport where gender DOESN'T make that much difference - or shouldn't. Technique is so much more important than sheer brute upper-body strength.

But the organizer said that so far, it's mostly beginners who're signed up - so in a way I'm thinking that that, in and of itself, would be a pretty worthwhile message to get across.

And I've got until May 20th to do some research. Seems kind of funny that I should have to do research about being a woman paddler but oh well. There was some book some well-intentioned person gave me called Kayaking for Women" - I dropped it open to a random page & read an introductory sentence about the sprayskirt that read something along the lines of "Imagine you're wearing a poodle skirt". Gag me with a bilge pump, dude. Promptly chucked it & went back to Paul Dutky's The Bombproof Roll And Beyond. Perhaps I should take another look.

Bedtime now...hoping to get in a paddle tomorrow, although it may be a bit on the rainy/windy side, those of us who are going will be touching base at 9 am so we can make the call then. Today was a gale warning w/pouring rain, perfect for doing taxes & then curling up with the kitties & one of my favorite movies, Spirited Away - that was all nice (well the second part, the first was productive & nice to have finished so yeah, I guess it was all nice) butI'm really hoping that the storm has blown itself out tomorrow because I will be working the following weekend so this is my last chance to paddle before the whole budget season takes over my life completely...

Ode to Joy (over cookies).

You know you’re having a long day when:

It’s 5:10 on Friday.

You are still at your desk.

You suddenly recall that at the end of the previous day (which was so insane that at one point you would have cried except that that would have been a waste of time, and you already didn’t have enough of that), you stashed a box of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies behind your printer.

This realization causes you to hear a mental rendition the “Ode to Joy” with full chorus & orchestra.

Guess who’s having a long day.

ugh ugh ugh

ok...do you remember getting any inscriptions - or signatures or whatever it's called when high-school kids sign each other's yearbooks - in your high school yearbook that read:

2 good
2 be
4 gotten

?

I have a variation on that theme to offer as an excuse for a post tonight.

2 tired
2 write
2 night.

Augh. I think I mentioned here or there that we're in the throes of budget season at my full-time job...did I mention that we also have a sales conference next week AND I'm getting going on March close documents as well? Who said that we had to do all 3 at once?

Whimper whimper.

I need to go play with the kitties now. Did you know that when you talk to people, your blood pressure goes up, but when you talk to animals, it goes down? Good thing I'm kittysitting right now.

I'll write a real post this weekend, honest. Unless I'm just too fried to write anything interesting which is possible. Oh man, I never did get down my notes on what I was doing in the pool in Stamford that was working so well...something about really isolating the hip action used to start the rotation of the boat, cutting down the involvement of the upper body as much as possible - the best Greenland-style rollers can roll with their arms crossed & held tight against the torso (check out the 'straightjacket roll' on Cheri Perry's website - no, that is not an actual straightjacket she's wearing, it's a tuiliq - she's awesome btw) - I'm nowhere close to that but I was up to handrolling (rolling without a paddle) with my hands held in fists (one step more difficult than open-handed) & should have tried the one where you put one hand behind your head...it was all feeling really good.

oooh ooooh ooooh ooooh!

ok...can't resist just posting a snippet from the end of a quick email exchange I just had with a friend:

"tonight's blog topic: what is it that I did right in a past life to deserve finding myself faced with dilemmas involving choosing between sailing with friends in the BVI's or kayak camping with friends in Cape Breton. Dang. Life, to coin a phrase, is good. Somewhere along the line I must have done something right!"

dang. sometimes I actually LIKE being me...


11 pm update...aw rats. not tonight. worked until 8, had to get in at least a good walk after that, grabbed some dinner, and I just have GOT to play with these kitties I'm taking care of (they are adorable, I have to warn people that I may be succumbing to the temptation to post cute-kitty stories before too long!) for friends before I get to bed, which needs to be quite soon as tomorrow's going to be another long one...oh well...

Sushi Paddle At Last!

So as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted by work (groan, work…budget season…whimper whimper, by the end of this I might be asking for my old admin-assistant job back…) – yes! I finally got an Edgewater trip in! I have been trying for what I think is 6 weeks to get up there & it’s just sort of not worked out. Maybe it worked ‘cause I didn’t plan it – I’d been thinking about it but I was just too darned busy last week to be organized enough to take a look at the tide tables & propose something for Saturday (which was the better day for me to go out), and had decided to let it go but then got an email from TG announcing that he & a couple of other Downtown Boathouse denizens would be launching at 10 from the Downtown Boathouse with Edgewater, NJ (just south of the George Washington Bridge) the destination.

I came awfully close to not going – I was wiped out after last week & it was awfully tempting to go back to bed when the alarm went off at 8:15 – but I followed my rule of thumb that the less I want to get out & go paddling on a nice day, the more I probably need to do just that & made myself go. GV turned up at Pier 63 as well, and he & I were on the water by 10:30 – with no paddlers in sight to the south, we started out by heading down until we found them (them being TG, HS, NB and in a nice surprise, IL, who’s my paddling friend who is also the broker who found me my fantastic apartment). Beautiful day – no wind – warm & pleasant and almost no boat traffic – one of those unusual days when you can actually see clear reflections on the water. We crossed the river quickly & headed north.

And headed north and headed north and headed north. I think I may have mentioned something at some point about the effect of spring snowmelt has on the currents in the Hudson? And how at the height of that you can practically have 11 hours of current headed south at various speeds interrupted only by an hour that feels like slack, which is as close to the northbound flood as you’re going to get that day? Well, we’re definitely getting into that. That’s alright though – Edgewater is a food paddle so the hungrier you are when you get there, the better.

The attraction Edgewater holds for NYC-based paddlers is that it is the home of a Mitsuwa Marketplace – a giant Asian grocery with a food court! We have no shame, we traipse right in dressed in full paddling gear (which is particularly outlandish in the wintertime). We do get a few curious glances & questions but surprisingly few – I’m not sure whether it’s because the Japanese who tend to be the majority of shoppers there are too polite, or whether it’s just because it’s close enough to NYC that nobody’s particularly surprised at, uh, minor eccentricities of garb.

Anyways, we paddled up against an increasing ebb. GV had been undecided about going all the way up with us, and did eventually peel off & go back. The rest of us edged closer & closer to the shore to try to find the easiest water. This put TG (who I should call “tugboat guy” for his inclination to tow anything that catches his eye back to the DTBH – he was the one who wanted to tow the Robbin’s Reef Light a couple of weeks back) a good position for scavenging; IL suggested that a dock with a restaurant might be useful at the Downtown Boathouse(it would be, too, Pier 63 has a bar & grill in the summertime, while they have, let’s see…oh yeah, a garden hose)but in the end he settled for an orange ball-shaped fender he found floating around loose with no boat attached to it.

We had a good lunch there at the mall; I had ramen that tasted so good gave me a Shiro’s Saimin Haven flashback; Harry had a bento that wasn't what he asked for but looked pretty good; IL had curry and NB - I can't remember what she had 'cause she'd gotten a new neck gasket in her drysuit which was doing its' level best to strangle her all the way up, so she wasn't looking her usual self & I was worried about her so I didn't pay attention to what she was eating. TG won the beautiful-lunch contest with a sashimi bowl that was so wonderfully arranged, it looked like jewelry or something. Seriously. In fact it was so impressive that when he brought it back to the table he was grinning – and he put it down in front of us with almost a bit of a flourish – and we all made the pirate noise! Simultaneously! ARRRRRR! Well…so much for ignoring us, everybody at the tables around us started cracking up. We joined right in, it was too perfect.

Post-lunch Asian grocery shopping was slightly curtailed – the problem with not making good time paddling up to Edgewater is we go up when the water level is falling (although the current is still going north, yes it’s weird, that’s how it is here) and the slope of the bottom to the shore in that area is very, very gradual. You land on a little rocky beach. If you get up there quickly enough and don’t linger too long deciding on what sort of sake you want to take home with you, you launch from a little rocky beach with a little mud at the edge. If you don’t – a giant, sticky, stinky, slimy mudflat has appeared by the time you come back out. Knowing that the edge of the mud flat had already been appearing when we arrived, we split up & did our shopping quickly. I ran to the Minamoto Kitchoan stand to get some of my favorite wagashi (Japanese confections – some of them are absolute little works of art, I tend to buy the simplest & least expensive ones but I love looking at the fancy ones – right now they have wagashi which look like cherry blossoms and things for Spring, so cheerful-looking!) to take home, and a hot oobanyaki (like a waffle with sweet red bean paste inside) to eat there while I waited for everyone else.

The mud flat was out in all its’ odoriferous glory by the time we got done. Once that happens, the only way to get the boats to the water is over a spit of slimy rocks against a concrete pier extending out into the water. I used to occasionally guide this trip back in my pseudo-professional-guide days, and I’m still amazed nobody ever broke a leg or even sprained an ankle doing that before one smart partner (the dancer, actually) figured out that leaving earlier = less mud. Poor footing, glass, stumps of piling, sharp-edged scraps of metal here & there - you have to take it pretty carefully.

Still, it was worth it this time – I did NOT want to get up at 7!

The weather had changed while we were eating; it had gotten cooler, the wind had picked up from the south, so with the ebb going strongly, it was very choppy, and clouds had rolled in. We fairly flew south with the ebb – at one point we turned in to look at the new boathouse in the Hudson River Park, and seeing how fast I was being carried south I intentionally turned it into a ferrying exercise, where you choose a point towards which you want to travel in a straight line with the current coming at your boat from the side, & then see how far upstream you have to point your boat to counteract the sideways force of the water – the angle between the direction your boat is pointed and the direction of actual travel is called your “ferry angle” and I swear my ferry angle was a good 45 degrees or more…it was crankin’.

TG did almost take another round fender or mooring ball that was out unattended – however he did decide that maybe the fact that it was attached to a buoy meant maybe he shouldn’t. Good thing too, otherwise I would have been forced to report that TG had a fine pair of balls and you know how people would misread that…

Ahem. Anyways, so we got home in record time, and then, as mentioned in the “dolphins, darn it” post, I spent the next hour or so fixing up the lines & fenders on the dock (and not seeing dolphins). A bunch of us had gotten together & done a pretty good job of fixing it up back in December but things had gradually been working loose again through the winter; I’d done sort of a half-assed job of trying to fix them after the Robbin’s Reef paddle a couple of weeks ago – but my endurance for puttering around on a dock is kind of short when that dock is covered in snow! Dang it, I’m from Hawaii, OK? My parents call me to complain when it dips down to 69 degrees and they have to put on their (thin cotton) sweaters – they think that’s pretty funny (they particularly like to do this when we’ve just had a blizzard here). Anyways, it’s hard to tie a good knot when your fingers are already a little numb from the cold.

This time conditions were much more puttering-friendly, which was a good thing since we’d gradually gone from 4 lines & 2 fenders to no fenders and 2 lines – with 1 good fender, 1 half-sunk fender, and 3 lines, it was sort of OK, but now it had gone from something that sort of needed attention to something that just had to be done. So I messed around with it until everything looked pretty good, and then – well, it was so nice being out there that I just sat down on the dock, leaned back on my boat, and watched the water going by. So glad it’s getting warm enough to do that again. Hurray, hurray, spring seems to be maybe actually really and truly here now (knock wood please)!

Dolphins in the Hudson! (D'OH!) + Pale Male Update #3

Wow. Harry posted this on the NYCKayaker listserve this morning:

"At the end of paddle to Mitsuwa I saw 2 dolphins just off of Pier 40
yesterday ( Saturday March 26) at around 4pm. The sightings lasted only a couple of seconds each but the arched grey backs and characteristic dorsal fins were unmistakable."

Cool, yeah?

Not the first time I've heard about dolphins being spotted in the area - a couple of friends saw a little one by itself when they were out a couple of years ago; plus one of the schooner captains mentioned once last summer (we may have been talking about seals coming into the area) that there was a small pod that was hanging out in the Upper Harbor a couple of years ago that a lot of the commercial boat captains had spotted. Maybe those guys are back!

Where the "D'OH" comes in is that I went on this trip (plan to write my trip report this afternoon or tomorrow - as I said Friday, I had some things I just couldn't not write about, but now it's time for me to get back to my more typical topics). But I keep my kayak at Pier 63, so I'd peeled off there. At the time Harry was spotting dolphins, I was peacefully puttering around with the lines & fenders on the Pier 63 hold dock about a mile north of there.

Ah well. At least the dock was back to looking properly secured & fendered when I left. It was a really good day overall - even after finding out I missed maybe seeing dolphins by "that much". Somehow, though, even though I didn't get to see them - it's still just neat to know that they're around.

also - www.palemale.com totally cracked me up today. Here's the text from Lincoln's post:

"To to member of The Media that inquired about Pale Male having two new mates named 'Linda #1 and Linda #6'. Please note that these are the names given to window railings on the 16th Floor of 920 Fifth Avenue on which he loves to perch. In a nutshell; Lola has been sitting on eggs fertilized by Pale Male since March 9th. Pale Male has since then been sharing nest sitting duties and hunting daily for both of them. He has, since the Fall of 2001, been unfailingly faithful to her and we look forward to hatching somewhere around April 15th."

Some poor gossip columnist got bored of Brad & Jennifer & discovered an interest in natural history, perhaps?

a couple more links - then tying this up.

a couple more links today

"A Different Portrait of Schiavo's Husband", Carol J. Williams, AP, in Gainesville.com

"For Parents, The Unthinkability of Letting Go", Benedict Carey in the New York Times (requires registration; article will go into archives, which are still available but for a fee, on the 27th or 28th).

I have also followed Ticklebug's link to this site, which has as a description "A blog exposing the lies of the media, judges, and elected officials who are attempting to cover up the attempted murder of Terri Schiavo, a disabled woman"...

which just doesn't make sense to me in and of itself, but fits in perfectly with what I said about our desire to read the simplest good guy/bad guy dramatic arrangement into even the grayest of real-life scenarios. The first 2 links get into exactly the psychology I thought I recognized in my earlier reading - and it was only after reading a lot of what both sides had to say that I got to the point of wanting to say anything myself.

Again, I think the most objective history & timeline of the legal case I've found was the one I linked to yesterday - Abstract Appeal - being maintained by a lawyer it's much freer of the tendency to overlay factual statements with emotional biases on either side.

Finally, if you are very patient & a good reader - here is the 2003 Guardian Ad Litem report by Jay Wolfson, DrPH, JD referred to & quoted in the Carol Williams article. 38 pages. No good guys, no bad guys, and no easy answers. Just the legal system really trying to do right by Terri - and trying to figure out whether "doing right by her" meant letting her go or keeping her on.

This is a job I would never want. Numbers - they're right or they're wrong. Simple as that.

anyhow...I'm putting these links up too because I felt like I owed it anyone who's been reading - particularly those who didn't agree with me - to at least try to share some of the kind of reading I'd been doing that (along with the parallels I was seeing in what I'd been through in my own life) eventually led to my putting together Monday's post. I doubt that that information is going to change people's minds here but hopefully this at least gives some insight into the underlying thought process that led up to that post (which I still stand behind).

And that is where I'm going to close this week's 3-day departure from my usual work/life/paddling post routine. Any more and what am I doing but adding to the very circus that I find so distressing? I said what I said Monday because somehow what I was thinking wasn't something I was seeing talked about much. Today, just kind of rehashing. Made my point, I think - time to bow out.

Yes, back to kayaking for my next post. Interesting stuff going on. More invitations to teach, plus never did write on what I did on Sunday while my friend was exploring his innate goofiness - want to get some notes down on that because that way when I forget, during the next couple of weeks, which will be unchlorinated, what I was doing that was working, I can come back to those notes as a memory jogger.

Thank you all and more info

Short post today - I'm still thinking of yesterday's as being my "current post", but I did want to add sort of p.s. to that one here.

1. Thank you to everyone who has commented (and Ruben - you're amazing). I don't even know what to say except thank you. Thank you seems like a good place to start - would try to do individual responses but I'm feeling a little at-a-loss-for-words right now.

2. I've been seeing a fair number of international suffixes (e.g., .de and .au) on my sitemeter & wonder how all of this comes across to people from outside the U.S. - the media has been so focussed on this here that most of us know about it, but if anyone who hasn't been subject to saturation coverage is interested in reading what I think is a very well-written objective history of the case, here's a good link for you: abstractappeal.com - I actually ran across this while doing a little more research to make sure that I could really stand behind what I wrote yesterday in the event that any critical comments came in. I was expecting more of those, since this is a topic on which people have very intense opinions, & I wanted to confirm in my own mind that I wasn't just talking through my hat - this overview served that purpose well.

Hostages.

I apologize to anyone who’s looking for kayak tales today, but with this all over the news, I can’t help doing at least one post on Terri Schiavo. Too sad about it not to - going to let myself.

Everyone seems to have taken sides. Either her husband is the villain, or her parents are the villains. We do like the characters in our dramas to wear their appropriately white or black hats, don’t we?

I feel so sorry for both sides. Her husband – well, what a nightmare he must be living. He has let this be his life for 15 years, rather than just washing his hands of the matter. That sounds to me like the actions of a person who genuinely, deeply believes that the woman he married would not have wanted things to be as they are. Her parents are clearly ready to care for her – the easiest course would have been to let them, and get on with his own life.

Her parents…how terrible for them as well.

Naturally they don’t want to let go. They think that if they can just keep her alive, somehow, sometime, a miracle might happen and they’ll have their daughter back.

There’s a word for that state of mind.

It’s called denial.

I have gone through some terrible grieving myself. I worked at the World Trade Center. I was there that day. More than eighty former co-workers of mine did not make it out. Shortly thereafter I lost my kayak company – which was probably one of the things I’ve cared the most about in my entire life. Well – I let it go because after what I’d gone through, I didn’t have the personal resources I needed to keep being part of it, so I resigned. The end result was that in March 2002, I found myself simply not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. Just wanted to sleep. Sleep was where I didn’t hurt.

I guess that was my denial. My mind is too clear, and the separation & losses were too overwhelming, to be able to actually deny. The towers were gone. I was not going to be invited back in to the kayak company – I was clearly under enormous duress and even under the best of circumstances, the relationship between myself & the founder wasn’t good & that put some very unfair burdens on the other partners. Post-WTC…me being in the company simply wasn’t a viable option. I understood all of that and I knew there was no way to change things.

Sleep became my refuge, the place where I could hide, the way I could turn my back on what I’d been through & what I'd lost or given up. Being awake was being an ache.

So…where this ties back to Terri Schiavo is that I think her parents are asleep right now. Sleeping, and dreaming of a miracle.

And in that state, they have found people who would help them stay in their limbo, instead of people who would help them travel through it and eventually learn enough, find the strength to carry what they needed to - the fact that their daughter was gone.

The people who have prevented them from doing that – the people who have conspired to keep the Schindler’s false hopes alive - those are the people who look the cruelest to me. They have essentially taken this entire family hostage and turned them into a vehicle for their own political ends or even just personal gratification (great ego boost to play defenders-of-the-helpless, isn’t it?)

Letting this be over would be the truest act of mercy possible – even for the Schindlers, who I don’t imagine could see that possibility when they are clinging so hard and letting go after so long would hurts so much.

They have been trapped in that limbo of a first stage of responding to a catastrophe for fifteen years.

Fifteen years.

Seems like the worst thing about false hope is that the longer it’s nourished and encouraged, the deeper the roots go, and the more it hurts when the bearer finally has to let it go.

DDF the Goofy Roller!

First off – I must post a quick excerpt from an Upper West Side-dwelling friend’s email by way of correction to a rather major error in “Pale Male Update”:

“PLEASE be informed that we on the UWS do not mistreat our birds. The crimes against Pale Male and occurred at 927 Fifth Ave., and not CPW.”

Oops! I don’t know where I picked up the misconception that they were on CPW – somehow I just always thought that was where the nest was. Funny. Well, now I know better & I hereby apologize to any and all Upper West Side residents who may have been hurt by my false accusations.

I had an interesting kayak rolling practice session in the pool at the Stamford Y on Sunday. I’ve been pretty happy with what I’ve done with my 6 hours over the last 3 weeks but that’ll be for another post, I think.

Usually I take the train up - one of the things I like about the Small Boat Shop sessions is that I don't have to impose on anyone else to get there, the Stamford Y is completely accessible to even the carless Brooklynite. This time I was offered a ride up by one of my P63 paddling friends, DDF, who was coming up for his first practice session after getting his roll for the first time (and second, and enough more after that to be comfortable with a practice session) at a class in Garrison, run, if I'm remembering correctly, by Hudson Valley Outfitter.

He stumbled across Frogma last week, so I had solemnly sworn - in writing, too - that in exchange for the ride, I wouldn't write about it if he fell out of his boat 27 times. He didn’t, so I get to write. Yay! 'Cause it really ended up being an eye-opener for me at the end.

There were a couple of bailouts but really no more than you’d expect from someone who’d taken a class, gotten a roll, and then not had a chance to practice for more than a month. Waiting that long after your first class to try again is definitely not ideal. It's a weird & counterintuitive skill to learn, and your body just has to remember how it feels, and the longer you wait to try again, the vaguer the recollection gets to be. His first try just didn’t work. Everything just sort of went screwy in an absolutely, 100% normal way – his arms tried to do the whole thing & his boat just sort of swung around 90 degrees instead of coming up. I nearly dislocated my shoulder the first time I tried to roll a sea kayak, after having gotten my first roll at the pool in Stamford months before, because I made precisely the same mistake & I am of a light enough build that my shoulder was literally the weakest link. Long time before I rolled again - that's all I'm saying now 'cause that'd be a good post of it's own though (and heh heh heh, it's already written 'cause that was one of my long postings back when I was actively cluttering up people's inboxes on the NYCKayaker listserve). Anyhow, nothing so dramatic for him, just didn’t come up. Bailed out instead.

A couple more tries & it started to come back. First one wasn't pretty, but hey, he was rightside up & the pieces had begun to fall back into place. Once he’d gotten back the basic feel of what needed to happen, he started coming up quite reliably – but the strength of the rolls were pretty variable. A good roll feels effortless, and a bad one feels, well, bad, and he'd gotten the roll well enough at his class through Hudson Valley Outfitters (I have to go check but I think that's who ran it) that he could tell a good one from a not-so-hot one. Well, he worked and he worked and he worked, and he was getting that here & there, even got three in a row at one point (I think that was when I quit watching him & went to the locker room for a minute), but he was also doing some that he wasn’t as happy with.

Towards the end of the class, one of the instructors for this series came down to say hello to to the denizens of the deep end. We got to talking a little bit about teaching, and he mentioned that he’s strongly in favor of teaching a person to roll on both sides at the same time. Now, I’m not sure I entirely agree with that; when I learned, I got the on-side (“handedness” definitely counts in rolling, so for most right-handers, it’s easier to learn to roll setting up on the right side of the boat, and vice versa for lefties), then once that was solid, I was able to start messing around with the off-side, always knowing that when I blew it, which I did plenty of times, I could go back & roll on my on-side. Practicing with friends outside of a class situation becomes a lot more fun once you’ve got something that you know will work to fall back on! However, there’s that, then there’s the view the instructor was taking, and then I think I’ve heard that in Greenland, they teach the “off-side” first because once you can do it on that side, getting it on the “on-side” is easy. Personally, this sounds to me like one of those things where nobody’s really right or wrong – all three approaches have their points, and one might work great for one person, while another might be more effective for another, depending on individual learning style.

Anyways - this short conversation went on shortly before the end of the class, and that’s when things got quite interesting. D was pretty tired, but it was suggested that he try an off-side roll. Just to see what would happen, y’know?

What happened was one of the prettiest rolls he’d done all morning. Followed by another, and another.

He was doing Pawlata rolls – this is a pretty easy roll involving a shift of the hands from a standard paddling grip to holding the end of the paddle in one hand and the shaft in the other – the extended paddle affords a lot more leverage. It’s sometimes taught as a first roll. Very curious by this point, I asked him to try a standard sweep roll.

Same result. Perfect sweep roll. No problems.

Turns out that what had been assumed to be his on-side (and he is right-handed, so this wasn’t a bad assumption – just didn’t happen to be true in this case!) was in fact his off-side, so he’d quite inadvertently done it in what I’m thinking is more Greenland learning style – putting the extra effort into drilling on the more difficult side first, then switching over to the easier side.

Well, those Greenlanders do know a thing or two about rolling.

DDF thinks that the key to this oddity – and I’ve seriously never really seen this happen so dramatically – is that although he’s a righty, he’s a fairly ambidextrous righty; in fact he said this really made sense in light of the fact that when he used to skateboard, he was a “goofy-foot” skater – one who skated with his left foot forward.

He now says that he’s a “goofy roller” too.

Funny stuff. Fascinating, too. At least for me.

As I said, I’d never run across this before, but now that I have, I won’t forget it – good to know that there is such a thing as a “goofy roller”, just in case I ever find myself teaching another one!

So DDF - thanks for the ride & the lesson, too!

Trying Haloscan.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

So says the Haloscan auto post. Yep...thought I'd try this. I like the way people use it to answer comments - it gives a very friendly sensation of dialogue to the comment section, plus even though I had the "anyone" option selected for "who can post" in the Blogger comments, I got an email today from Ignacio, at On Kayaks that Blogger wasn't letting him post. I'm hoping use of HaloScan will rectify that.

jeeze. now my only question is why IS it the rare occasions I am actually hit by an irrestistable impulse to tinker with this thing instead of just writing in it, it's always hits, oh, around 20 minutes past my bedtime (which isn't all that early anyways)? WHY???? Problem with that is that by the time I finish, it's gone from a little past bedtime to WAAAAY past bedtime. YAWN.

Pale Male Update #2 - Incubating!

OK…enough about me – time for a Pale Male & Lola update
because the pix today are FAAAAbulous and plus THEY’RE INCUBATING! Yes, if all goes well, our local redtails with the CPW address will be raising another set of fine young eyases again this year!

For anyone to whom that paragraph makes absolutely NO sense at all, here’s the back-story:

Pale Male is a 14-year-old (estimated) red-tailed hawk who’s a longtime and much-loved resident of New York City, having first been sighted here in 1991. He and a series of mates (Lola is his current mate; if I remember correctly, the last mate, Blue, died after eating a poisoned rat or pigeon – he and Lola have been together since 2001) have been nesting on an ornate parapet at 927 Central Park West (same building as Mary Tyler Moore, no less!) since 1993. Since 1995, at least one of each yearly brood raised in that nest has fledged with the exception of 2002 - Lola’s first clutch, according to the statistic page fromwhich I’m gleaning all of this info. I wonder if redtails don’t do that well on their first try cause it looks like the first 2 clutches Pale Male & Blue had were abandoned and didn’t hatch, while over the subsequent 4 years, 11 of their 12 hatchlings fledged. 1992, Pale Male & First Love’s first full year together also produced no young – they had a run of rough luck, the first nest was destroyed, and then after they rebuilt in another location, they were both injured.

I’m quite fascinated by this statistics page, can you tell? I just found it today – included the link here ‘cause I really just stumbled across it. Have to put palemale.com on my blogroll!

There was an interesting documentary produced within the last couple of years. I’d known about them for a lot longer – they were local celebrities even before that. A couple of years ago I was out for a walk in Central Park when one of the youngsters, who was still working out the kinks on the flying thing & was being harassed by a bunch of smaller birds (which was what first caught my attention – this was a few years back & I can’t remember if it was crows or some smaller birds, I think it they were smaller but isn’t it more usual for crows to mob predatory birds?) came working it’s way right over my head, flapping rather awkwardly from tree to tree. He or she finally made it up to the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and from there, where the smaller birds finally left it alone and it was able to finally get enough wingroom to work up into a proper upward-spiraling soar & dissapear. What a moment that was – and I remembered that the night I happened to catch the documentary, which was a fascinating picture of both the hawks and a dedicated coterie of hawk-watchers, on the Discovery Channel last year.

This winter the co-op board at 927 CPW, in a stupendous display of the unique arrogance that Manhattan co-op boards sometimes display, tore down the nest & removed the anchoring pigeon spikes (wire bristles designed to keep pigeons from landing on your fancy architectural details). Too messy, they said. Too many nasty carcasses & stuff. Poor Pale Male and Lola – they came home one day to find their nest just gone. They tried to rebuild – they’d bring sticks, but without the spikes, it was a useless effort as the sticks would just blow away.

But although they couldn’t speak for themselves, the hawk-watchers could. The media picked up the story; there were protests in front of the building, there were letters to the editor, and, finally realizing that they were embroiled in a complete PR nightmare & that even some of the residents of the building were angry (I think Mary Tyler Moore was among them!), the co-op board relented and hired someone to design, build and install a custom-designed falling-stick-and-dead-rat-proof redtail nest cradle on the parapet!

Once again…all together now…only in N.Y., yeah?

There was no guarantee they’d move back in – it was quite possible that after such a disturbance, they might want to look for new digs – but in the end, they chose to do so & proceeded to rebuild their nest in time for mating season. And now they’re incubating their 2005 clutch – I’ve been so busy with other stuff I actually hadn’t checked up on palemale.com for a couple of weeks (after all the waiting with bated breath to see whether they were going to rebuild was over & they’d begun their annual mating flights) and then one morning I was listening to the news as I was getting ready for work, and there in the middle of all the usual death, destruction & misery was the announcement – “Pale Male and Lola are expecting!”. Or something like that.

I was thrilled. I’d posted a Pale Male update back when they started building & just couldn’t resist doing it again!

"Promethean Fire" burns away a dreary day

So – I did it. I got the letter off to the swim guy today. I actually came to think of it more as “the bomb”. Not the positive-kind bomb either - as in “it’s da bomb”, you know – but as in “bombs away”. Well…swim guy wasn’t happy…sigh. Oh well. I kind of knew he wasn’t going to like it but I just felt like I needed to bring up some of the liability issues that the better paddlers end up getting stuck with when they work stuff like that whether we like it or not. It’s done, and I think I said everything I wanted to, and fairly clearly, and that’s the best I can do.

But he definitely wasn’t happy. Usually I like to make people happy. Unfortunately in this case that I couldn’t manage happiness-making and giving my actual perception of the situation, as requested, at the same time, and me being me, I usually go for telling the truth rather than trying to say what I think someone wants to hear. That’s not such a bad trait, is it? Even if it’s not the best way to win a popularity contest. Oh well (yes, again). Popularity schmopularity.

So it was a sort of depressing day – but also something of a relief in that now it’s done.

Ended up having one of those “lucky I live New York” finishes, though. Where else can you, on a random Tuesday after a not-so-hot week-and-a-half of work and non-work crap, decide, on a spur-of-the-moment whim that you need to go do something that very night that is guaranteed to completely blow you away & wipe all the nastiness out of your brain - and then not more than 3 hours after that, after a fortuitous check of a schedule on a website, be blissfully ensconced in a fifteen-dollar seat in the nosebleed section, watching the Paul Taylor Dance Company perform “Promethean Fire” & being duly blown away – as you knew perfectly well you would because you’ve seen that dance, like, 4 times, and it has the same effect of just completely lifting your mind out of whatever crap the world has been throwing at you & just washing it in pure awesome magnificence every time you see it.

It really is the most amazing dance. I’m no dance critic, and if you’re curious I’m sure a quick Google of “Promethean Fire” will give you much better descriptions than I can muster. But wotthehell, Archie, here goes. It’s the whole company. The music begins with the curtain closed. As the first measures of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D minor play the curtain rises to reveal all 16 dancers on stage – standing like statues - all dressed in sort of chocolate velvet leotards – arms, shoulders & upper chests bare – then starting with one, and then moving out through the group, they start to move. The patterns they make are hypnotic. They swirl, they melt together and break apart – they fragment into subgroups – they open out, fall away, weave together…they collapse, and writhe away from the center…they’re seagulls, they’re leaves blowing past – they’re beautiful, so beautiful it can make your heart catch in your throat. There’s no applause between the individual parts, it’s like the whole audience is just holding their breath afraid to break the spell. And there’s this one moment, when, after a duet has gone from tender to blundering & awkward (as though all the sudden the grace they were sharing just stopped working, and they aren't sure why - Taylor does that a lot) to the edge of desperation – the woman turns to the man, who stands upstage of her – holding his arms out to her – and she breaks into a short diagonal run that ends in the most breathtaking leap – feet first, body flying through the air, laid out horizontal to the floor – she has got to have such complete trust that her partner is going to catch her to commit like that – he catches her – but at the moment she takes flight, there’s always an audible gasp from the audience. I still gasp even though I’ve seen it so many times. It’s just that amazing.

Anyways – just what I needed tonight. I’ll go to sleep with those images playing behind my eyelids instead of all the dreary day-to-day stressors of the last couple of weeks. And all on a whim I had around 4 in the afternoon. Isn’t that fantastic?

Um…but I left out the most amazing New York part of this whole very particularly New York evening. The really incredible part is that one of the people weaving all the magic down there on the stage is a friend of mine. He’s also a former business partner, was one of my first kayak instructors, and was a valuable mentor when I then first started learning to teach. I've learned so much from this guy both on-water & off.

Actually, it was his suggestion about the cheap seats – I’d been torn between going to see some classic Paul Taylor dances that I hadn’t seen before on Saturday, or going tonight to see this piece that I love so much, and I’d said as much in an email. Well, he’s a thoroughly practical person & instead of coming back with an either/or suggestion came back with “The cheap seats are always good”.

Oh yeah. Cheap seats. I forgot about the cheap seats. Fifteen bucks. Imagine that – a top-quality live dance performance for not a lot more than you’d spend on a movie. They were great, too – from that height, the patterns formed by the moving dancers are even clearer. You actually miss some of that from the floor…great stuff.

Anyways – every time I see him dance I just end up shaking my head & thinking “I can’t believe I actually KNOW that guy”. Unbelievable.

Yep. This town does have its’ points...

How to Make A New York City Kayaker Really Really Envious

OK, any NYC Kayakers who happen to be reading…check this out…

This made me…just…oh, just go look for yourself.

Offending site can be found right
here.

there. Did you LOOK? Am I wrong? Is that not truly disgusting? Jeeze. Jeeze LOUISE, even.

Non NYC kayakers…don’t worry, it’s a NY thing…I’ll explain it sometime when I’m back in an “explaining why us NYC kayakers are all a little insane” mood (NO, it's not just me!)

That was the weekend that was.

There went another weekend.

No trip report this time. Sadly, I suppose - no, but not really. I had been trying to drum up a joint sushi trip (that’s a paddling trip that involves landing at a ginormous Japanese supermarket & food court in Edgewater, NJ, and having sushi – or saimin, or musubi, or whatever looks the most onolicious when you get there – urban paddling is fun even if there ARE garbage barge piers here and there!) involving the people who store private boats and the Manhattan Kayak Company “Polar Paddle” clients. No, “I had been trying to drum up” is not quite right, it was more serendipitous than that – things are very weird between me & the MKC founder, so mostly I steer clear of mixing in with MKC stuff at all, just give ‘em money once a year to keep my boats there. Drumming up a joint trip is WAY outside what I would dream up on my own.

However, there’s now this funny circumstance where 2 of the rolling students from the class I was assistant instructor for in February happen to be clients of MKC, and I was telling them about a planned sushi trip a couple of weeks ago, and they were so envious because the polar paddles they’ve been doing all winter have been limited to the (as O. described it) the “Concorde-to-Downtown Boathouse Corridor” – there’s a retired Concorde on a barge at the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum at Pier 86, about a nautical mile north of pier 63, and then there’s the Downtown Boathouse at Pier 26, a little more than a mile south, and the polar paddles haven’t really gone outside of that. Well, I’ve been trying to pull off this sushi trip for a month now (we work around the tides, so you can only do it every other week) – and when they heard the last one had been abandoned in favor of the thoroughly enjoyable “Saturday boring paddle” I wrote about 2 weeks back, they put in a request with the Polar Paddle guide to please please please let the Polar Paddle this week be for sushi. And he seemed to be into that. Surest way to make things weird would’ve been for me to say “no, I don’t think we should because that could make things weird”. No, I was happy to go with circumstances this time.

Well – would’ve been fun. But a lot of my usual gang were out of town, and there was sort of yucky-looking marine forecast for Saturday (possible small-craft advisory, winds W at 15-20 gusting to 25, and snow) when I checked the NOAA weather site on Friday, and O & D had not hearing back from the polar paddle guide after he’d said he was checking some boat issues with the MKC partners. Add to that the fact that I was just utterly exhausted after an insanely busy and stressed-out week at work coupled with a lot of stress about the un-fun stuff I need to tell the swim guy, plus a stupid personal issue that I should just write off as a loss, already, but am having a hard time doing (please forgive moment's whimper - just not answering a personal plea is about the meanest response of all – there’s answers I would like to hear, and answers I wouldn’t like to hear – but no answer at all? Makes me feel like I’m just not considered worthy of acknowledgement - I know that I am even if he doesn’t think so, and that’s why I should let it go – working on it – sorry about the whining but hey, what are blogs for? Get it off my chest here instead of wasting any more time trying to get an answer out of a stone, y’know?) and I decided to just not do it this time.

Naturally NOAA had gotten it wrong & it was a stunningly gorgeous day. Breezy, yes, but “nothin’ but blue skies!” However, I think this time I was grateful to NOAA. Sometimes it’s good to have a quiet weekend to just catch up with yourself. I slept in. I read. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch (must take care of the inner child, yeah?), and then I cleaned and vacuumed and scrubbed, and then later I finally sat down and wrote my Letter to the Swim Guy. It wasn’t easy, but I think I said everything I needed to say. He is not going to like me very much after he gets it. I talk about basic safety requirements, and liability and potential lawsuits, more than I like to – but these are the things that I & a few others are really afraid he’s losing sight of in all the excitement. Anyways – I got it all down on paper and now I send it off. And then there’s another person that writes me off as a nasty negative naysayer, y’know? Oh well. Seems to be my job, sometimes. Somebody’s gotta do it, right? Personally I’d be perfectly thrilled if all of my concerns were completely groundless & he’s already working on all of it. Anyways, I’m not sending a totally unprecedented message to him – just one of a type he doesn’t like to hear. And I can understand that – the swims are great, I love ‘em, that’s why I’ve done as many as I have and it’s neat that they’re growing – but…

I seem to say “Oh well” in my blog posts a lot. Hm. Oh well…

Anyways, today’s main event was 2 hours of rolling practice in Stamford. Rolling practice is like yoga-in-a-boat for me, clears my mind of everything except me, the boat, the water & the paddle & how they all balance and turn together – great thing to do after a very rattlesome week. Came home afterwards to my nice clean apartment – took a long nap, then went for groceries & cooked up a big pot of homemade split-pea soup – even was domestic & nurturing enough that I moved all of my plants (hah, all 4 of ‘em, no green thumb here) into the kitchen to enjoy the humidity & fluorescent light as the soup simmered away for hours – the ti plants should particularly appreciate that, one has been thriving amazingly well for a Hawaiian plant in a Brooklyn apartment, but one’s been looking a little peaked.

And that was the weekend that was. Quiet, and restful, and productive in exactly the ways it needed to be, and unproductive ditto. God bless NOAA. Just what I needed, I think. Now I’m ready for whatever this week throws at me. Hm – let’s see – Monday I go watch JH open up the proverbial can of whupass at the Vintage NY Trivia Night at my local leftist-communist-anarchist coffee shop (ostensibly whoever of us river-rat pack show up play as a team, but JH is the one who knows everything there is to know about this city – it’s really fun to watch!) Tuesday is going to be interesting – I’ve been invited to participate in art – sounds pretty cool. She doesn't want anything fancy from me - just wants me to talk about weather on the Hudson. I think I can manage that! And work should be a little lower-key this week than it was last week. I’m really hoping that the worst piece of March is behind me now.

And there are daffodil leaves in the back courtyard, spring is coming, la la la!

A minor change

Repeat visitors may have noticed that I have updated my subtitle. Yes, "Because it's too cold to paddle and I'm bored" worked GREAT back in January, when it was, indeed, too cold to paddle and I was, indeed, bored. As you may have noticed, it hasn't been too cold to paddle now for several weeks. And boredom? Can someone please tell me where I can buy some of that? Let's see, calculating the various arcs of the Budget '05-06 season, closing of the books on '04-05, and oh yes that little matter of A Certain Much-Anticipated Children's Book coming out in July (yikes yikes triple yikes), and then boating season, I would say that my forecast for the earlist possible time at which I am likely to be bored again is...crunch crunch crunch...yep, same answer as before, early to mid November.

oh btw about The Book? Don't bother asking, the answer has already been no for more than one close friend (with a sincere I'm sorry 'cause for every person who's asked me so far, if I could, I really would, it just doesn't happen with this particular series of books). Sorry. Not even if you're Brad Pitt. Not even if you're Chow Yun Fat, and really lonely, and paddling is your secret favorite hobby. Nope.

Now...er...if you are, say, Johnny Depp...ummm...depends...

wouldyoudressuplikeJackSparrowforme? (blush blush blush)

Thankful for...

Taking a quick break in a very very very stressful day (and one of my occasional veers away from the Hudson & into the dicier turf of politics, religion & ideology) to say it always makes me feel better about the world when I see reasonable people actively standing up to fundamentalists. In ANY religion.

No time to rant/reflect but just had to say -

Thank you Some Amusing Blog Pun.

Thank you Sardonic Bomb,

And also...Hooray for the Spanish Muslims.

Update: Took the time to leave a comment on Alan's blog - thinking about it, I realized it would make a good addition to what I'd already said here without taking any additional time out of the work day. So here it is:

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel a little less like shying away from religion entirely - last time I went to church(other than going to Aiea United Methodist, the church I went to as a kid & where my parents still go) was Christmas 2003. I went to a little Episcopalian church around the corner from the apartment I'd just bought.

The minister turned out to be a raving Pentecostal type. Preached The Gospel According to "Left Behind" authors Lahaye & Jenkins.

I wish I'd had the guts to quietly stand up and walk out on his horrifying sermon. I'm entirely too well-trained for that though. Just left afterwards without shaking the minister's hand & have had no urge to voluntarily attend a service since then.

Later update: Why didn't anybody tell me my link to the Spanish Muslim's fatwa story was broken? Fixed now. :)

Spring? What was I thinking?

I’m glad I had such a good weekend last weekend, because this is a rough week.

Fortunately it is at least a prescheduled rough week. We have these roughly once a month when it’s time to close the previous month – this one’s a quarterly close so even more work. So I knew it was coming.

Still, I didn’t get home tonight until about 10:30. That was just because I was just determined to finish the last of my reports. I did, too. Yay me. Rather just have tomorrow to review everything for errors. Maybe I can even make it to yoga at the company gym – that would be nice although my chances of actually getting calm & centered is just about nil. At least it’s moving around. Today was all about hunching over my computer churning out numbers. Bleah.

Worked pretty late last night too, and last night getting home got to be a bit of an adventure! My “Spring Peeper Song” post a while back was (ahem) perhaps a touch premature, as I should have known. That was a most amazing storm yesterday. I’d actually listened to the forecast in the morning – it said something about rain possible turning to snow in the afternoon but I wasn’t envisioning ANYTHING like that. The company I work for has a cafeteria on the top floor (well, almost top). Big windows, great views of the city. I went up there to get lunch, which I had to eat at my desk as I’d gone to a Pilates class in the afternoon (ok usually I’m not so into classes that I’d do yoga AND pilates in one week – but in weeks like this I just don’t feel like making up my own workout circuit) and had a ton to get done – but I did stop & gape for a while at the snow whizzing around outside, and at the trees in the planters on the deck whipping around, and at the way you could almost hear the glass flexing as the wind beat against it. I got to a good stopping point (point of frustration with missing data that is) at around 8 and heading for home.

Well – the B train made it just past the stop 2 express stops from my home, then stopped and sat there between stations for about 45 minutes. And I had managed to leave the office with no reading material. Boo. So I sat there & tried to formulate what to say to the swim-race man – the more I’ve been trying to write up my concerns, the more I’m finding myself worried about some major liability issues not just for him, but for myself (one of the drawbacks of being a BCU 4-star paddler is that hell yes, if anything goes wrong, and I’m involved in any way, I automatically carry a lot more responsibility than Joe Recreational-Kayak-Paddler, who can legitimately say “How would I have known?” in a way that I can’t) – it’s all kind of scary, and this is just the kind of stuff the guy has a history of not wanting to listen to, so in addition to trying to get work done yesterday, I also couldn’t stop thinking about that. A stalled train with no reading material was as good a place as any for such bleak and gloomy thoughts. Finally they did manage to sneak the train into the next station, but at that point they announced that there were power outages & that there was no telling how long we’d be sitting there. The station being a mile from my home, I decided to hoof it.

Exciting walk, that – the snow had stopped hours ago but it was icy cold, and that wind – wow. It would settle down from time to time but then you’d hear a roaring (I passed one house that had wind chimes on the porch & the things sounded like an old-fashioned wind-up Big Ben alarm clock jangling away) and see the trees start to dance a gale-force blast would hit. Yes, a much more exciting walk than my usual fair-weather post-work saunters through Chinatown. My hands were starting to feel unpleasantly tingly by the time I got home. That was one of those nights where I was really glad our building super takes pride in keeping that boiler roaring all winter! Not quite as glad of that as I was that I didn’t get clobbered by a falling tree, though - that definitely wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.

So maybe I should take down “spring peeper song”…NO! Darn it all those daffodils are still out there. I won’t give up.

Well, I have got to get some sleep now. With the financial presentation on Friday who knows how late I’ll be stuck at the office tomorrow. Wish me luck…once more into the breach…

Seals - Right Here in New York Harbor!

I just have to point out a new link on my "Hudson Tides & Weather" blogroll - just added a link to a site giving a clear, concise set of guidelines for viewing marine mammals. This is due to a very neat development - seems that New York City kayaking types may eventually find themselves needing to familiarize themselves with the Marine Mammals Protection Act, as it seems that seals have begun to decide that our city is sort of OK (she said while crossing ALL of her fingers and toes and her eyes, too).

As the river's been getting healthier, there have been more & more sightings of seals in the area. There have been seal sightings for the last few years down at Swinburne and Hoffman Islands, a bit south of the Verranzano Narrows Bridge. The Verranzano Narrows is where the less sheltered, more open water of the Lower Harbor meet the more confined & heavily trafficked spaces of the Upper Harbor. Hoffman and Swinburne are uninhabited, so made perfect winter haul-outs where the shy harbor seals can mostly be left alone (except for the pesky kayakers who would go down hoping for a glimpse). Apparently, though, the seals are getting a little bolder. The cleaner the waters around the piers & docks of Manhattan have gotten, the more the pilings beneath those piers have come provide a home for a wide variety of fish - seals like fish - no reason for seals not to come up & get them some fresh Manhattan sushi. And evidently, they are.

The first sighting I heard about was from TG - the guy who likes to tow things. He posted a very neat account on NYCKayaker; he was out for an early morning paddle, the seal was out for an early morning swim, and they didn't notice each other until they were quite close. Really, you just don't expect to run into a seal off the Holland Tunnel ventilator shaft. Sounded like there was a moment when both seal & paddler were thinking a very startled "Holy cow, that's not a...ohmigod, it is!".

Then on our paddle on Saturday, there were a batch of bystanders watching the DTBH set launch - there had been more seal sighting over the week, one was checking out a model boat regatta, another was hauled out on the River Project pier, and there'd been photos in the paper, so people were coming down to the river hoping to see them. All the attention may well have sent the animals back out to their private resorts on Hoffman and Swinburne - but I remember paddling to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay when my friend & mentor RCS & I had gone there for our Instructor Development Workshop with Eskape Sea Kayak Tours (he went back for certification, I just went for the training half 'cause I was still pretty green at the time - but it was a great experience) and having a curious harbor seal follow me for quite a ways, popping his or her head up out of the water & watching me with those big misty-looking eyes. So it does not seem improbable that if these New York Harbor visitors are treated well & with respect by us locals, they may eventually be as common a sight as they are in San Francisco Bay.

Can't hurt to brush up on these guidelines. I can dream, right? Now I do wonder what you do if you come back from a paddle & find a seal has hauled out & is having a nice snooze on your dock. Is it an infraction of the Marine Mammal Protection Act if you eventually politely ask it to leave so you can land? Or does that constitute harassment? Hmmm.

Actually the new docks & get-downs in the Hudson River Park are all going to have seal exclusion gates precisely to minimize the chances of that sort of human-seal interaction. Army Corps of Engineers rules, I think.

Me - I have a feeling that in the unlikely event that I EVER get back to my home pier & find it occupied by a seal, I'd just sit there & watch it as long as it wanted to stay there. Probably holding my breath the whole time for fear of scaring it away. Then I'd fly home & write the most excited post ever.