Graduation / River Guide

My friend Thomas was in town this past weekend for his doctoral graduation. In true professional fashion, he neglected to pay attention to any of the details associated with his graduation ceremonies. This includes the location and appropriate dress code. The morning of graduation he starts looking up this information on the internet and realizes ever clothing item required for 'walking' is absent from his suitcase. It's a bit of a scramble to come up with the right items from my house. To find the humor in this situation, you would have to understand that Thomas is roughly six inches shorter than myself with about a third less girth. Sticking to some of the clothes I had outgrown years ago was slightly difficult. Luckily I still had a pair of black slacks that I was planning to give to my younger brother. In the end, we found everything we needed but it was definitely not a perfect match. The picture below may not do complete justice, but I'm pretty sure MC Hammer used to wear more form-fitting attire. With shoes two sizes too big, I think the saving grace of this outfit was that I had a black belt with just enough notches to keep everything strapped together, like bungee cords keeping a tarp down in the back of a pickup truck.

Not a lot went on after the graduation ceremonies, of which I did not attend. Thomas ended up going to a graduation house party and I headed downtown to have a few drinks with friends at the Bike Shop. I wasn't expecting much out of the event but we all lucked up with the live music. A fellow by the name of Brooks Hubbert was rocking the socks off the back patio. Like the dick van dike of Mary Poppins, Brooks was providing all the instruments of a full band with the help of a foot petal recording device and an iphone app. He would beatbox out the percussion, sing any backup singer and synthesizer parts and use his guitar to cover the base line. I'm sure this isn't the first time someone has used this technique, but Brooks did it with deadly precision. It was nothing short of amazing. At the end of the night, we actually asked him if he would be willing to play one of our house/lawn parties.

Fast forward to Sunday morning around 10am; Thomas and I get ready for his first kayaking trip. We had to drive downtown to get the camera he had misplaced at his house party so I decided Dog River would be the closest body of fresh water (apart from the open waters of the Bay). Unfortunately for Thomas, he had to endure my growing pains as a kayaking instructor. In my initial instructions I neglected to mention the importance of setting your foot pegs within the kayak so the first half hour we were on the water he used twice as much energy to paddle around. It's tough to have fun in a kayak when you're exhausted. When we finally got all the basics down, we had a nice two hour float and got to explore a bit of Dog River I had yet to see. We were also about ten minutes short of seeing a train go across the river above us and another five minutes short of seeing a gentleman incorrectly cut down a tree with a chainsaw. Good trip though.

The rest of my Sunday was fairly busy. I had about an hour after we finished kayaking to get ready for a banquet dinner sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. I volunteered to help in the kitchen and ended up being a speaker. That was interesting. Afterwards I went out to Municipal Park to run for a while. The final day of running in my C25K (Couch to 5K) program required a series of 90 second and 3 minute runs so I decided to try and make it around the two small lakes. Roughly 2/3 the way around my timer sounded so I decided to do one extra run cycle... that nearly ended with me running over a little girl near a playground (VERY embarrassing). With running accomplished I drove home and in a less than masculine finish to the weekend, I fell asleep on the couch while introducing Thomas to the world of Harry Potter movies.

Lake Forest Lake

This past Saturday, a day before Mother's day, I went out to the lake near my parents home. It's a small lake and perfect for a casual paddle. There's not too terribly much to tell other than the fact that the water level was a little low making it difficult to get around in some areas. I did run into three "firsts" for my kayaking trips. The first and probably most dangerous was an eight foot alligator. I was a bit unprepared for an animal of this type but luckily it appeared to be afraid of our ten foot kayaks so it kept its distance while we were there.

The second did not keep it's distance as much as I would have liked. Half an hour into our paddle, while I was near the shoreline, some type of snake dropped out of a tree roughly 5 yards from me. I didn't care to get close enough to identify it. The last "first" was a beaver dam. There was significantly less danger associated with this first so I didn't hesitate getting close to the little waterfall it had created. I don't know why I didn't take a picture of it, but I didn't. C'est la vie.

Here are a couple more photos that I did take. Enjoy.

The longest minute

I recently mentioned that I started a running program called "couch to 5k". Well, today I began week two of training. In the first week, the cycle called for eight sets of running and walking; a minute of running and a minute and a half a walking.

Starting week two, I neglected to check for any changes in this run/walk cycle. It turned out that the eight, one minute runs had changed to six, 90 second runs. (I've been watching TV for the last 2 hours while trying to write these two paragraphs and I've completely lost all motivation) Long story short, when the phone app tried to tell me to start my cool down walk, I thought it was saying to start my 7 turn of running... so I ran a lot longer than I was supposed to.

Yeah, not interesting at all... back to TV.