I heart mondays

Mondays, for all of their sucktasticness have a few redeeming qualities. The first of which is the star trek enterprise marathon. Yeah, I'm still a geek. The second of which is that heroes is on, and heroes rocks. The third of course is that its almost tuesday, and the shield is on on tuesday, and the shield is the most rocktastic show ever created.

Paddled again this weekend. I guess I'm getting pretty close to the point where I'll be ready to work as a guide.

Kayaks have a tendency to flip over. They do it pretty often. A skilled paddler can turn one over with no problem in the heat of some nasty rapids. I'm a less-than-skilled paddler. I'm good enough to paddle a rapid, and good enough to nail my roll every once in a while, but not every time. The biggest fear that I ever hear anyone talk about is "oh my god, what do you do if you flip over?". What indeed. There are 3 options, stay in the boat and flip it over, get out of the boat and swim to shore dragging your now filled with water, 3000lb boat behind you, or stay in the boat and drown. Clearly there are only 2 feasable options.

The fact is that you have about 30 seconds, give or take, to get your boat sitting right side up before you bail. That's a lot of time, but not enough when you're upside down and panicking.

So, I says to myself, self? Why is there no device that would allow a kayaker to breath safely when their kayak flips over? Honestly, you're basically sitting inside a sealed air tank, and you're only about 2 feet removed from the surface. I wonder if kayakers are just too macho to use such a device, or if noone has invented one yet? I think I'm going to work on creating a hose that can slip down through your spray skirt into your boat(where there is fresh air), with a mouthpiece on the end similar to a snorkle but closable so water doesn't pour in. Using this device, a kayaker would be able to try their roll once or twice and if they fail, they could pop their air hose, take a couple breaths and give it another shot, greatly lengthening the amount of time that you can remain underwater safely. It would be a good beginner thing to help ease the tension of being upside down and out of air and only having a moderatly sucessful roll.

New Boat

I got my new boat today, yay. Its the bomb-digity, paddlerific, superfloaty boaty. We got a ton of rain and snow this week, and that means high water. The lehigh is running at like 7000cfs(cubic feet per second), normally, it runs around 400-1000, so its a lot of water.

What I love about paddling is that regardless of what you take with you on the river, you always come back with more. If you kick back on the couch, you leave the couch with what you took with you. You don't find out anything about yourself. Saturday, I'll find out if I'm good enough to paddle at 7000. I should be...theoretically, but there's only one way to prove the hypothesis. Nobody ever answered the question "Can I do it?" by sitting on their ass avoiding trying.

If I paddle at 7000 without any problems, then whats next? I know I'm good enough, and I have to wonder...what else am I good enough for? Probably the lower yough, maybe its time to launch my kayak off of a waterfall and see what happens? When does a person cross the line between "hey, that looks like fun", and "oh my god that freaking dude is insane to try that"? When does a normal person go from thinking a 3 foot drop is hard to thinking that a 20 foot drop is hard?

I can remember my first time in a kayak, it was on flat water, and I flipped over and almost drowned in mid may. I got back in my boat and paddled 9 miles soaking wet and pumped with adrenaline from my previous mishap. I was scared. Controlling the boat felt impossible, like it would flip at any second. Today, I paddle class 2 and 3 with ease and little fear. I don't even think about the boat. I'm normally just paying attention to the river ahead to pick my line.

If I'm not good enough, and I die, actually if I ever die, it'll probably be because I tried something crazy and failed miserably. I'd like my tombstone to read "Here lies Matt, Grand Poomba, at least he tried it."

Another great weekend

Saturday was a great day on the lower lehigh gorge. The weather was awesome, and the water was high. This could be the first time in my life that I have a tan before May. By "tan", I of course mean scottish tan, which is more like a sunburn.

The good news is that I got all my raft training signed off, so next week I can paddle my boat. That's great, because its much easier to get a single kayak to do what you want it to, than to get a raft full of people to. It will also be easier to keep my feet warm in my own boat, since they get to stay inside in only a small amount of water.

This river guiding thing is going to work out well I think. I'm having a blast, and meeting some great people.

My hockey team lost our first league hockey game on wednesday night. Its coo though, it was still a bunch of fun, and my skills are getting back up to par. Our jerseys are black and gold, woo-hoo.

Nature's Beauty

Yesterday I went whitewater rafting on the Lehigh. Apparently, the best part of training to be a whitewater guide is that you basically get to go whitewater rafting for free every saturday and sunday. The downside of that is that its freaking april. I've kayaked the Lehigh plenty by now. Its not as intense as the Yough, actually, its pretty lame. That becomes 400 times more apparent when you're in a raft. Kayaking raises the intensity of whitewater by a bunch. You're lower to the water, making most rapids taller than you, and your boat is unstable, making it a constant possibility that you might just flip over for no reason. In a raft, you just bounce off stuff. You *could* fall out, but its not very likely, even on class 4 rapids.

I've never been through the gorge in the winter. I know its not winter, but it was darn cold yesterday and I consider that to be close enough. Some of the icicles hanging off of the trees close to the waterline were beautiful. We saw a couple bluebirds playing, and some kind of goose that had a pure white body and a black head. They told me what kind of goose it was, but WTF do I care? Its a white goose with a black head.

Now that I've seen all that crap, I don't ever want to see freaking icicles when I'm paddling again. It was effin cold yesterday. My feet still hurt.

I love the human adrenal system

Nothing like being able to endure 10x more pain that you should be able to endure because your adrenaline is pumping. A couple days after hockey, I normally end up finding scratches and bruises all over my body. Scratches and bruises that I don't know the origin of. I took 3 pucks to the hip today, at least I'll know where those bruises came from.

On that note, I realized recently that had I rejected the job at GUARD, and taken the similarly paying yet less prestigious job at circuit city in Pittsburgh, I'd probably still be living in the burgh, playing hockey weekly with all the guys I used to play hockey with, and partying like it was 1999 every night. I probably wouldn't be making nearly as much as I am, but life would probably be much more simple.

With this in mind, I've realized that my true goal in life is to have a job that simply affords me the opportunity to do what I actually want to do with my life. What do I actually want to do with my life? I want to whitewater kayak when there's water, in as many rivers as possible. I want to play hockey whenever I can. It doesn't matter if I suck compared to my old skills, its a lot of fun. I also would seriously like to take up rappelling, but I need to find a place that teaches that. Unfotunatly, buying a rope and jumping off a cliff only has a 15-20% probability of survival.

So here's a cheers to leaving work at work, and playing the rest of the time. Here's a thumbs up to telling the man that he can't convince me that I need an expensive house, 2 car garage, white picket fence and 2.5 children. All I need is a kayak, a paddle, and a place to launch my boat and I'm set for the summer.

OK?

I saw a new commercial for valtrex the other day. Valtrex is an anti-herpes outbreak medication, and it usually features people who are really sad, and then they take valtrex and all the sudden they're riding horses and kickboxing. I don't know much about genetal herpes, and I think that's a good thing. The new commercial goes something like this:

Guy: I have genetal herpes!

Girl: ...and I dont!

Both: We'd like to keep it that way, thats why we use valtrex!

The pair then proceeds to bike ride together and hold each other under the sunset, whilst soflty giggling at some joke that only they are in on.

OK, here's where reality and TV split ways I think, cause this conversation would have gone more like this if I was involved:

Guy: Hey bebe!
Girl: I have genetal herpes.
Guy: oh, ok, well, have a nice day:)

I don't care how hot she is, or how much valtrex she uses. If she has genetal herpes, I ain't interested.