Well, I thought the rafting trip yesterday was successful anyway. It was beautiful out, great weather, though since its been so dry, the water level (1’8) was a bit low. I ended up having Curt captain a boat with Jennie, Josh and b1uebutterf1y and I took beststephi, hurtsogood and James in my boat.
Curt’s crew made the trip major without incident (I think he got knocked out of the boat himself just after Dimple at the beginning of Swimmers, but his crew was fine) , but I flipped for the first time in about 3 years. beststephi is a little upset about it I think, but I thought it was fun. Flipping is part of rafting. Sometimes you just have to take a swim.
Surprisingly, our flip happened not at Dimple (which we did pretty much flawlessly…) but at RailRoad. As best as I can tell, we took a turn to close and hit on the front left side of the raft. We hit too hard because beststephi got knocked to the side and collided with hurtsogood. They both went tumbling over the right side of the boat and the boat started to tip more. James got catapulted over me and went in. I tried to keep paddling and stay in, but the boat kept tipping and I eventually went in too. I saw the girls both pop their heads out of the water somewhere downstream. James was next to me just behind the raft (which had wedged itself between two rocks). He was struggling to hold onto it, and I made him let go. I gave him his paddle (I had grabbed it as well as my own) and sent him floating down the river. Then I freed the boat and let it float down the river on its own (I couldn’t get back in from where i was stuck and where it was… I was just able to push it out). Then I jumped into the river and floated down to where James was (he’d made his way to another big rock). By the time I had gotten there, beststephi and the raft had caught up to each other and she was helping hurtsogood in. They were still a ways away from us, so I told James we had to float down the river a bit more. I told him about keeping his feet downstream and sent him on his way (through the remainder of RailRoad Rapids, but what can you do), then I jumped in myself and started floating, but a kayaker came by and offered me a tow, so I grabbed onto the handle on his tail and he pulled me across the rapids a bit and deposited me on another rock. From there I crawled from rock to rock through the rapids and made my way back to the boat. I had beststephihold one end of my paddle and then I grabbed one end of James’s so he could climb over to us. We were all back in the boat and back on our merry way before we made it under the bridge. All in all… it was very good.
The rest of the trip was pretty fun, and a decent workout. A bit sore from it, but it was very nice. It started to rain, (just a sprinkle really… there was supposedly a 50-60% chance of Thunderstorms), but through the wonderful power of denial I manged to make it stop after about 10 seconds. That’s right it was all me. I am Maverick Nature, dammit. Ate at some grill place on the way back and Steph and I dropped everyone off at home.
Today I spent working on another Telerama sysadmin task. I think my biggest problem with this is that I never had to be inventive before. I never had to deal much with workarounds because I was always the sysadmin, so if I needed to install something and some prereq was broken, I’d always just be able to fix the prereq. I’ve never “not been root.” But I got the job done in a rather inventive sort of way, actually… Its Sunday, so I don’t expect they’ll answer my mail. I wonder how many more of these there are.
Nothing really left to do today. Just taking it easy. Its raining so no tennis or basketball (and I’m sore anyway), and I need to get the truck inspected but couldn’t get an appointment til Wed. Bleah. I know… I haven’t eaten yet today (yeah… I know its 3 — I forget sometimes… so sue me), maybe I’ll go cook something.