Weekend Hash: Round 3 - First Impressions

I woke up this morning feeling like I had been in some kind of vehicle accident. Everything muscle in my back and thighs ached and there was a deep tendonitus-like hurt in my triceps. I woke up early to take my developmental pysh exam this morning and even though I got 7.5 hours of sleep, my body definately needed a few extra from missing so much this weekend. We ran the river 5 times this weekend (this is the most likely explanation for my body feeling beat up); without being cocky i feel like i am developing my guiding skills very quickly and am rapidly becoming comfortable in the raft or swimming in the white water. Yesterday just for fun, our trainer had us surf the most dangerous spot on the middle section of the river and at the end of the river, we attempted to flip our raft. The raft went up on it's back side and then fell over sideways, not quite flipping but dumping all of its occupants into a raging but safe rapid :-D

Saturday night I was called cocky once again, by a drunk girl. This insult was not delivered from someone irritated with me like two weekends ago. A girl who isn't a guide but hangs out with the High Country guides introduced herself and was asking me a few questions, to which i responded honestly. Then she said, oh hes cocky! he'll fit right in around here. It may be the booze, similar personalities in both girls, or the fact that i am really apathetic when it comes to impressing people, especially when i first meet them. I say a lot that i'm the kind of person that is not really arrogant or cocky, but i definately straddle the line between confidence and arrogance without ever going too far. With people i first meet though, i think my apathy and confidence are misconstrued as being arrogance. Whatever... i don't really give a shit, it's just interesting. Now fastforward about 10 min, after us trainee people had to run and get firewood, the same girl came up to me saying that she had to nut check me, which amounts to her making sure i had a pair. I promptly backed away and said no. She tried to pressure me to let her, saying that i would get hell on the river if i didn't, but again, being confident and apathetic, i said hell no, and informed her that i don't let people i don't know touch my nuts. Once she realized i wasn't budging, she took her drunk ass over to another conversation for a few minutes, but ran over real fast and told me good job for standing up for myself... my initial thought was "bitch please! i don't need some drunk ass telling me that i did a good job not being a fucking man whore!" lol well she sneak-attacked me later on in the evening and managed to invade my groin area before i could react... then i grabbed her arm and pushed her away. She wasn't mad, she had accomplished her mission. Oh well.

We almost had a throw down Saturday night. This guy who was visiting with a friend there was sitting on a bench and someone tipped the bench over (a common occurence with this bench... it happens to everyone). Well dude-man on the bench didn't realize that it was just messing around and ran at the offendor with a foot long mag-light, the two collided right next to where i was sitting. Everyone jumped on the two of them and broke them up and things got straightened out with noone getting hurt. The guy realized that it wasn't personal and the two of them were hanging out and joking around 10 minutes later.

In a final bit of news, the girl who i pissed off 2 weeks ago doesn't seem to be holding a grudge. She was hanging out with us saturday night and before she left she said that it was good seeing me again. I asked her if she was upset about 2 weeks ago and i apologized explaning that i was drunk and such and she said that it was all cool. we had seen each other earlier on the river that day and she waved in our direction, but i thought she was waving at our trainer. After i apologized about 2 weeks ago she said that she had waved at me on the river. Hmm, maybe someone does want my body hahaha! jk.


What a weekend. now im off to study for finals.

Weekend Hash: Round 2

Soi went and trained on the river again this weekend. It was a lot better than last weekend. The guides were a lot more chill, the weather was a lot nicer, and all of us trainees were doing a lot better on the river. We got to swim our first couple of rapids and it was awesome! I about drowned on the first one because every time i took a breath of air, i got splashed in the face with water. Our trainer that day really spent a lot of time telling us about the ins and outs of the river, how to swim and not drown, and working with us to teach us how to get off the rocks if we pin our boat.

When we got off the river saturday, the guides were cooking up some tuna steaks and they let us have some, much to our suprise. We looked at them in a very confused manner the first two or three times they said to grab a plate, and then one of them said "Look man, we're going to fuck with you guys because you're trainees, but at the end of the day we'll all have something to eat and chill with you"... it was amazing! it really is like a big family up there and we are just going to be the retarded siblings for this season: we'll get made fun of a lot inside the family, but they'll still be cool with us being there and they won't let us take shit from other people outside the family. One little fun story about saturday, there were only 2 of us trainees on saturday so we had to do all of our own boat loading and everything like that. We had to help pump up and load 8 other boats as well. Now i would say im a strong guy, but those rafts are heavy on 2 people. Anywho, at the end of the day we were going to run the river one more time and so our trainer went to drop the van off at the take out. Being two very eager trainees we went ahead and moved the raft down to the put in, down this very long ramp which was about a 20 degree angle. Well, while we were down there the river turned off so we had to drag the raft back up the ramp and wait for our trainer to come back. it was rough but we got it.

We ran the river twice on Sunday we had two other trainees show up. We all got some good stick time but I was having a great day guiding cause it seemed like all the rapids were just coming easy and the boat was going exactly where i wanted it to and such. I even dodged this huge rock at the bottom of a rapid called tablesaw by about 2 feet... sweetness. Next weekend we should be swimming some of the bigger rapids at the end of the river... i can't wait.

Weekend Hash: Round 1

So i went up to train for the first weekend of raft guide training on the Ocoee this weekend. It was a weekend full of cold water, getting to know the senior raft guides, and borderline hazing behaviors from everyone there who was not a trainee.
Our first river run we were trashed the entire time by the river guide manager Patrick Oshay. He would take us to rough spots on the river and get us to fall out, flip out, and any other term that could be used for getting thrown from the boat. To give you an idea, he told us in a normal season from May to October, he might have 50 people swim and thats running at least one trip a day 5 days a week. In contrast to that relatively conservative number between the 6 of us trainees in the boat, we fell out of the boat and had to swim 24 times in 1 run on the river. And yes, this was all intentional.
In other events, on Friday night i believe i irritated this young lady up there. She first came up (shes training with a different company) and saw that i didn't have a beer so she got me one. Major cool points and we were talking and she was talking amongst the guides she already knows there and such. At this point, being a new trainee i had been handed a few drinks from other people besides her so i was tipsy borderline drunk. I went over to talk to her again and she said something that seemed incorrect so i corrected her on it... or something like that since drunk memories aren't always that accurate. Some talking ensued and she proceeded to call me cocky... yea, let me take those cool points back now. So i was trying to get her to tell me why she thought i was cocky and she wouldn't tell me; i had a wonderful idea amidst her stubbornness. I decided i really was going to act cocky since she was being such a hobag and all: i told her, "I think you want my body!" :-D Now this didn't exactly defuse the situation, but i didn't care... i did however get her to make the most genuine disgusted noise i think that i have ever heard and she just went off. It was most entertaining :-) My friend Tiya who has worked on the river for a few summers told me drama like that happens all the time and that i will probably enjoy myself. Sweetness! I can't think o fanything better than pissing off immature bitches all summer :-D
Yesterday we ran the river once and the trainer said that it was too cold for it to be safe for us to run it the rest of the training day... seeing as how we had very little cold weather gear. His name is Jason and he seems awesome!
That's my weekend of training. I think i shall be writing these on Sunday nights when i get back or the next day. I'm off to study for my micro lab final now.

imus

If you find Imus' comments on the radio to be slightly odd or maybe even inappropriate, you are a normal person. If like Al Sharpton you believe that noone has the right to say such things on the radio and that what Imus said is racist, you are 2 things: An idiot and a bigot. Short of threatening to kill someone we can all say whatever the fuck we want on the radio unless otherwise stated in a written contract so lets just act like grown ups and ignore name calling that we don't like... some of the basketball players were crying after talking with Imus, shit grow some thicker skin and realize the world is not a nice place. Someone says something you don't like, tell them to fuck off and ignore them... it's not worth getting all emotional about.

On a positive note CNN had a black news editor this morning who had similar thoughts to mine although he was more gentle about it. It was really cool to see a black person who seemed to be tired from all these non-important issues that are seemingly made important because Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, or any of their other zealots cry racism!

Why i keep my distance

I see her on campus. She is deserving of the term gorgeous. She has jet black shoulder length hair. Her eyes are a rich brown, not too dark, not too light. She has a smile that can be described as nothing less than amazing. Her figure is properly proportioned, not fat, not anorexicly skinny. She commands this feminine aura that drives me to appreciate her every time i see her. I do not know her name nor do i care to. Knowing her as more than one very attractive young lady would ruin everything. Before I saw her as often as i do now, i had seen her once in the library. We traded smiles at each other... everything was right with the world as we went about our business on our respective computers. Her significant other at the time walked over and i observed her behavior. It was very reminiscent of cristi's in that it was clear that she was in need of attention. Leaving the library that day i didn't think much of it. Now i see her at least twice a week, although smiles are not traded. I see her and sneak a glance here or there... never attempting to get close enough to know her. Never getting close enough to start a conversation; she was marked off limits in my mind from the time i watched her in the library. At an age where it is rare to be this attractive in body and also be attractive in mind i will not allow myself to hope that she is any different. I would much rather admire her beauty and be blissfully ignorant, keeping my distance from her, than to take the chance of having my criticisms and thoughts of disappoint about girls my age further proven correct.

my morning starts.

just as i hear the coffee machine summoning for my caffeine laden morning beverage i am having this chat conversation with kiki:

me: i had an almost inappropriate dream about Jaybee (censored name - that girl who i was calling and she never called me so we stopped chit-chatting)

Kiki: hee hee

me: i was apparently trying to be inappropriate and she was busy or something

but she definately is a hottie!!

Kiki: haha you got pwned in dreamland

me: hahaha

Kiki: that's hilarious

i got owned and got told in the same morning... ouch :-)

Today

Today was a good day... although it started off a little rough. I overslept my alarm, which amounted not to me being late for class, but rather getting up just in time to make it on time to class without any studying or reading this morning before said class. Found out in my frequently skipped core classes that i have a quiz wednesday and a test friday... yay... after micro lab i went and ran. Let me extrapolate on this "run"

I left my keys in the car. The chilled wind nippy at my exposed and thunderous thighs. I stretched more so than usual before i run knowing well the problems that the concoction of improper stretching and cold make when mixed together before running. The ominous sign of the days run was the initial heavy breathing. Labored breathing is always expected for the first mile or so, but today was different. It was as if the air was not holding enough oxygen for me to breath in. Also my lungs did not like the onslaught of the too-cold-for-this-time-of-the-year air making forced entry and taking up residence for a second or two. My "run" was further foiled by my ipod acting up... i guess thats what you get when you buy used ipods... go Apple! Finally, as if running in the cold weren't enough, my meticulous stretching effectually did nothing to prevent the cramps in my calves and sides. It started in my right side... i have this funny little way of running with my hands over my head for a for hundred steps and it stops the cramps. After this, my right calve started cramping, so much so that i had to stop and stretch it out. After beginning to run again the series started over with a cramp in my left side and then cramps in my calves. My goal was to run about 3.8 miles or so... well shortly after 2 i stopped and walked about 3 ish and left. It's been a while since a run of mine has been totally and completely stopped as a result of cramps in multiple locations. I guess my lungs liked running in the warm air last week and were incahoots with my brain to stop this insulting cold air by creating cramps. i will go back to that track wednesday... i will settle the score with my body.

After my harrowing defeat on the running trail today, i came home, ate and did a few pushups to prepare for my up and coming PT test and went to read for my quiz wednesday. toodaloo

weekend was good

Hung out with the family... went fishing today. All is good but for some reason i'm not in the most chipper moods. i think its the money situation with the roomates that is irritating me. sometimes i feel like im partnered with individuals who don't know how to manage their finances... because all i ever hear from both is that they don't have any money in their accounts... a most important life lesson learned... only four weeks left until im out for the summer.

i also heard there is supposed to be some kind of fee for posting now... this is an attempt to validate that... we shall see.