classics

Johnny Carson likes chips

Charles Barkley isn't on his game

Not comedy, but still oddly amazing

put your gaggles on

You've heard of a gaggle of geese? Well have you heard these collective nouns?

A sloth of bears,
clowder of cats,
skulk of foxes,
trip of goats,
drift of hogs,
troop of kangaroos,
leap of leopards,
labor of moles,
string of ponies,
crash of rhinoceroses,
knot of toads,
peep of chickens,
murder of crows,
charm of finches,
siege of herons,
parliament of owls,
muster of peacocks,
rafter of turkeys,
smack of jellyfish,
cluster of grasshoppers,
plague of locusts,
and my personal favorite, a wedgy of swans.

Grits & Haggis!

So the weekend of 5/16 & 5/17 was my sailing club's first ever gonna-be-annual regatta for my kind of boat ONLY, not a mix of boats like most races (known as an OD race-- one design). When different kinds of boats race, everybody is assigned a time handicap if their boat just can't go as fast as the fastest boat (PHRF racing, performance handicap racing fleet). So OD is cool since you know that you won purely because you had better boat-handling or tactical decision-making, probbly both. Since the club is in a southern spot, and the boat is a Flying Scot, we ended up naming the regatta "Grits & Haggis"! (And both were served at meals...) Our memories aren't clear on this, but I -may- have been the person to originate that title.

So guess who got the honor of designing the official t-shirts? Moi.

And we:
1) didn't hit any islands (SWEET!)
2) finished ALL the races in the regatta (that's new)-- five!
3) DIDN'T COME IN LAST!!!
4) didn't have the experience to fly the downwind sail (spinnaker), and learned that when we do, we're gonna be RIGHT IN with the big boys!

Check out this photogenic crew! (slide-show, if you want)

And as to not coming in last, out of 16 boats, we finished:
R1 R2 R3 R4 R5
13 15 15 15 14
So alright, once we figure out this downwind sail, we'll be in the mix. (That's half the race) We lost a ton on the downwind legs, but made up SEVERAL MINUTES on some other boats on the upwind leg.

And I've termed wrecks involving a particular sailor (Mr. French): we saw his boat collide hard with other boats two or three times, so that's now called a "French kiss". (It feels weird to say that I hope I DON'T get French-kissed)

"Today was a good day" (says Ice Cube)

(I have no idea how I know this, but the title's a rap song)

I THOUGHT this was a by-product of taking a TBI, but I found out it haappens to "normal" people also. 90% of the time, when I'm typing at the computer keyboard (which ex-prograammer Jeeff does a LOT of), II'll go to type some word with a double-leetter, such as "happy" and end up typing "haappy"; always it's the leetter right before the doubles that I also wrongly make a double. Isn't that oodd? It kkeeps my head spiinning. I mean, I know it's not ha-ha fuunny, but reaally just ruubbish. (It makes me ffeel like I was edumacated in Miissiissiippi) Someday II'll get to the rroot of the iissue (and bring a vaccuum cleaner with me to clean house), but I'm just not wiinning the baattle yet. Or maybe I nneed to not dream of becoming a double-bbookkeeping (woah, that was mostly ccool) aaccountant and seettle for becoming a zzoologist.

So for my last b-day, cousin Brad and wife Danae (HIS wife, I'm stiill single, ladies) got me the Tiki Toopple board-game. It is SWWEET since it is wicked-easy to learn, and yet VERY strategical (and yes, a fair bit o' luck). Oh yeah, and there's one other reason I love it: last game I did my best-ever: 3 perfect rounds to make the score 48-6-2! (game's to 35, the most you can score in one round is 16) Just now, I toopped that by going 48-5-2!!!

So my courtrroom-heell has begun, where II'll be in and out of courtrrooms for a long while. Today was a simple deal to aappear before a judge and somehow convince her to aallow the coollecting of insurance to begin. I had some questions for her (thought up & wriittenn down last night at 2am when I couldn't slleep). And during the procceedings, after I had my turn at asking my questions, she made this comment, which has brought a huge grin to my soul (since she knew absolutely nothing about me): "We don't nneed a special-nneed trust, since from his questions, he's obviously inteelligent."

So, after all that, please know that I'm not swaaggering around, saying "LLook at me, I'm so smart." I've just spent TWO YEARS thinking the wreck caused me to lose some inteellect, or thinking skiills. Maybe, MAYBE NOT. (I'm goonna stop before the speell-check thingy kiills me)

Keowee Cup (part 2, the non-"whoops" blog post)

(Sorry about the fake empty blog post if you got emailed... "Oh, so THAT'S what happens if you accidentally push Enter there")

OK, glossary of terms all racing sailors just know:
RC: race committee, they're on the water in the RC pontoon boat
PRO: principal race officer, person in charge of running the race
bow: the front of the boat-- is that as obvious as I think it is?
mainsheet: the line that controls the mainsail, can crudely be likened to a car's gas-pedal most of the time, pull harder = go faster upwind
DNF: this racer did not finish a race they started
DNC: did not compete, this racer didn't even come to the start area
the helm: a steering wheel for a nautical vessel (that also may be obvious)
tacking: changing course by roughly 90 degrees, putting your bow through the wind

So this last weekend was my sailing club's big regatta of the year, Keowee Cup! The first day... well, let's just say the first day is over. Whew. It was totally bananas. 1st off, we showed up and got Rebooted in the water. All fine. Then we went to the captain's meeting (that's before EVERY race), and got a rundown of what was going to happen by the PRO . Except she didn't cover what the racecourse was going to be in terms us newbies could understand. "It MAY be course 5, but it may also be one of several others [Jeff's never heard of], I'll decide on the water. Ensure you swing by the back of the RC boat right before your start to see." (Now I've got several different racecourse configurations figured out, but apparently there's NINE standard ones I don't know about, so after this, I'm gonna do some homework) PRO: "And if I fly the standard P flag over an H flag after flying the S flag backwards and then raise the Q flag twice while raising the B flag halfway, it means..." (I lost her after that).

So why was it CRAZY? The wind was so strong, several boats had "issues": 1 turtled (turned completely upside-down), 1 lost his mast, we came VERY friggin' close to capsizing once (within about an inch), and 2 boats couldn't miss islands, me being one of them. Yeah, I ran aground. Yes, I failed to miss an island. Yes, I've sailed before. Yes, I... back off, alright?

Let me fill in the back-story. See, with that one ALMOST-capsize behind me, I was playing it on the safe side by keeping the main-sheet out, a bit loose (lubbers: that's one method of going slower). The problem makes itself known when you try to tack without hauling in gobs of mainsheet. The issue was that I had the mainsail out way too far, tried to tack, and once we started turning, it turned out that I didn't have enough forward-speed to carry the boat over to the other tack, so it was "try to turn the boat, fail, try again...". I think I tried that about 3 times (yeah, I'm a quick learner). Finally, it was either tack or run aground, so I tried to tack... with the mainsail still way out (slower, to keep us below capsizing speeds)... and got pushed right aground. OH MAN OH MAN OH MAN. Shoot. Luckily, we de-islanded ourselves after a long while. That was it for us that day though. I was so shaken by hitting an ISLAND, we called it and went in.

Now, that was actually very probably the smart decision, given how STRONG the wind was blowing. We normally sail in 5-10 knots of wind. Sometimes we'll go when it's blowin' 15. Today was 21-30 knots on windtrack, but the RC says they saw 24. HOLY JUNK-BUTTER. My first sailing mentor has told me not to sail in anything above 20.

After coming home and relaxing a bit, I went back down for dinner where I learned some heartening news-- I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE WITH TROUBLES. 8 boats besides me DNF'd, and most of them DNC'd the rest of the day's races, as well as I. 3 or 4 capsized. And I mentioned that one other boat ran aground as well. NOW I feel better.

(And it's not so big a deal, but Nigel Pitt was there & recently joined KSC & I got to meet him! I know you don't know that name, but my memory has been through a serious ringer, and the memory of that name survived the coma. He's like a rock star of the sailing world. Don't believe me?)

So all in all, what I thought was a ruined day was actually a good day! We sailed, we survived, and we learned. I mean, that we were out the in ~24 knots means my recovery is coming along AMAZINGLY in many different areas.

-------------------------------------Day 2-------------------------------------

OH MY GOODNESS. We -COMPLETED- TWO RACES. First time since my car-incident that I've done that (as skipper)! And it was BLOWING a stink. What do I mean by that? 17-26 mph! And someone mentioned that the max for EXPERIENCED sailors in the kind of boat I have (Flying Scot) is 23!!! And I wore a different kind of shoes today, and also had on my rain pants (that go over your real pants) that were so long, I kept tripping over them. Now the fact that I kept tripping over them should have clued me in, but it took me falling down on the boat's hull 3 times today before we got a handle on it. And afterwards, once we had the boat on the trailer on the launch ramp & the drain plug out, you should have seen the ten minutes of water that poured out the now-opened hole in the bottom at the back. And it wasn't raining.

So with all my falling down (imagine the stress for mom & dad since I was on the helm), we were WAY behind everyone else (they were almost into the clubhouse while we were on the last leg)... but dad talked me into finishing what I'd started, so the RC had to hang around for many more minutes until we crossed the finish line. On shore later, that earned me a hug from the PRO for sticking it out and finishing. And we had questions for her yesterday, and had said "sorry, we're newbies" and I thought that was why I got the hug. So I told her "Actually, 2 years ago, I was in a coma." And she said "I know, they told me on the boat."

So between that and the fact that we "fouled" another boat and they were SO NICE when we hurried to apologize on land afterwards... I CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND KEOWEE SAILING CLUB AS A SUPPORTIVE COMMUNITY (ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE RE-LEARNING TO SAIL)!!!

Yawl, y'all

I am writing this from a chair in... my new living room!!! I'm in an apartment in the same neighborhood as my folks' house, so in case I have any issues while readjusting to living on my own, they're only 2.42 minutes away. Since I'm a Southern sailor, I just had to get an apartment in the Yawl building. All the streets/buildings round heah have nautical terms, and a yawl is, well, a yawl. Yes, it's about twice the price it should be since I didn't find a roommate, but hey, it's only for 1 month (so far), just while I prove to myself and the world that I can do this.

Oh, but it is sweet. I have a view of the Lake Keowee waters from the master bedroom and the living room. And I'm within walking distance of a leisure trail along the lake, shuffleboard courts, and a beach! The leisure trail is only about 10 seconds away, and the other two are on the leisure trail! And there's a covered outdoor deck with table & chairs! So I've got an extra bedroom for at least one month, any bidders?

And this morning was my first day with a driving instructor (outside the hospital system)! It went well, I even got parallel parking down pretty good.

So all in all, THAT'S what a darn good day feels like. Since I've tasted the opposite, HOORAY LIFE!!!