long beach '12

this past weekend was our annual long beach dragon boat tournament. and while normally it's a lot of hard work, it's still a ton of fun. this year, tho... i'm undecided. we're always short volunteers, and since we had an excess of paddlers for socow i decided to marshal saturday rather than paddle. i'd already brought socow co-captain song in with me to handle our corporate team boston sci so i was expecting to mostly marshal and maybe call the occasional race. turns out ripple effect (space dragons' sister team) needed me to paddle their women's boat, so i did get a 500m in with them.

friday set up

sunday i also arrived super early (mostly to give kim a ride), and found out that alex (who does a ton at marshaling) had really bad food poisoning the night before and was not going to come that day. !!! so i decided to give up my morning 500m socow race and help marshal until the uci volunteers showed up (they were supposed to come at noon). 

marshaling. ;)

things were supposed to be fine. but my co-captain was running late so i had to get boston sci together myself for heat 60. which would've been easy enough, except that i was also supposed to paddle heat 57. ...i asked rip to help me and there was some drama there and just... the situation managed to work itself out, as things usually do. but rip ended up talking to me for the rest of the day (actually, it's thursday night now and he's still not talking to me. anyway...).

lucy took photos of me!

later the uci volunteers were a bit late, but eventually i did manage to make it back to the socow tent and have a late lunch and paddle our 200m with them too. for the whole weekend, i probably spent a total of 1.5 hours with the team.

boston sci with song on the bow

at sunday's banquet i felt like i was trying to play catch-up, but still unable to keep up. now everyone's pictures are up on fb and i'm in hardly any at all. i dunno, i just feel really sad. i got into paddling because of the social aspect of it. which i'm now totally missing out on. i don't regret volunteering because lord knows we need as much help as we can get. and i in particular am useful because i paddle so i catch things non-paddlers have a harder time with. i also know nearly all the steerspeople so i can find you a steer last minute and i can also get steers' attention faster cause i know most of their names. and i can drum. but still...

socow 2012

sunday night after banquet i (and two socow'ers) went to club ripples to meet up with space and ripplefx. we got there pretty late tho, and after like 30minutes both teams went home. i did go out with the two socow'ers to another bar tho, and we had fun getting to know each other better.

korean bbq for dinner. rudy (far right) is a vegetarian, lol.

i think it's all harder because of the fight with rip. this is the 2nd time this month he's gotten mad at me to the point of not talking. we normally fight this "badly" only once or twice a year, and for 2012 this is our 3rd time, and it's only july!

anyway, i'm unsure of what's going to happen with rip, or with lb next year. i think i'm going to try to stick with the same plan: volunteer saturday, paddle sunday. i think it would've been better (for me anyway) if i had managed to stick to that but things come up... i know i personally have mixed feelings about lb this year, but honestly, it was a great tourney. we were only a few minutes behind (until that one boat huli'ed and didn't come back to the shore for nearly an hour), didn't have too many serious accidents, alex ended up coming, we got more volunteers sunday afternoon, and all the teams i'm involved with had fun. some even came away with medals (5 of the 6 space teams placed into div 1a, and space red was first in the 500m and 200m.). i just need to focus more and pay attention to those closest to me, rather than get distracted with the association stuff. it's hard tho, cause i feel very responsible about certain things, and generally when i know i can help, i do. anyway, here's to 2012, and here's hoping that it's even better next year.