lb 2013

long beach this year was really good. last year i didn't have such a good time because i was working too much and because of some drama with rip. but this year it was totally different. i barely volunteered at all since we already had so many marshaling volunteers. and even better, since they had mostly paddled before, they were all great! in addition to not working, i only paddled with socow and called a couple races for boston sci, so i had a lot more free time this race. i even managed to take a nap on saturday!

of course, i didn't hang out at the tent all weekend. in addition to the usual stuff, gary let me start a race! i was pretty nervous, of course, since i'd read a lot of bad reviews of our starter from baby LB. but it was an elementary school race so it was only 4 boats, i knew all the steers, and it was a 250m without the start blocks. so i got all the boats lined up pretty quickly, and i did the thing: "paddlers are you ready, attention please, go!" and no one moved. no one. not even a little bit. lol. gary and i looked at each other. "i don't think they heard you." hahaha, then he did it himself and it went fine. :) i later talked to a steer from the race and he said they did hear me but since they were elementary school kids they just weren't ready to go yet. lol. maybe i should've called the all women's cancer survivor's race.

boston sci did terribly. of course. i think we place last in all our races? maybe 2nd to last in one or two, lol., oh well. socow did not do well in our first race, but it was seeding to div III and IV so we were up against some very legit year-round teams (including lard red!). in our 2nd race our steer miscounted lanes and we ended up colliding with electric dragons before she called a check. we placed last. didn't even beat the pinks. sheesh. in our finals race, since the team was pretty upset with her (she'd actually messed up in our first race too, tho nothing that cost us time), i switched steers and went with herrick, a festival team steer. but i've always liked him and thought he did a good job at testing a couple weeks ago. he did excellently. everyone really liked him. and, more importantly, we placed 2nd! 2nd in the lowest division, mix IV C, but it meant that we won medals. haha!

i had to stay for the award ceremony since i was presenting the icdbf trophies and since socow won our first medals in like give years some of the team also decided to stay behind since it was was supposed to be no more than a two hour wait. supposed to be. ...and so of course it ended up taking something like four fucking hours or something like that. they ended up rerunning a race, which took forever. and for some crazy reason they stopped using both sets of boats so things ended up taking even longer. i got on the chase boats taping the start blocks (even got on the catamaran this time!), and nosed around starting too. probably should've went to marshaling to try to hustle things along or at least find out what the delay was about (starting and chase boats had no idea what was happening. our walkies were either not working, or were not being responded to).

awards were... not so bad. haha, i breezed thru mine, which was easy since i only handed out six. but we stayed nearly thru the end because mary announced the regular awards in "reverse" order so div 4c was announced last! gah!!

that night we went to korean bbq, of course. (at some point over the weekend our team chant became "bar be que! bar be que! bar be que!") where we were presented our medals. after we had boba. it was pretty great since everyone went to both!

anyway, so yeah. this year was great! it was like before i got too involved with the other stuff and stopped having fun. i know mike wants me to be a race official (which i think i'm going to do for the la race again), but i really like not running around so much. i got to hang with the team, which was really great. the only thing that would've made this year better is if rip was around, but he was in the carribean for a tourney. as i told him before, i'm sad i didn't go with him, but since i would've regretted something either way, i picked the one i knew i could live with. there were of course a few hiccups but i think the overall feeling from everyone is that this was our best tourney yet.