One of the juniors, W, has been rowing with us, because she can't make the junior
practice time. Today she coxed the first half of practice. The rowing was ok,
though not great; it felt otherwise all right, but I couldn't get my oar off the
water because the boat was down to my side. She seemed to have very little idea of
what a coxswain says; I've seen other people that bad and I still can't figure out
how someone can respond to a cox, day after day after day, and still not be able
to tell people how to put a boat in the water.
But it was after she
swapped into the boat that we really had trouble. She caught a crab (got her blade
stuck under water) seventeen times. SEVENTEEN TIMES!!!! And when I say seventeen,
I don't mean "some vague number and it seemed like a lot", I mean I counted
seventeen and I may even have missed a couple. We had to stop for four of them,
during the piece. Jesus Christ.
The other 783 strokes (30 minutes at
a rate of 21 strokes per minute, plus paddling it in to the beach afterwards), she
didn't crab because her oar was hardly in the water at all. I will say that, after
about the first ten, she got very good at recovering from a
crab.
grrr.
I have a gazillion things to do to get ready
for our trip: shopping, trying to find a cheap cell phone service, getting
audiobooks out of the library, cleaning before our catsitter The Immaculate
Housekeeper comes in, packing. As well as some things I don't need to do but want
to: checking out the newly-opened mall down the block, getting supplies to make
Mom's birthday gift. Actually, I do need to go to the mall, really, to get the
fishnet stockings Egret and I want to wear for Hallowe'en. Besides, there might be
a selection of cell phone places there.