Brown Water

The horses all came in with layers of mud on them yesterday. The pastures were wet with puddles from rain, the air was warm and it was just too just too tempting to take a few rolls. Big fat honey bees were lazily hanging in the air just outside of the barn door, running into our heads as we wheeled out the wet bedding and poop from cleaning the stalls. I brushed the muddiest of the horses before I left, but I only relocated a portion of the accumulated earth. For the white mare it is protection against the bugs. She would rather I do a bad job at cleaning her anyway.

I stopped by the river today, in a parking area at the head of a bike path, to see how the rising waters looked. We hit flood stage today in most spots along the upper Hudson River and some distance south of the Federal dam in Troy. The water was brown with large parts of trees going by in the channel. They will be joined overnight by lawn chairs from the back yards of flooded communities upriver, once they get over the dam. Two male mallard ducks came floating by at 5 or so knots riding the safer run of current near shore.

The winter's precipitation hasn't stopped, it has just changed to liquid form.

Red Lines on the Radar

Spring is here again with a very warm day. The air mass is so warm that we have tornado warnings up southwest of us. It looks likely that we'll just get the wind, thunder and lightening here. But it'll be hard for the barn owner - there's a good chance that she'll be out at the barn at the wee hours of the morning to make sure the horses and grounds are all right. Horses tend to want to flee in storms. While these horses associate the barn with safety, lightening is still alarming.

Our cats will be less upset. They live on us when they are comfortable, so a little rain and boom boom won't change anything. 

Bells

The bells at the Roman Catholic church across the way started at 6AM this morning, and continued for an unusually long time. Apparently this congregation really takes time to enjoy their Easter morning Mass.

Shortly following that, the local public radio station played portions of the Messiah by Handel, a lovely touch since it is usually only played around Christmas. If you read the words to the whole work that is a strange choice. Except for the initial sections, most of the work talks of events around the Messiah's death and subsequent resurrection. But we rarely hear this work played at Easter, the very moment of the the fulfillment of God's promise for the forgiveness of man's sins. It was good to hear the section of the Messiah talking about Christ rising from the dead on the heels of those very enthusiastic bells.

This morning we finally found some food that our oldest cat would eat, after nearly a week of being unable to get anything into her. We made the hydration schedule more frequent, but that's not enough. We are really just forestalling the  inevitable at this point, but we want to keep her feeling better as long as we can. It was fitting that this was Easter morning.

Move Them Bones

Sunny day today and the horses were all snoozing when I got there. Several were out cold on their sides - the Halflingers, the old Quarter horse, the Andalusian mare at at least one of the other boarders. The Halflingers decided to start getting up when I stopped to shoot them on the way in to do stalls. The quarter horse stayed on his side until he heard me come out the back side of the barn, the same place that his noon time feed arrives from each day.

We should all sleep so well. That has been a little harder to come by this week because work being done on our house is nearing completion, so a whole new set of tasks will soon start. And our oldest cat is nearing the end of her journey.

I learned this morning that I am old enough to be unaffected by the proposed changes to Medicare/Medicaid, by just a few years. Perhaps my spending time with old things is similar to carrying around a rabbit's foot.

Big Bunnies

Easter is near and the local shopping mall had all the signs. The pet store has baby rabbits on display, in an open top case that allows customers to pet them. In the main concourse there was a much larger rabbit, an Easter bunny in the same space that seats Santa Claus each December. The photographer was taking shots of young children with this horrifically large rabbit, or at least the overly large head. I wouldn't be surprised if half the young children taken to meet this Easter Bunny run out of there fervently hoping that it is just a made up story, lest they risk meeting the real thing.

Today there is also a story in the local newspaper about an unfortunate situation for many animals. There have been complaints lodged against a woman who runs an animal hospice, or at least a strange version of a shelter. It appears that she gathers animals that are dying. She claimed that she gave the animals all of their medications and proper care such as making wheeled devices available for the paralyzed ones, but her statements are odd at best.

The most bizarre part was her explanation of why investigators found corpses laying around. The operator said that an animal's spirit stayed with the body for a while after death, so she purposely leaves the corpse out for a few days before burying or cremating it.

The baby bunnies in the Mall store might have no better end than the critters that end up in that hospice - of sorts. Easter tends to create a lot of work for people who rescue rabbits (yes, there is a rabbit rescue organization similar to pit bull rescue groups etc).

As scary as the big bunny doing pictures was, that may be the only kind of animal that should be part of Easter. A fake one.

Forty Years Ago Today

We reluctantly closed the west side of the barn tonight due to predicted rain, shutting the old quarter horse away from the outside paddock by his stall. He did not want to come inside, but he is an easy old man so I didn't have to get a halter. I just took a small bit of his mane in my hand and he walked into his stall beside me. There are some very sweet things about old horses.

As I drove away from the barn I pulled off the road to look at a towering black array of clouds in the west. I considered going back to close up the sheltered side of the barn as well. I decided not to, that I was seeing more dark than immediate danger, but it was impressive.

Something on the drive home made me remember one of the odder experiences of my college years. In the spring of my sophomore year, I ended up traveling to Montreal with a small busload of young men from the college Wesleyan group to see the show "Hair". I no longer recall how I met this bunch, let alone how I ended up seeing this play with them. They explained at the time that they wanted to see it to help them understand the part of the world that fell outside of their ordered view. But frankly, they wanted to be shocked.

As it turned out, we didn't have pricey enough seats for a really good bout of righteousness. The famous nude scene was done mostly under filmy material with the lights very low, so the only chance at seeing anything was a brief instant when they turned up the lights at the end of the scene. You had to look quickly. For most of the time, the lights were so dim that only the first two rows could have seen anything other than vague forms and some movement of the fabric.

By the next semester I had long since found that I was not a fit for their white pressed shirts and two piece suits. But they did make interesting company to see "Hair". And unlike many of my later companions in trips to Montreal, we didn't have to worry about what was in the car when we came back across the border.

That was about 40 years ago now - probably the same year that the old quarter horse was born. In fact it may have been within weeks of today. It is possible that this remarkable old man was just beginning to learn to run on wobbly legs, with the knobby knees of a foal, when I was seeing "Hair" with a bunch of shocked young Wesleyan students. This would make a nice story for the old man if horses cared about such coincidences, but they don't.

Crossing the Sea

There were stories on the radio today about Passover and the escape from slavery under the Pharaoh by the Israelites. One format was a gathering of various departed relatives in a family which was joined by Frederick Douglas. As a result, there were snippets of music from the days of slavery in this country and southern chain gangs along with the traditional Jewish songs that ran behind the radio dialogue.

I had not previously made such a direct link between the two groups - the memory of having been enslaved. The music and conversation made a good radio show, serious and weighty comments mixed with family banter about parenting and daily habits in a household.

The last story I heard, about God parting the Red Sea so that Moses' people could flee the Pharaoh's army, had especially good timing. It aired about the time that I was realizing my playing at the rehearsal of our trio tonight had been affected because I was still tired from last night's rehearsal of Debussy's "La Mer" with the Vermont orchestra. And it began raining just as we brought the horses in for their evening feed today.

This year seems determined so keep me thinking about precipitation in some form, whether liquid or the solid form that is still on the ground. I stepped onto a pile of snow tonight getting out of my car at the cello player's house.

Inching to Spring

The demonstrations of kayak rescues went well yesterday. I was approached by a few people, all women, who seemed like they may be interested in learning more. I tend to get more follow-up than the guys do. It may be that a white haired broad helping a person twice her size back into a boat and doing a roll is more surprising. But it really doesn't matter why - we've succeeded if only one or two people are encouraged to learn to be safer on the water.

The attendance was not as robust as in some earlier years, with cold nights still making summer seem far away. The water in the pool is drawn from a reservoir that is still quite chilly regardless of how warm the season has been. I've done this demonstration wearing a drysuit with two fleece layers underneath while the crowd of observers around the pool are in shorts. Yesterday was cool and rainy and people were in long pants and jackets still, so the difference was not so extreme.

It was still worse in the pool though. One of the guys who was standing in the water while little kids had a chance to noodle around in whitewater boats started getting hypothermic, even wearing a dry suit. He made a run for an infusion of very hot coffee the moment he got out of the water.

Unfortunately at least one of the observers got to be more a part of the demonstration than he had planned. One of our club members was taking photographs at poolside, and when we were pumping out the boats after one of the rescues I apparently got him dead in the face! He didn't come back and give me hell, so I assume both he and the camera were OK.

New Starts, Old Friends

The signs of spring are in bloom - the crocuses are up and the daffodils are well started. Garden plots have been cleared and are ready for the new plants. The peepers have been in full chorus for a week now, and the horses now spend most of their time without any blankets and with windows wide open until after dark.The sun is warm enough to drive with windows open.

We start the new season without one friend. Spicey did not survive the last early winter. The inflammation in her hooves became more than she could bear. But for the last few months she had much attention and grooming, as a few of us old ladies at the barn spent time untangling her thick mane and tail and brushing her equally thick coat. She had a metabolic order that meant she never fully shed out.

There will be a small ceremony remembering those who have passed tomorrow at the barn. I will be naming Spicy - apparently no one else asked. So I am glad I can make it.

Finally Warmer

There were deer by the muck pile again last night, the first I've seen for a while. They eventually took off but weren't very organized. Most of them ended up going over the fence at the back of the rearmost turnout ring, flashing bright white tails as they went over. One ran back and forth in front of the fence a couple of times before launching into the air to join the others. Unfortunately I don't carry a camera while hauling a wheel barrel bucket full of muck.

I was hauling the muck from a pile near a gate between pastures where the horses gather and make a small mountain of the stuff. We had a little time after getting the grain dropped so I grabbed two helpers to clear that area. We were all surprised to find an inch of ice between the poop and the mud underneath! With a day of temperatures in the low 70's earlier this week we didn't think that was possible. But with luck (and no more insulating poop), today's sun should melt it.

Aside from the ice is the pasture, we seem to finally have reached consensus about spring. The horses are shedding out, with tufts of long hair sticking out from places that they have rubbed against a fence. Brushing them creates a cloud of horse hair that lands on everything, like a coat of snow from the white thoroughbred mare. The ground has started to turn green from grass between the paddocks, despite overnight temperatures that can still linger around freezing.

Open water beckons for paddling as well. This weekend we'll be demonstrating kayak skills in a pool at at outdoor show, to help inform people thinking about learning to kayak.

Running Water

Yesterday was the first wonderful day where the network of hoses was turned on again at the barn, so we can now turn a faucet to refill water buckets rather than hauling them the length of the barn. Cleaning water buckets is much easier too, because they can be removed rather than having to tip out the dirty contents ever -  so - carefully in order to avoid disturbing the heating elemens under each that keeps the water from freezing.

Heated water buckets are nicer than breaking ice with a hammer. With no heat, the buckets have to regularly be brought inside to melt because the ice layers build up, which was how things went when I had my horse many years ago.

The outside buckets can be filled with a hose as well, though it is often as easy to carry buckets for the last walk from the end of the barn to the outside bucket as it is to take the time to extend then recoil the hose.

I stopped by a parking lot at the head of a bike path that runs along the Hudson River on the way home. The draw of the river in the most urban of places is impressive. On a weekday early evening, the parking lot was full with cars of joggers and walkers and riders, all in the shadow of a six lane highway.

The view across from the parking lot is the county jail, upstream is a bridge and more industrial development along the river and behind is the painted smokestack of a local paint manufacturer. But the draw of any water is still strong. This little strip by the river is full of people once the water is liquid again.

Leaving the Nest

I have been watching an eagle cam from a link that was posted on a paddling message board. The video feed is excellent quality, showing a nest in the upper Midwest with three chicks.

Normally eagles fledge at most two chicks. While this pair seems to have a historically higher percentage, raising three chicks is still unusual. That means at least one of these chicks may not survive. Even in a few days you can see which of the three chicks is the strongest, which seems least likely to make it. The adult seems to be feeding each chick based on how aggressively it competes for food.

Eagle cam link: http://www.ustream.tv/decoraheagles

But this morning offered a different view, when it seemed that the female sitting the nest was making a special effort to keep the smallest chick warm. Is this an instinctive act to help the chick survive, a kindness to one that she knows will not, or disinterested activity while larger fates decide whether this chick will live? I share the human impulse towards trying to alter fate, so it is hard for me to interpret the actions of the wild creature in this video.

This morning my neighbor's truck was filled with trees from last Christmas to be chipped, ours among them. His wife takes discarded trees from the alley each January and sets them up in their back yard to provide safe nesting for the sparrows and small song birds that return each year. The neighborhood has a resident Cooper's Hawk that also comes back, and who regards the fledglings as his personal buffet. The pile of trees in the truck means that these birds have fledged.

In the case of my neighbor's efforts, she is just evening the odds. The density of the ground cover and foliage in these city backyards can be lush, but still can't offer the same protection these small birds would find in thick, wild woodlands. For the eagles in the video, the urge to intervene is more difficult.

Merging Signs

Today is the first of my spring concerts, with the pops orchestra. The riverbanks are finally free of ice. All that is left is compacted piles of dirty ice and snow in large parking lots from snow plows. We may even be free of ice below our back porch by weekend's end!

The cats have arranged themselves in the strips of sun coming through the front windows, each just big enough for one cat. They have been doing this for a while now, but the slots of sun are coming earlier.

Even the players in Washington D.C. have managed to pull out a win. With just a few hours to spare and furlough notices being printed for federal workers, a governmental shut down has been averted. The tourists arriving in the Capitol for the Cherry Blossom festivities will not be surrounded by piles of garbage bags by week's end. And the trees outside our front window are sprouting buds.

For the moment, it must be spring.

Governmental Inaction

The stalemate over the federal budget in Washington DC is hours away from causing a shut down of the Federal government. The two major parties, especially the hard core Tea Party Republicans elected in November, are making it very difficult to find common ground.

Each blames the other, but the Republican side has questionably financial conditions. They want a rider that would ban the EPA from publishing regulations that have undergone the full public comment and review period and are ready to release. This has fiscal impacts somewhere, sometime, but lacks the urgency of the problem for military families when their paychecks stop. The Republicans also insist on a policy of no further funding, ever, for any aspect of Planned Parenthood. This is fiscal, but its purpose is more in line with their love of social engineering. 

Some of those arguing to defund Planned Parenthood are insisting that this would increase women's freedom. I must be unfit for public office. I don't understand how removing a source of affordable medical care enhances any one's freedom.

In my younger years I volunteered as an escort at a local Planned Parenthood office. I usually went on a Saturday morning, when the more aggressive protest groups came through. The group would bring a couple of bus loads of people to hold signs and make access to the clinic difficult for a few hours. It never bothered the more extreme of them to bring young children, who were often freezing their arse off on a cold early spring day and risked being hurt by the crowd if things got nasty. 

The protests were futile for the stated purpose. Clients looking for an abortion, their issue, avoided Saturday mornings because that was always when the protesters came in. But they would get a good shot in the newspaper since it is usually a slow news day, and that was probably their goal. Not that I am cynical or anything... 

I noticed a new place to view one of the area hydroelectric power facilities when I was driving around today, a dead end street behind a rental place on one of the islands in the Hudson. I stood on the shore and listened to the water flowing over the dam, watched it spread into three channels around two more islands to my north. We'll soon be taking our kayaks out to play there, in the white rills beyond the waterfall and the two low head dams that were beyond my view. Two geese were sitting in the grass just behind me, likely a pair with a nest built somewhere nearby.

A short term government shut down has no effect on them - the water will still flow. But longer term, could it? Maybe, if no entity is there to mediate between the competing interests for the river's water. If the water was taken upriver, this pair might find their little piece of urban heaven gone.

Music in Our Ears

Early this morning I caught up with an old movie called "Boys Night Out", a classic comedy from 1962 where four suburban businessmen get an apartment in Manhattan for evening entertainment not involving wives. The apartment ends up including a blonde woman who the guys believe is an escort, but is actually a graduate sociology student using the opportunity for her thesis on the sexual fantasies of suburban married men. Of course it is a comedy, so no one actually gets their clothes off in these dalliances. The lack of hanky panky is the face of assumptions otherwise is one of the comedic threads.

The film has a classic ending, with the blonde, the husbands, their wives, a private detective and the student's professor all in the apartment and yelling at each other, shortly followed by a scene months later where all four couples are out for the evening together.

The movie is a successful silly comedy of the era, well executed in terms of sets, clothing and cast. And it has music - real music. When the first of the men sharing the apartment arrives for "his" night, he brings a bottle of champagne and puts a recording of a Mendelssohn violin concerto on the stereo.

There was a time where this was common. The theme for the  Lone Ranger television show was from the "William Tell Overture" by Rossini, families listened to recordings by Heifitz and the last time I played Rachmoninoff's second symphony I could have sworn I heard the start of the theme song for "Million Dollar Move" in the middle movement. Many popular films used classical music.

But this is long lost. When we were walking out of the movie "The King's Speech" a few months ago, several people in their early 20's were commenting on how wonderful the music was. It was a lot of Mozart, with the ending music being the magnificent Adagio movement from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. We stopped to tell them what they had heard and they were floored to hear it was classical music. They were talking about getting the recordings - maybe they did.

There is a good reason to put classical music into the common marketplace, even if it does risk playing the more accessible works to death. It gets it into peoples' ears as something familiar, not music that can only live in stuffy music halls. It's a shame this doesn't happen so much any more. The are still some moments, like the use of Orff's "Carmina Burana" in the movie "Excalibur", but they are too few.

Velcro Pets

We have many friends whose experience with cats fulfills the stereotype of cold, distant and uninvolved creatures. There are chasms between that and how we live with ours. I regularly have to lift them up before they walk across the keyboard while I type, and it is impossible to sit or lay down without acquiring at least two of them. One, the biggest, regards any shoulder within reach as his perch. His concept of reasonable reach is broad - he has been known to climb up our backs when we were removing around inconveniently.

My sister's dogs aren't so different, though they are inconveniently large. Any sit on the couch is taken as an invitation into a lap. Sitting on the ground puts a dog head under each arm, looking for a pet.

I was on a pet sitting job tonight, and stopped the play in the back yard for a bit for some cuddling. Even a couple of the horses at the barn will seek physical contact, butting their heads out as you walk down the aisle looking for a scratch.

I increasingly wonder how these stereotypes are born. It seems impossible to live with any animal without a lot of physical contact.

Mud and Medelssohn

The performance last night went well for a "practice" concert, if that means finding the spots that need a work before the final performance. I have plenty to work on over the next several days. Warts and all the audience seemed to like the program, especially the Wagner. Perhaps they also felt that a dark work was apt for the day. The grounds at this place are quite nice when the the flowers are in bloom, but right now the residents are taking their daily constitutionals under grey skies and trees still laden with last year's dead leaves.  

Days like yesterday would have seemed odd when I was working a day job. I went out to the barn and did my normal afternoon shift. I had to turn out all the horses when I arrived because it had been raining earlier, so I got some time in the deep mud of the paddocks before going in to clean stalls. By the end I had accumulated a few inches of new mud on my boots and splatters on my jeans to nearly my waist.

I changed into the black skirt and white top for the concert in the small bathroom at the barn, with the spare water bucket to my right and parts of a harness hanging behind me. I waited to change into civilized shoes until I had made my last trek from the barn to the car, holding the skirt in an unladylike fashion to keep it out of the mud puddles.

After a half hour drive I joined my fellow players, most of whom had spent their day in clean houses or offices, to present light and terribly civilized music. I keep waiting for someone to notice that I have spent my time in less sterile environments, but so far performance concerns seem to outweigh olfactory alertness.

Happy Spring?

We woke up to the second morning in a week that was rain overnight rather than the originally predicted snow. Given how reluctant winter has been to let go this year, that passes for a real spring day.

It's another grey day for the horses, with half a day in due to the rain. The warmer temperatures are welcome. While we have a few good days, they have been in the minority so far in this cold and grey spring. The horses will likely all end up with mud-cakes blankets and necks by day's end from rolling. They still have much of their winter coat, and some even have distinct beards of long hairs flowing from their jowls and chins. Even with the blankets, the mud still finds quite a bit of horse to which it can attach.

The pops orchestra has a performance tonight at an independent living facility (seniors), a trial run of the program for our annual fundraising dinner and performance. The program includes excerpts from major operas. The dark tones of Wagner are apt for a grey day.

Chaos?

Today was another rehearsal running through small points in the Debussy with great precision. These rehearsals are tiring - happily this is the last such sectional. We will be working on technically easier pieces at the next rehearsal, so should be able to play though works.

One of the difficult aspects of "La Mer" is that it has to be played quite precisely, with fast licks that still have to be airy and key signatures (how many flat or sharp notes) changing at the drop of a hat. This tends to be a more prominent aspect of music composed as the 20th century arrived and after. Works by earlier composers such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven have more predictable structures from one measure to the next. Both approaches create wonderful music, but for some the music of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras sounds less chaotic.

I looked up chaos, and found that most dictionaries define it as a condition of disorder or confusion. The question is, for any musical work, can it be chaotic unless the listener arrives with some pre-conceived assumptions about what it should sound like? I don't think so.

There is a body of music theory that can be used as framework for educated discussion, but in the end the world at large doesn't define whether a work of music makes sense. The final edict is given by listeners. That is probably the good and the bad news for a composer.

Free Range

The ground at the barn is finally clear enough to start picking up the poop and leftover hay that the melting snow revealed wherever horses had roamed. This includes the general grounds between the back of the barn and the paddocks as well as the paddocks and turn out rings themselves. The 37 plus year old draft horse is often left to wander loose in the general area. This isn't uncommon when there is a long term senior citizen in the barn. Even much younger horses will not wander too far from their stall and source of daily grain, so it doesn't take robust fencing to keep in a really old, slow moving mare.

But while one horse is fine, two or more loose horses will often act like teenagers and find trouble. The people that run Farnsworth Museum in Rockland Maine reluctantly learned this lesson. The Wyeth family has a long history in that region and has been a significant booster for the Museum. At some point the Museum was given the Olsen House, the house and land that is pictured in the painting "Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth. The descendents of the Olsen family that last lived on the property donated it on the condition that their daughter's horse, a black Morgan named Sassy, would have lifetime tenancy and care.

The property sits on a dead end road out at the end of a point, with the adjacent farm still owned by the same family that owned it at the time of the painting. There are no major roads nearby. As a result, for many years a visit to the Olsen House included a stop to pet Sassy grazing in the the front yard. The women who worked there complained that she would stick her head through a window to try and mooch food when they had lunch. Sassy also had a regular spot in the local Fourth of July parade.

Then one year when we visited the Olsen House, Sassy had a friend. She had been joined in the front yard by a younger buckskin named Nordie. Nordie lived on the adjacent farm, but had been allowed to run free and join Sassy,

Unfortunately for the people up the road who had gardens, Nordie and Sassy got along famously. They would trot up the road and act like giant squirrels, sampling the vegetation in yards and gardens.

After a season of complaints, Sassy and Nordie had to be contained. Sassy was eventually moved to a nearby farm with fields of soft grass for her aging joints. She died after a long and graceful old age. Nordie was still around last summer - when we visited the Olsen House we saw him in a pasture down by the old farmhouse.

Warm Water

We were at a community center pool for kayak practice last night. It is much nicer to get the basics under you each spring in a nice heated pool than in 40 degree water outside. This is a huge pool but we still had an impressive number of boats in there - seven longer kayaks running from 16 to nearly 18 feet long as well as a surf boat and three whitewater kayaks.

Some of us were practicing for a sports Expo in mid-April, where we'll be demonstrating rescues and strokes. This includes self-rescues, where the paddler gets back into the boat without help, and assisted rescues where the swimmer is helped by a second paddler.

I needed to tune up my rescues and confirm that I still had a roll, which is officially a self-rescue. The guys who had most recently come from training had a couple of tweaks on assisted rescues, something which happens every several months. The big change this time was having the swimmer, the paddler that had capsized, hang onto their cockpit while I emptied the water out of their boat.

People are usually surprised when they see how easy it can be to do an on water rescue. They can be defeated by a boat that doesn't have the water displaced at both ends, like many of the 10 foot little starter boats, or some serious physical infirmity. But with a fully equipped sea kayak or touring boat, a very small person can rescue a quite large one. One of the critical pieces of equipment is a skirt that seals around the cockpit opening to keep water from entering and swamping the boat. The person I'll be paired with for the demos is a tall, big guy, to make this point.

Unfortunately there are rescues where it is harder for a small person to rescue a really large one because of the weight difference. One of them is called a "Hand of God" (HOG) rescue, used to bring up a person who has become unconscious. In a sea kayak, the unconscious paddler is likely to be hanging upside down in their boat because they didn't pull off their skirt before passing out.

Near the end of the session, we got into a lot of HOG rescues. It started when a guy who had just undergone training was challenged to do a HOG on the biggest guy in the group, my demo partner. Then another paddler capsized on purpose and a few of us got into the game. I managed my first successful HOG rescue in a long time and there were some pretty good photo ops. It's not uncommon for the two paddlers to come up hugging each other in this rescue.

A few of us hopped into the whirlpool before hitting the showers. This is fun but we are not young. On the way to the showers I commented to the life guard that anyone looking at this pool session would think that we spent all of our time falling out of boats. Regardless, he still wants to get into a kayak himself.