My team had a really great showing at the Masters Nationals Rowing Championships down in Long Beach, CA last week. The MRA ended up winning the overall points trophy for the regatta, and I medaled in every event I was entered. (Which was payback of sorts — when I rowed at the World Championships two years ago, I got shut out of every event.) My final tally was a bronze, four silver medals, and a gold.
The weather was excellent, and the course was a mile-long strip of sandy beach that was purpose-built for rowing back in 1932 for the Olympics. It was a great spot to race in terms of weather, the beach, the calm wind conditions, parking, etc. We got a write-up in our local paper yesterday here.
What’s more, during breaks in our races we were able to watch the Olympic rowing events, including the eights’ finals, in which the US women took a gold and the US men took a bronze. That was inspirational.
With the conclusion of the summer 1k sprints, we’re now transitioning to 5k and 6k races this Fall. I won’t be making it to the Head of the Charles in Boston, unfortunately, but there are lots of local “head” races…
My rowing team (Marin) is getting ready for the Masters National Championships next week in Long Beach, CA. Hopefully we’ll do well; the competition should be fierce. I could be in up to 10 races over four days, which will be an endurance test. (Frankly I wanted to focus on just a few races, not this many, but our coach likes to go for the overall point trophy, which means entering as many events as possible and hoping for the best.)
On a different subject, here’s a vid (I just received) of the boat I was in that won the San Diego Crew Classic back in April. I’m the guy in the bow, black visor. We had a hell of a race!
You know inflation is skyrocketing in your country when you have to introduce the $100 Billion banknote. The poor residents of Zimbabwe (despite most of the country being billionaires, they are indeed dirt poor) such astronomical inflation that they literally bring wheelbarrows full of cash to market to purchase basic groceries. In fact, the new $100 billion note only gets you some fruit. Rather than address the root causes of its inflation, the government of Zimbabwe responds by issuing more currency, and at higher and higher denominations. I’m assuming that their government is readying the trillion dollar note, and eventually the Googol dollar note.
But hey, the new bill at least gets Earth off the hook easily with Dr. Evil, no?
Stacy, my boss, just told me about Animoto. You can upload photos, select a soundtrack, and it generates a nice slideshow that’s sync’d to the music. Here’s an example using Interop Las Vegas pics:
We just got back from an excellent week in Tahoe. The smoke up there from the wildfires was pretty bad, but hey, it’s a vacation and we were in the mountains - how bad could it really be?
Flickr balks at vids that are more than 90 seconds long, so here is a vid that didn’t make it through to the end. It’s the Brown/Donat trio, singing at the “Blue Review” (the talent show put on by Lair of the Bear campers each year).
We just finished another fun week at the Lair. It was so nice to unwind, see our friends, let the kids run amok, and hang out in the mountains. Here are some pics, and click thru for a special vid…
Having kids, of course, means living through a second childhood. I get to play with Legos, play catch with a baseball, and waste time on our Wii. But I just realized that fooling myself into believing I’m a kid again is a double-edged sword. The two little squirts are now on summer break, and I’m sitting here feeling like I ought to be on summer break too. I miss the old days of summer, watching hours of game shows and re-runs of old sitcoms like Gomer Pyle, going on bike rides down to the store to buy gummi bears and comic books, and complaining to my mom that I was bored. This sums it up pretty well:
Aug 21st, 2008
