Today
Published August 10, 2011 | 
Today is Wednesday, August 10th, 2011. The heat wave that has gripped my little part of the world has broken. Well, It’s changed anyway. The Costa Rican humidity has passed and average high temperatures is back around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Today I’m meeting a new rolling student who’s driving down from LaCrosse for a bit of coaching. I love private classes.. I also feel a bit humbled by the fact that someone would drive so far to hang out with me for a couple of hours. I’ll tell you one thing, I want to see her rolling before the days out. Now here’s a few more thoughts that popped into my crazy head this morning… Continue reading
Fates
Published August 5, 2011 | 
Same old song / just a drop of water / in the endless see
all we do
crumbles to the ground /though we refuse to see
dust in the wind – kansas
I was out biking on the Military Ridge trail between Dodgeville & Madison, Wisconsin. On this Day, 10-year-old in tow, we road as far as a small (below 700ppl) town of Ridgeway. While everyone else went under the shelter to eat lunch, I wandered. I came across this beat, white canoe leaned up behind an old concrete block building. The canoe was part of a menagerie of toss-away items, like you seem to find behind every old brick building. (Why is that??) In the small island strip of sickly grass and even sicker saplings caught between gravel and concrete, rested trail signs, pallets, windows, windblown garbage and of course the canoe.. Continue reading
The Rain King
Published August 1, 2011 | 
I love the rain, any foul weather in fact. Sure, you get wet. Sometimes you get cold. Sometimes you can hardly hold your eyes open. Still, that’s the price of often dream-like landscapes and what can be a very sensual connection to our planet. Rain, wind, and even snowstorms are often like fire alarms for me to get outside either on the trails or on the water. What truly amazed me recently is when we were experiencing our first real rain after days and days of hot muggy weather and the trails… were empty. Continue reading
Posted in Nature & Wildlife, Outdoor Recreation, Quixotica, Random Thoughts | 
devils lake, wisconsin | 
3 CommentsNothing At All
Published July 26, 2011 | 
After yesterday’s review of the new Sea Kayak Essentials DVD, I thought it was as good of a time as any to put in a reminder to make sure and spend plenty of time on the water doing nothing as well. Don’t practice, don’t exercise, don’t take pictures, nothing. Just play. That’s what I love about my old Perception Mirage.. it does nothing well, which means when I’m in it, I’m there for fun.. everything else is essentially impossible. We should all have a kayak like the Mirage! On the other hand, you do know what the real difference between a sea kayak, a white water boat and a rec kayak is at the end of the day, right? Nothing. Nothing at all.
The Mission
Published July 19, 2011 | 
Those of us who are into kayak rolling always say that one advantage of rolling is that when we get too hot we can just roll and cool off. Well, not always. Sometimes the water and the air are both thick and hot, so much so that you can hardly tell where one stops and the other begins. I went out rolling yesterday to get some relief from this crazy heat wave and within a half hour I was zonked. The water wasn’t cooling me down, while the heat, humidity and the rolling was just leaving me dizzy. . . dizzier. For a while I found myself just lying there on the back deck of my boat, arms wide in a jet black replication of that poor priest in the waterfall scene from The Mission… Oh, a nice cool water fall… That would be sweet! (Well, not like in the movie of course!)
Dragged Down by the Stone
Published July 18, 2011 | 
Gotta stay awake, gotta try and shake off this creeping malaise.
If I don’t stand my own ground, how can I find my own way out of this maze ? – floyd
Blogs have changed a lot since I started blogging 3 PCs and 22 kayaks ago… Well, that was how I was going to start off this blog, until I thought a bit more about it. Not ALL blogging has changed, but for some it has. It used to be that a blog was simply an online journal. While what we wrote back in the day was certainly available for anyone to read, it wasn’t primarily written to be read. It wasn’t a business an online publication or an e-zine. It was simply an outlet. Anyone who’s ever visited a therapist in their lives knows the value of keeping a bedside journal and the extended value of sharing it. Of course the whole exercise begins to get distorted when you become overly mindful of the audience.
Posted in Commentary & Rants, Paddling, Quixotica, Random Thoughts | business, sponsorships | 2 Comments
I think about a world to come
Where the books were found by the Golden ones
Written in pain, written in awe
By a puzzled man who questioned
What we were here for
- bowie
So, I was walking down the beach when from behind, a disembodied authoritative voice said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” In that split second before I responded I had to realize he was talking to me, then that he had read my shirt, then try to discern if the question was genuine or sarcastic. From the tone of voice I figured it was the second. I just turned, smiled and shrugged my shoulders. He then said something to the effect that it could say any sort of nonsense, like the old Steve Martin line, “My mama dogface banana patch.” Yeah, I figured he wouldn’t understand. Continue reading →