water log

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

another dang scout project completed and now i'm off the hook until next year- walt whitman and heidi simpson

(poetry doesn't have to rhyme)

raingutter regatta, or regada as some poor soul on our scout committee kept writing on the mass emails, causing my eyes to bleed with every read, is completed! and like pinewood derby, i realized that i had to go to drastic measures to complete our ship. unfortunately, the junk store does not sell completed boats for me to purchase and pass off as my own, so another scout's father took mercy on me and made it for us, the day of the regatta, no less. he even seemed to really enjoy the task. engineers of the world, i salute you! 

reagan even wanted to name our vessel after him.

and like pinewood, reagan "won" every race. you cannot burst that boy's bubble of enjoyment with reality and i will knife anyone who tries. 

blythe figured out that there was water in them thar inflatable raingutters and did what every other kid wished they had thought of:

satisfied. if there is ever a cub scout patch for world's largest tape worm, blythe gets it!

in other water news, we've been trying to hit up the pool as much as possible. an hour here, an hour there.

pole dancing. but only so she can work her way through medical school. that's the only acceptable reason.

absolutely no fear in this child. she is swimming across the neighborhood pool solo, just wearing her puddle jumper. all the lifeguards know her by name. 

 reagan was cracking me up today. he was bored out of his mind because there were no other kids there today(which BLOWS my mind, it's summer! what else do you want to be doing when it's a bazillion degrees?) and in between jumping in and retrieving his diving dart, he took a few attempts to "baptize" himself. 

as in doing this number,

raising his hand to the square, saying a prayer and then dunking himself backward. classic.

this is him coming back out of the water after his self baptism:

he's a character.

finally, there is a class at the gym i've been wanting to try for a year now but i've never done it because it requires swimming and weights and it's the hardest class offered at the ymca. but, i love a challenge at the gym so i finally got the courage to do it. 

and it was horrible, just like i like. and by horrible, horribly embarassing because i can hardly lift myself out of a pool without using my legs so i got to roll out like a beached whale. also, try this next time you're at the pool. swim out to the deep end where you can't touch whatsoever and try going down to the bottom with a weight overhead and then swimming back up. or treading water and taking an XXL shirt on an off several times. i made eye contact with the lifeguard several times and at one point i asked him to keep particular eye on me because i did not know if i was going to make it. he laughed and i laughed but i wasn't really laughing. because funerals are only fun for the live people.