We’re in Port Angeles, WA right now visiting grandparents. We’ve only been here for a few days, but we’ve had several adventures so far…
On Tuesday, we went tubing at the lake, and I actually hit a buoy at 30mph! It was awesome: as the boat was turning, my tube fishtailed out to the side, heading straight for a collision with the buoy. So I bailed off and just barely missed the buoy, but the side of leg slammed against it underwater. Everything was OK, but I have nice big lump on the side of my leg. It would have hurt a lot worse, had it been my shin that hit the buoy…
Yesterday, we drove to Neah Bay, which is on the Western tip of the Olympic Peninsula. We looked through the museum there, which is full of artifacts from a medieval Indian village that got buried in a mudslide in the 1300’s. After that, we hiked on a trail to a viewpoint over Cape Flattery, at the End of the (North-Western) World.
That is to say, the most North-Westerly point in the United States.
Notice in this panorama that there’s no horizon. I told you we were at the end of the world! More photos are below.
I’ve been enjoying my newly acquired Legality With a Sword lately by going sparring three times so far this week. However, I only sparred about three people last night because for the last 45 minutes, we all just sat around in the salle playing other people’s guitars. It’s a good thing I recently started learning guitar, or I’d have been one of the only ones still sparring, and therefore, Weird.
Last night we went to the last track race of the season. As you can see from the photo, almost everyone was from Forza Jet Velo — even the ref.
There were three races: an eight lap scratch race, a miss and out race (where every other lap, whoever is last gets pulled from the race), and what was going to be a points race, but got changed — on our whim, 30 seconds before it started — to an unknown distance race (self-explanatory), which ended up being six laps.
I don’t mean to be arrogant, but for my own records, I won all three of them. I almost crashed though — in the second to last lap of the scratch race, I was drafting behind Andrea, and I started to pass her by going up track, but she went up track at the same time, sending me careening toward the wall. It looked much cooler than it sounds; therefore, I’ve posted a video below.
Last night I competed in a bike race at the velodrome for the first time. They call it Fast Twitch Friday, because it consists of mostly sprint races.
I did two races: the first one, called 10 Lap Progressive, is a ten lap race where you get points every time you win a lap. The first lap is worth one point, the second lap is worth two points, the third lap is worth three points, etc. Whoever has the most points at the end wins.
I didn’t do very well in that race, mostly because I didn’t really know what was going on, and one guy got way up ahead of the pack at the beginning, so there was really no point in anybody racing unless they could catch him. But I did better in the next race, which was a 12 lap “regular” race. There were 13 people racing, and I came in 4th — but the youngest one besides me was 26, and they were almost all bike messengers.
I was scheduled to have a third race, but it got cancelled because somebody had a really nasty wipeout. She was going over 30mph when she lost control about 40 feet before the finish line. She slid about 20 feet down on the track, and it looked like she broke her collarbone and had a concussion.
Unfortunately we didn’t get a video, but if we had, it would probably be worth 1000+ views on YouTube.
We all graduated from the Intro 1 fencing camp yesterday, and now we’re officially allowed to spar. Yes, that’s right: we can stab people all we want.
Here are some photos from yesterday, and below is a video of one of the games we played. The object of this game was basically to forget our form and just run around stabbing people.
We went to Morton, WA this weekend to visit relatives and watch the Loggers’ Jubilee. In addition to the parade, there was also a Lumberjack Competition, which included axe-throwing, horizontal- and vertical-chop, and even a guy standing on his head at the top of an 80ft pole with his wife trying to shoot at him.
I’ve uploaded photos and movies to my .Mac Web Gallery — which brings me to the new iLife ‘08.
We picked up a copy at the Tigard Apple Store on our drive up to Washington. And as you can probably guess, I installed it in the car.
The new iPhoto has some really nice improvements, the biggest of which being Events. iPhoto automatically sorts your photos into Events, based on the day they were taken. So, all the photos taken yesterday are grouped into an Event, all the photos taken today are grouped into an Event, etc… It makes it a lot easier to find photos, because instead of browsing through 5000 photos, you browse through 100 Events.
The new iMovie is also a lot easier to use, with some really useful new features, like a color adjustment panel that works the same way as with photos in iPhoto. However, some features which were in the old iMovie are now missing. I’m thinking this is probably because iMovie ‘08 is sort of a 1.0 app, because they completely rewrote it. If that’s the case, the missing features will probably come back in good time. Until then, I’m happy with the new improvements.
I haven’t gotten a chance to really look at the other iLife apps yet, but I like the looks of Magic GarageBand, and some of the other new things in iLife. You can be sure I’ll be playing around with them soon.
On a completely different topic, I’m taking a fencing camp this week, along with Joseph, Kyle, and Eric, all of whom I roped into it. There is only one thing I can say: playing with swords is great fun.
Coach: “There’s some gear and a skinsuit over there. Take it. You’re on the team.”
Me: “But… But… I have swim practice every day, and doubles three days a week!”
Coach: “Good, then you’re in shape.”
I’m now part of the Forza Jet Velo cycling team in Portland. We’ve been showing up at their practices at the Alpenrose velodrome every few days for the last few weeks, just to be able to ride on the track and train with them for the time trial. Well, yesterday I broke their team record by a second in the 500m sprint (which is just under two laps), with 41.89, on a crappy rental bike. Now I’ve been recruited to the team. This is going to be great: it won’t interfere with swimming, because I’m not even required to go to practices. I just have to go to one championship race per year, which I already do anyway. And they just gave me a bunch of gear for free.
Looks like my legs are going to get a lot stronger by the end of the season…
I did the state championship cycling time trial today, which was 20 kilometers (12.5 miles). Unlike last year, there was a really strong wind that had me going 25mph on the way down and 17mph on the way back. So my time was seven seconds slower this year (34:52), but I think that’s not so bad, seeing as some other people were four minutes slower this year than before. Also, I’m proud to say that I trained for it even less this year than last year (which was two short rides the week before the race).
