NRKANGEL'S BLOG
Already Missing Friends but Savoring a New Stride
Tuesday, August 17, 2004 3:20 AM
46 days left...Happy Monday! <grin!> I'm feeling a little charged today thinking that the 46 days I have left are really more like 34 working days! Yeeee-HAAA!
It's really hard to believe how much writing time I've missed recently. I sat down a couple of times to blog only to let myself be interrupted by work or life. It's gotten to the point that I start feeling guilty whenever I've got downtime and I'm NOT writing.
Today however, I told myself that this blog entry gets written even if I have to blow off all the work that I'm being paid to do. (That sounds sooo bad! Still, slacker-ism is not really in my normal character make up, so today is really a banner day of sorts. Call it a breakthrough to my inner child (or silimar non-responsible-type person.) I'd do the big grin thing here, but the guilt prevents me. (Part of me wants to put on somber clothes and till the soil or do something equally Amish to punish myself. Fortunately I don't ever listen to that part of me...)
Of course, I have a vaguely good excuse about how I'm using my downtime. Recently I've been hanging around with friends as much as possible before I leave.
On a side note, when we get people together it nowadays, the topic inevitably comes around to how long I have left up here. When I tell them, things get quiet for a few seconds, almost like someone's whispered "cancer" or something. I want to laugh out loud and say "Hey! It's not a disease, ok? It's just San Diego!" Only I don't want to risk the knock-on-wood, "isn't-it-ironic" kind of curse by saying that. So instead I listen to that loud, semi-hysterical fun-house laugh that goes off in my head dressed in Amish clothing. And biiig clown shoes. That guy scares me...
Anyway, I meant to catch up on writing this weekend, but my friends Chris, Dave invited me invited me along on their company outing on Saturday to go river-rafting a few hours from here. Of course, I went.
Thinking back, almost everyone I know up here is a result of knowing my buddy, Dave. He introduced me to the area and to most of the people up here I call friends. (I was best man at his wedding a couple of years ago and I gave the thank you speech to the people attending his father's funeral last December. In a way it's like we're brothers with all the thick and thin we've been through.)
All twenty of us caravan'd our way up to an old train station where we had lunch on a turn-of-the-century style train that took us to the launching point for the rafts. The train ride was kind of neat. Periodically people in period costume came up and down the aisles to chat and entertain. This was a good thing since there wasn't much to look at out the window but rolling hills and scrub. (If you let yourself, you could almost imagine that around the next hill you'd see riders on horseback plodding alongside a huge, drift of cattle.) Of course, the music being pumped into the train was some rastafarian regge as if things in life weren't surreal enough. (Maybe the cattle around the bend were Jamaican?)
Anyway, the river was about as slow moving as the train and meant for the (extremely) casual adventurer or company with kids in tow, like us. Naturally the inevitable water fights broke out anytime the boats got near each other. One guy without a watergun took a tupperware container that held cookies and dumped out the already waterlogged goods in order defend himself. (That tupperware won hands down for close-in warfare. One hit from his artillery was enough to soak you to the skin.) Fortunately the temperature was around 85F and the sun was strong and warm in the sky making the water more a blessing than a curse.
I finally got back home around nine or so (Dinner was at a place called House of Beef - emphasis on Beef - salad strictly optional). I sat down and toyed with the idea of writing while the good food and light dosing of alcohol had me ready to fall asleep at my keyboard. I actually ended up falling asleep by ten pm... earliest time I clocked this summer. (I hate going to sleep early...)It's fun
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