Olympian wonders

Last weekend, I took the train north to Olympia, WA, to visit my friend Marcy. She put together an action-packed weekend with tons of new experiences and fun times. The list of “firsts” for me included:

  • Eating Voodoo Doughnuts that I picked up in Portland during the train’s stopover there, at Marcy’s suggestion. My favorite was the butterfinger one. Yum!
  • Attending a punk house show (that’s when a collection of bands show up at someone’s house, set up in the living room, and play for the benefit of a group of strangers who’ve also shown up). Imagine a house painted completely black (with some wood trim), decorated with things like a poster of Shirley Temple with “SHIRLEY’S FIRST BLACK EYE” written on it, a slouched crowd of smokers out on the stoop, and punk music booming from inside. A sign on the bathroom door urged you to pee outside. There were three bands that evening, the best one being TacocaT — aside from scoring points for their palindromic name, they write cute/edgy songs mainly from a girl perspective. Check them out!
  • Playing Urban Golf through the streets of Olympia. This involves dressing up in your best argyle, tweed, or houndstooth and hitting nerf balls with golf clubs on a predefined course. Marcy and I set up the course she’d scouted by duct taping squares of astroturf (to tee off from) and then marking “holes” to aim the balls into. It was an absolutely hilarious time. We got lots of strange looks but only a few comments, and no one called the police. Hooray!
  • Waving my hand through the water of Puget Sound to trigger bioluminescence. This is completely awesome. Too bad the water’s so cold. I can only imagine how phenomenal it would be to SWIM while glowing blue!
  • Attending a rock concert in hipster bar. I only recently learned what a hipster was! But this place apparently sold the right beer and attracted people with the right fashion sense. The highlight of the evening was a Japanese band called Mugen Hoso, which consisted of two too-cute Japanese guys in the middle of their “BIG BANG! BANG! BANG!” tour. They’d driven 40 hours from Austin, TX, to arrive 5 hours before this concert, but were buzzing with energy and played their hearts out. So charming, so rockin’, so cute!
  • Climbing up on a bench to escape a moshing crowd. At first I thought Mugen Hoso had inspired some massive brawl, but it turned out that the people were intentionally slamming into each other and apparently enjoying it. Beer quickly slicked the floor, and it got harder to pay attention to the band. Even though I had a great view from the bench, I had to be ready to catch and push back on random bodies that came flying at the bench. Headbanging I’d seen before, but this? Wow.
  • Picking blackberries and eating them with vanilla ice cream. Mundane for many, perhaps, but a marvelous treat for me :)
  • Attending a roller derby match. I didn’t know anything about roller derby, so was grateful to have an informed friend along! Basically, it’s two teams of super-athletic women racing to score points by passing the other team’s members around the rink. It’s quite a spectacle, with players decked out in fishnets and face paint, but what really steals the show is the amazing skating (on old-fashioned four-wheel skates, no less). Olympia has a world-class team, and they demolished their opponents from Cincinnati with a final score of 299 to 81! (Check out this picture from the match.)
  • Watching salmon prepare to head upstream, and seeing a “fish ladder” that helps them get past a dam. Wow, those salmon are huge! We also saw seals swimming around them ready to catch a meal, and blue herons winging all over — beautiful.
  • Cutting someone else’s hair. I got to use a comb and scissors, just like a pro! Marcy is a brave, brave woman.
  • Attending a party where I was the only one without a tattoo. Well, okay, I think Marcy is also tat-less, but we were definitely the only ones. Turns out that tattoos don’t keep people from wanting to play croquet, though!
  • Mutton Bustin’. Technically I didn’t actually get to see this, although we did call up some videos. Marcy and I met up with a high school friend of mine who talked about how her son had just won 3rd place in a Mutton Bustin’ competition at the fair. This is a sport in which small boys are put on sheep (yes, sheep), then the sheep is tickled and prodded into a frenzy, and then they are let out into a yard where the boy tries to cling to the sheep and not get bucked off. Wow!
  • Being in a comic strip. That’s right, one of Marcy’s friends who also golfed with us, Chelsea Baker, is an illustrator and comic artist. She created this summary of Urban Golf, and I ended up in it!

    That’s me with the hat and argyle sweater over my shoulders.

Now that’s an incredible, learning-filled weekend!

Sprechen sie Geocache?

Every group of hobbyists develops its own jargon, which can be fascinating to examine. The invented words and coinages reveal something about the habits, attitudes, and passions of the group, whether or not you know or care about the hobby.

Take for example GeoLex, the geocaching lexicon. As a novice geocacher (really just a geoseeker), I’m peripherally aware of the geocaching culture, but I keep stumbling across unfamiliar abbreviations and cryptic terms in the cache logs at geocaching.com. So I welcomed the chance to learn some more of the lingo—and some of them are pretty funny.

For example, there’s a type of cache called a “mystery cache”, in which the true coordinates of the cache are not posted but instead you must figure them out. (I call these “puzzle caches” because usually you have to solve some sort of puzzle first, which only adds to the fun!) In fact, I recently tackled my first puzzle cache, called “Stargazer’s Delight”. To get the coordinates, you must “decode” a series of images of stellar nebulae, clusters, and galaxies. Totally awesome puzzle! I actually solved it, but then ran out of time hunting for the cache itself! It was in a creekside forest and there were about a billion perfect places for a cache, which I would have loved to thoroughly investigate. Well, maybe next time I’m in Sydney I can try again.

At any rate, apparently some folks get frustrated with this sort of cache, yet still want to claim a find for it. Thus has come into being the term “battleshipping”, in which you try to indirectly pinpoint the puzzle cache without solving the puzzle. You do this by attempting to place caches of your own in the general vicinity (which is usually given by the fake coordinates of the puzzle cache). The gods of geocaching.com prevent two caches from being placed closer than 528 feet (161 m) together. So if you try to place a cache too close to the “true” cache location, your cache should be rejected. I don’t know if this actually works (GeoLex claims that cache reviewers will notice this kind of behavior and flag it), but the term makes me laugh.

I also laughed when I learned that the zig-zag path of the final approach to a cache is called the geocacher’s drunken bee dance. So apt!

Because this is the Internet, geocaching acronyms are numerous. There’s the well motivated CITO (cache-in-trash-out), GZ (ground zero, where the cache is), FTF (the person first-to-find a cache), TFTC (“thanks for the cache!”), DNF (“did not find :(“), and TNLNSL (“took nothing, left nothing, signed log”) — because one of the fun aspects of geocaching can be to find “loot” in the cache and swap it for some of your own. Me, I get enough fun out of just finding the thing. :)

And of course, there’s TOTT, which is what sent me hunting for a lexicon in the first place. It stands for “tool of the trade”, which apparently can be any sort of tool needed to access or open the cache. Not knowing ahead of time which tool is needed adds to the challenge.

But my favorite acronym (which I just now learned!) is YAPIDKA: Yet Another Park I Didn’t Know About. One of the greatest things about this hobby is that it leads you to little nooks you might never have discovered otherwise—sometimes in your own hometown!

Crossing the wake

Building on my initial success with learning to wakesurf, the following day I got some more practice and found it to be easier and easier. I’m still no pro, but I managed to stay up for an entire minute on at least one run, and I even dared to cross the wake!

This turned out not to be as tricky as I thought. I just leaned a little back into my heels, the board climbed up onto the wake, and I held tightly to the rope while froth rushed over my ankles. Then I dipped into my heels again and the board slid down the far slope into the other side of the wake. The trick was to do all of this gradually without overcorrecting for the slope changes! My posture and confidence have both improved a bit, and I’m doing much better at keeping slack in the rope. I was even able to let go with one hand and wave at the boat!

The idea ultimately is to be able to let go of the rope entirely and just surf on the wake behind the boat. The rope isn’t really towing you anyway (except atop the wake where there’s no wave to ride down); it’s just there for balance and positional correction. I did get to see the no-rope version performed, and I’d love to get to that point myself! It’s fascinating to see the balance in forces between the rider’s weight on the board pushing down and the rush of the wake-wave curling up. But first I need to be able to start on my own… to date I’ve still had someone holding the board steady for me during those first critical seconds of getting onto the water. But I think that may be an achievable goal! No-rope wakesurfing… that’ll take a lot more practice.

Surfing the wake

Over the past two days, I’ve had the chance to learn how to wakesurf! Given some expert instruction and tons of assistance (i.e., holding the board steady for me initially, just like training wheels), I was able to stand up on a wakesurfer and ride the wake curl right behind the boat for a good 15 seconds!

First we’d position the board behind the boat so that its front rested on the boarding platform and its tail hung out into the water. I learned to step onto the board with my front foot and lean my weight back out over the board, using the rope, without putting my back foot down until the boat picked up enough speed. It takes some practice to figure this out, but it seems to happen around 6 knots. At that point you can ease your weight fully onto the board (and off the platform) and slide backward, paying out rope gradually, until you’re in the wake curl. At first this felt really shaky to me, because your legs have to figure out how to absorb all of the little bumps and twists of the water while maintaining your balance. Then it started to smooth out, and I stayed up until the board shifted back a little, up onto the wake, and I lost my balance. Also, my posture in this picture could be improved by straightening my torso to make it easier to keep my weight centered over my feet and the board. But hey, not bad for ~8 attempts.

The goal is to get enough control and comfort that you can actually let go of the rope entirely and just surf along behind the boat. I’m nowhere near that point, but considering that the last time I was really in the water was 1.5 years ago, and that was to learn (belatedly) to swim, I’m thrilled with what I was able to do today! I doubt I’ll ever be a surfer, and I also learned today that I have no innate waterskiing skill, but I’d definitely wakesurf again. It’s fun!

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