Gone Fishin'

...or something like that.

I'm off on vacation! Back to Ontario for me for two weeks for my BFF's wedding and some family festivities. It's starting to feel like fall (already!) in the Rockies, so the timing is ideal - Southern Ontario is still hot humid, and very much like summer. Also, I heard something about potential snow on Friday, so I'm skeedadling my little butt off to the airport as fast as possible! Time for some fun, sun, and yes, maybe even some fishing.

See you in a few weeks!

Summer

Feisty Foxes Bring Home the Hardware!

 Dragonboat festival was, in a word, awesome. Or, in three words: SO MUCH FUN!!!! (this is how I felt all weekend, complete with all five exclamation points :P)

 My upstart women’s team, the Feisty Foxes, did quite well coming in third place in the women’s division. Not too shabby for a bunch of ladies who (mostly) only set foot in a real dragon boat last week! We did have some veterans on our team, ladies such as myself who competed on corporate teams in years past, but “veteran” really means only an additional 4 hours of practice in this case.

What a great group of women, and such great community spirit. This was the first time my community had put together a community team for the festival – that is, a team that wasn’t a corporate thing. In this sort of town, it’s too easy for all of the special events to be for the tourists and leave the locals on the outside. To have a team made up of local women from all demographics – long-timers, seasonal workers, and even the mayor, certainly says something about our local community. Add in the fact that we had more committed women than we had seats on a boat, and that everyone worked together to ensure we all got a fair chance to paddle – well that certainly says something indeed.

I am so freaking proud of all these women who came together to made this team. I am even more proud of us for making this team work without any drama, whining, backstabbing, or stupidity and giving it our all in every race – even when we were doing back-to-back 500m races against mixed teams who could have easily kicked our collective asses. (btw, we actually did okay in those ones too- came  in fifth in C divison!) (Okay, fine, fifth out of six teams.) (IT WAS BACK TO BACK 500M FINALS!)

...

Whatever, we only cared about our women’s standings anyways.

Ahem. Sorry, where was I?

It’s Thursday now, so most of the sore muscles and frantic energy have worn off, but wow, what an experience. We brought home the hardware, had a great time, and can’t wait to do it all over again. All of the local teams (corporate and otherwise) are churning with ideas and by next year we should have our very own local dragon boat club. But the best part? All that training paid off, and I now have a wicked set of guns :P


Note: I wrote this post on Thursday with the intent of posting it when I got home and got some pictures. Unfortunately I'm having picture issues, so I'm posing it now and will add the pics later. Because I KNOW you all want digital tickets to the gun show :P

Hello!

Photo from North Shore Dragon Boat Festival

Just popping in quickly to let you know that I'm still here! I haven't given up on this blog yet, I promise :)

This past month has been non-stop busy with working both of my jobs (50 hours a week is FUN! :P), preparing for my best friend's wedding, creating and presenting my first Toxin-Free Body Care session for the the local community, and training for race weekend.

Yes, race weekend! I am part of the inaugural crew of our valley's first all-women's dragonboat team. We've been training since May on dry land and in large voyageur canoes all prepping for this weekend's Dragon Boat Festival! We're a casual social team with a competitive streak, and we're going up against some very experienced crews from out of province and out of country in our division. Needless to say, we've got a long way to go to have half a chance of keeping up with our competition, so we've been training hard. And it doesn't hurt that the very attractive professional coach and event orgainzer has come down from Edmonton to train us either :)

I'll be back after this weekend with some posts, 'til then, Paddles Up!

Not my team :P Photo from ottawacitizen.com