Happy Birthday!

Yesterday was Daughter#1's birthday so I want to wish her a Happy Birthday! She recently moved into a new apartment, which we will see shortly as we travel foolishly over the 4th of July weekend to CT. Nothing like battling NJ beach traffic on the NJ Turnpike over the high weekend of the summer. Ann and I gave her a digital camera for her birthday. This is about the fifth camera she's owned. Daughter#1 is like death to anything electronic lest it be a camera, cell phone, a computer or her car. Like her Mother, she seems to emit some sort of ion and/or magnetic field that destroys electronic devices. Unless she drops them in the toilet first. But we love her.

For practice on Tuesday we didn't have enough guys for two 8+s so we went out in an 8+ and a 4+. I was two seat in the 8+. We did four 6 minute race pieces with the 4+ acting as the rabbit for the 8+ to chase down. Each piece had a different stroke rate. The first piece we were capped at a 28 SPM (the 4+ had no cap and could row at whatever stroke rate they chose). We were closing before our 4 seat caught a crab. So much for race piece one. The second race was at a 24 and again we caught up to the 4+ in about the last 150 meters, but we lost set, which slowed us down and we didn't catch them. The third piece was a 20 SPM. We got close but no cigar. Same for the last piece. On the way back to the Boathouse, our coach set his launch at max speed and told us to see how long we could hold him off before he waked us. We did this twice and once it was for 1:45 and the second time it was for just over 2 minutes. It was good workout, but a stark reminder how much work we still have to do. A 4+ should never be able to stay ahead of a 8+. Sort of embarrassing.

Yesterday was a work at home day, but I literally spent all day on the phone. I'm handling a good sized competition at work and myself and the rest of the work team spent hours talking to various competitors regarding their proposals. Thank god for speaker phones. My arm would have fallen off if I had to hold my phone to my ear the whole time. Needless to say, that left little time to do anything else other than scarf down a few Coronas afterward while making dinner to unwind from that marathon. Ugh.

I have a three day weekend coming up, which I hope to do a lot of nothing. Isn't that why God invented weekends? Even He/She rested on the 7th day.