Sporting Life

A couple of weekends ago, we had the annual Louisiana marathon. I've probably mentioned it somewhere in these pages, but it's a fun day every year. Our house is somewhere very near mile 23, and we pull out the lawn furniture and turn up some music and spend the morning watching the fit people pass. Our neighbors have come to join us for the only morning of the year where we have no traffic.

The later in the race you get, the more social the racers, so towards the end, we end up sharing beer and champagne. This year. we made a couple of pitchers of banana daiquiris which were popular with the athletes.

Line that was supposed to hold my fat ass.

One lady asked for a beer when we had no more with us at the street. I jogged inside to grab one from the fridge for her. When I brought it out to her, I breathed heavy, "I'm so tired. I ran all that way."

She had about 0.25 seconds of sympathetic face before it dawned on her and she came back around to "Shut UP!"

I've got a good pic of the dog watching the parade that belongs in this post, but it was already a little bit too photo-crowded. Take a look at it as a daily photo.

Saturday the next weekend, we went to Velvet Elvis to try to resolve a lingering rigging issue. I was all strapped in and ready to be pulled to the top of the mast, when I felt a pop. My weight went back to my feet which were back on deck. A few seconds later, the halyard I was going up on floated down onto my head. No joke here. Fortunately, the line broke while I was an inch off the ground. A few minutes later, I would have been falling from the height of a two-story building. Pshew!

LSU Natatorium

Sunday was a swim meet. V swam in the early session, and K in the afternoon, which meant that I was in the nautitorium for about 7 or 8 hours, when you figure in warm-ups etc. I didn't see a soul that I knew there. I managed to listen to some decent tunes, and read a little bit of a decent book, but mostly, it was watching kids swim.

The morning session warmups included about 300 kids by my rough calculation. Each of three pools was full to kid-density that you see here. (There's one more pool to my left, and another one under the diving boards at the other end.) Then, there were two shifts, each as crowded as the other. That's a lot of swimming kids.

While waiting for K's second race. he flipped through my phone pics, and found this one. Apparently, we released a genie on New Year's Eve.

There's no image processing going on here. It's just a smoke bomb going off under the blue-tinted light over the bar. Kind of cool, isn't it?

Releasing the genie