Awesome and awful year so far

This has been a really strange year so far. I hadn't blogged about it, but my oldest sister Merls was diagnosed with breast cancer a few weeks after our mom died. She had a lumpectomy and is going to have radiation and Femara, so her prognosis is very good.
This means both of my sisters are breast cancer survivors, which is scary. I can't do anything about it except go to get screened every year (and I do and am clear) and just keep doing the things that make me happy.

Crossfit keeps improving my boating. Now that sounds like a trivial thing in the midst of the subject of cancer, but it is completely relevant. It is one of the reasons this year has been awesome at the same time it has been extremely sad and painful.

I am boating better this year than I ever have. Thank you crossfit.

Middle Fork of the Salmon was the best trip I've ever taken, ever. ever ever. ;-)

Week of Rivers was awesome as usual. Wish I lived closer to some folks...

I'm going skiing in Utah this December.

And I'm tinkering with violin.

I suppose the message here if there is any, is to keep busy doing the things you love, and find new things to love as well.

Quick post on guitar stuff

If you play by ear (like me) and need to work on memorizing the fretboard (like me) and you want to improve your soloing on guitar (like me), and improve your chord knowledge (like me), get a ukulele.

A ukulele forces you to make chords out of, at the most, four notes. This simplifies the chord shapes in your mind. You start to see the patterns of, for instance, the relation of the other notes near the note you are playing on the C string (on guitar this would be the G string) and then, when you are back on guitar, the pattern is there. I'm telling you, for me, starting to play ukulele provided a real boost in my soloing and my chords.

Another thing that will help your soloing is to be mindful of your hand positions. If you are making an extreme movement to get to a note, well, you're getting out of position and you are going to hit a wrong note. Everybody learns how to play a scale vertically - without moving your hand up the neck. Start practicing scales in the pattern of two strings, slide up a fret, all the way up the scale, maintaining your hand position. If you start your major scale from the first note, then the second, and so forth, you will be covering all of the modes.

Finally, if you can get your paws on a copy of The Alchemical Guitarist vol 1 DVD, which consists of lessons by Richard Lloyd, which originally came with Guitar World magazine as a column, you will find a wealth of information that will be helpful to you in ways that no other guitar instruction I've come across has possessed. I didn't see it for sale on Guitar World's site, though vol 2 is there (I just ordered it this morning), nor on Richard's site. Perhaps if enough people requested it it would be put on sale again.

I cannot stress enough how much Richard's lessons have helped my playing. There is an example lesson on youtube, how long it will be up there I don't know. When I first watched this lesson I had to rewatch it about 20 times to understand what he was saying, and then it was like a light bulb went off in my head. Here it is: sample lesson from Richard

The way it feels to paddle whitewater - via video

This is a nice find for me this morning: a point of view video of the Wenatchee, that somehow captures the way kayaking whitewater feels to me - a combination of gliding, flying, rollercoaster riding, and endless movement.

I hope that you get outside this weekend - the woods, the rivers, the lakes, the beaches, the mountains, the deserts, the caves, the canyons; anywhere outside of the air conditioned walls most of us spend our workdays in.

What now?

What do you do after the loss of your parents? It's like floating in the air under a parachute, wondering where you will touch down.
I'm trying to keep busy - going paddling as much as possible, because that is my great stress release. Everyone at work has been very kind to me and my sister. I find myself thinking strange thoughts, like, "Well, mom outlived Bin Laden".
I've also been watching PATTON for the first time; it's on Netflix online. Wow what a great movie. It also strikes me as being a movie about my parents' generation, the best of us I think. My father and my uncles on both sides of my family were all in WWII. My mom was born in 1930, so during the events in the movie she would have been a young teenager. My father was in his 20's, as he was born in 1920.
I took a playboating class last weekend (my penchant for non-sequiturs has remained solid) and it was hard for me to get into at first. We stayed for a couple of hours at the Slow Joe wave at the NOC, then went up to the top and played down to the Ledges. I even thought, as we drove to the put-in, that I might just bow out for the rest of the class. Details of my mother's suffering in the hospital kept popping into my head. But I decided to keep with the class, I went anyway and I am glad I did. I rolled a lot and that cold Nanty water got my mind out of its funk, at least for awhile. This was during the Boaterchik festival, and that night we all had barbeque and beers at the festival and I and my group of friends slept in this crazy bunkhouse, in sleeping bags because it got pretty nippy at night. The next day we had the second part of the playboating class and again, at first I wasn't really into it. We put on at Ferebee and went down to the stern squirt spot behind the flat rock, and that cold water slapped me upside the head over and over and it was the best thing. We paddled to the takeout and I had a good line at the falls.
Crossfit has been helping too - it is such a ridiculously hard class, every time, that it drives any bad thoughts out of my head and replaces them with sweat and gasping for air. I have had great improvements in my paddling from it, both in terms of strength of strokes and in terms of stamina (metcon aerobic endurance). Most of my classmates are much younger than me and run rings around me, but I soldier on. It is a positive and encouraging environment.
This is a rambling mess but I'll post it anyway.

My momma

My momma passed away last night around 7:30. She had terminal cancer in her lungs. It was a very fast sickness and she spent less than a week in the hospital.
The Palliative Care Unit at UAB was wonderful to my mom. So was the general medicine wing of Spain Wallace. So was the ER at UAB. I can't tell you enough about how sweet everybody that worked there was to my mom and to my family.

Here is a picture of my momma and my poppa that I love.

MULBERRY FORK PARKING ALERT

The attorney for Blount County has notified the Birmingham Canoe Club that any cars parked on Whitewater Drive, the paved county road leading to the BCC property at the takeout for the Mulberry Fork River, will be towed at the owner’s expense. The county will be posting signs in the near future. Please park in the parking area only!

WildWater movie

The new movie WildWater will be shown at the National Paddling Film Festival - see my last blog post for NPFF details.

The trailer for WildWater is excellent, enjoy: