kayaking on dead legs

The week was finally over. On most Friday evenings I like to fix an easy dinner and nap and walk in circles in my pajamas thinking and talking to myself. It is how my brain unwinds after the week. Some people manage to unwind during the drive home in the car, or over a drink. My mind, however, seems to take this idiom literally and I must actually unwind. Like an old tape that I must wait and rewind in order to get back to the good parts. You have to wait for it to reach the end of the tape where there is always that loud click at the end before it starts to rewind automatically. That click always scared me because I thought, "It is just a matter of time and that snap is going to break the tape and it will just spin and spin slapping the end of the tape against the inside of the cassette, no longer useful at all." Thus, it is terribly important that I unwind. This brain is the only tape I have and while it can get wound pretty tight, I want it to last, despite all the strain I put it through.

This Friday of discussion I decided to go kayaking with Tony in his homemade kayaks. These boats are the most beautiful ships I have ever seen, and I cringed to drag them across the pebbles and into the lake.

After rocking back and forth a couple times getting used to the boat, we were off. The lake was gorgeous and we were the only two people on the water. Tony showed me around the lake and we paddled under a trestle. I always imagine how beautiful these architectures might look if they were decaying and returning to a more natural form. Trestles seem to me to be already moving in that direction.

half way across the lake my legs started to go to sleep. It got to the point where I couldn't feel my feet and I wasn't sure if they were on the pegs or twisted in some unnatural position. I imagined them twisted together like some developmental disease that would make me walk with my knees together for the rest of my life. there was very little I could do about it on the water because any movement might tip me over into the freezing water of the lake, which I was sure would do little to help my blood circulation. I didn't want to imagine trying to swim with dead legs. That alone made kayaking with dead legs seem great.

When I paddled back onto the beach I had to sit in the kayak for a couple minutes with my knees pulled up to my chest, waiting patiently for the blood to find its way back.

After the lake I enjoyed a wonderful home-brew while Tony and I solved all the problems facing public education. I found that my interest in home-brews for outreached my interest in United States Public Education.

On the drive home I enjoyed a nice chat with a psychotic ex-husband of a friend. How I find myself in the cross-hairs of these scared little men I will not understand. I guess if the men weren't psychotic they would still be married and I would be "safe."

Needless to say, by the time I was done with the drive home, the conversation had managed to rewind my brain to the point where the drink was needed after-all.