I may have been slacking in my personal swims lately, but smelling the chlorine vicariously this morning with this video.

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Love being able to combine alumni fan-boyism with the vicarious smell of chlorine in the morning.  It’s especially good when it involves seeing Cal Bears out giving back locally and working with the kiddies.  Now if I could only get up the energy to get to an actual swim…

One week ago today, thirty or so very good friends and family gathered at The Linkery in San Diego to celebrate Randy’s 50th birthday. The people at The Linkery outdid themselves with great service and great food, and while the Big Five-Oh is easy to poke fun at (and there was a ceremonial presentation of Spinner’s first AARP card), the rapidly-marching-to-death jokes were kept to a minimum, and as far as I could tell a great time was had by all.

Very early the next morning we left Diego and the Great Basil Forest in the care of a wonderful housesitter, and set off for Hawai’i.

In hindsight we’d redo the itinerary. It seems ridiculous in hindsight to fly 21 minutes from San Diego to LAX, then sit on some very uncomfortable seats at LAX draining the batteries on various portable devices for three hours until our flight to Kona. We could’ve driven to LAX in less than two hours, and still left home at least 90 minutes later than we did. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… As for Delta – I know it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything but a hop from here to the Bay Area, but $25 to check a bag and no food except a bag of peanuts on a five-hour flight? Ohmygawd you’re cheap bastards and you’ll get no linkey-love here.

Once we got off the flying metal deathtrap though, life was renewed. I suppose for Randy it was like how Logan’s spin through carousel should’ve been. Hours of people reminding you of approaching mortality, more hours trapped immobilized in a sealed metal tube, then whoosh…PARADISE!

In our first two hours on the Big Island we swam in the ocean, swam in the resort’s pool, then had mango daquiris and kalua pork quesadillas at the hotel’s poolside bar.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: we shopped, we ate, we swam, we bodysurfed, we paddleboarded.  Lots of details in the photo captions over at Vista.

Yes, I got injured a couple of times, but it was all still absolutely worth it.  I got stung by a jellyfish or something, but I got stung swimming the water portion of the Ironman course in Kona.  I beat up my ankles on some silly rocks, but I did it body surfing at Magic Sands on the Big Island.   I suppose I should mention the dead brain cells from several rounds of Mai Tais too, but that doesn’t sound nearly as butch as the swimming and bodysurfing.  Would it help if I said they were flaming Mai Tais?

We visited palaces and churches and archeological sites and generally behaved like gawking tourists we were.  Spent lots of time sitting on the seawall just watching local life: the triathletes and open-water swimmers, the locals playing, the outrigger canoe clubs, the birds and crabs doing their things.

We had a great time.  The vacation was way too short.  Probably wouldn’t have come back but for the grim realities of modern life spelled out by Quicken, even given my responsibilities to appear in court this Tuesday.

The flight home was relatively uneventful: same tin-can of death, same lousy service, still no love for Delta.  Diego not only survived, but seemed much better after five days with the housesitter than he’s ever seemed after any time at all in the kennel.  The Great Basil Forest is thriving.  After 36 hours the mountain of laundry finally seems surmountable.  I’m back and I accept it, happy or not.

I’ll be wearing green whenever I get around to getting dressed, except when I go out for my swim because I don’t have a green speedo anymore, and I’m not going to run out and buy one just for the holiday.  I love the holiday and all things Irish, but some things are overkill.

Nothing really new here for the holiday in terms of content either, so please enjoy this YouTube rerun from last year.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day everyone.

All the good holidays get seasons, so I’m happily and guiltlessly extending my birthday into a season this year.

Yesterday Randy rode the Flightline zip line at the Wild Animal Park.  I got a couple of photos of the preparations, but nothing from the ride itself.  My hands were too busy to work the Canon and the wind grabbed my helmet cam right after launch and repointed it at the sky.  Still the experience was a complete blast, and we broke down and bought the photos of the day taken by the zoo’s photographer.  Randy put some of those up on Facebook, and some more might make there way over here in the next few days.

I spent today with some overdue humiliation and exercise.  Swimming alone has been good for me, both physically and with the meditative aspects.  I’ve been feeling a bit stagnant lately and kinda hitting a wall, and have been looking for a way to avoid my tendency to become complacent.  Spent the morning getting beaten up and feeling old at a coached workout with a local masters swim team, Different Strokes.  Had a great time and should join if I can prove to myself I can commit to their schedule.

The birthday season is scheduled to wrap up with a grand finale Thursday evening at a showing of Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.  The tickets were generously funded by my parents’ birthday check, and thus makes the perfect finale to this year’s Season of Chuckie.

Let’s face it: software is never as easy to install as it should be, and food never tastes as good coming back up as it did going down.  But at the end of the weekend I lost a couple pounds and have Windows 7 up and running on the desktop.  Wish I could have worked a swim in there somewhere, but it just didn’t happen.  Still, I think the scales for the weekend balanced out pretty well in the end.

Made it back to the pool this morning for the first post-Christmas-gluttony swim.  Minor panic attack when I pulled into the parking lot, but fortunately all the New Year’s Resolutionists were staying in the dry areas of the  gym.  Either they’re committed non-swimmers or they haven’t resolved enough of their body issues to be seen in swimwear yet.  Either way I won – I had a lane to myself for the entire workout.

We’ll see if the effort pays off on Friday.  Weather permitting, at 11ish we’ll plunge into the ocean like little penguins with 300 or so of our closest friends to celebrate the New Year.  Most of our friends normally wince at the thought of going, with the imagery of icebergs and hypothermia shivering up their private bits just as surely as the cold water itself would.  Still fun though, and free coffee, doughnuts and certificates always make for excellent motivators.  See you there?  This will be the 24th annual plunge, and our fourth together.

Pretty unproductive this afternoon due to a cable outage wiping out the landline, broadband internet and the cable TV.  DVDs and the Blackberry kept me from curling up into a fetal position, but not much work got done.  Not that much would have with no courts, law library, post office or banks open, but I like to think I would have tried.  I was tempted to just go swimming and blow off all the pretenses of work, but I respected the scheduled off day from the gym, and hope my arm respects the decision and continues to heal.

You know what they say about idle hands though, so while following a twitter conversation ably engaged by The 17th Man and others, I was introduced to the Screaming Viking blog, a swim blog with two great recent posts touching on one of my pet peeve issues here.  The internets are abound with the stories of people who don’t swim and don’t get speedos (little-s, the small suits, not big-S, the brand).  One of the all-time most visited posts here (after the image of my prostate), was a post three years ago about some local high school water polo players suspended for wearing their team uniforms (speedos) to a school pride event.  SV’s posts were both more positive: local swimmers donning pink suits to show their support for breast cancer awareness, and a problem favorably resolved with some race officials thinking the swimmers were wearing two suits and being too modest.  They were both great posts, and especially with the post on the pink suits, it was nice to see that a swim team could show some support for breast cancer awareness and wear the suits of their choice without getting a bunch of suburban prudes’ panties in a bunch.