dragons and boats and excessive kissing, oh my, oh my

this past weekend was a bit of a blur as you'll see in some of the pics i have posted. part of that is because a lot happened in a short amount of time. the other reason is that the camera used to take the pictures is kind of dirty, hence the blurry pics. a small part of it is also because of an editing feature i use to inject a little more action into a still shot.

friday was pretty normal. not much to report. saturday was eventful.

for starters, we did some cleaning. cleaning on a saturday morning is always fun and full of excitement. i took caleb's training wheels off of his bike and tried to get him going on two wheels. no such luck, but we'll keep trying. around noon we had to hustle out the door to get to lake las vegas for the dragon boat race i had been training for and by training i mean that i attended two practices. but, this was a charitable/business networking thing, so our lives didn't depend on it... but maybe the lives of the women suffering from breast cancer whose cause we were supporting did. i guess i should have trained harder.

on the way to the boat race, aim hears that the renaissance fair is happening that very day and expresses disappointment in not being able to attend. i'm not sure why, because that's not really her crowd, nor mine... of course i wouldn't admit it even if it were my crowd. apparently, mrs. blogmaster wanted to get some fairy wings for the tinker bell costume she is conjuring up. as a reminder, i am being cajoled into dressing up as peter pan for all hollow's eve. i negotiated my way out of the green tights and was given limited rights to contribute to the wardrobe, so the peter pan get up may have some redeeming features to it after all. the boys have reluctantly agreed to dress up as the wild boys, or is it lost boys?

now that i think about it, aim may be trying to tell us... and the rest of the world for that matter... something about the men in her life. first, she's married to a guy that never wants to grow up and, secondly, she has given birth to a pack of ravenous wild/lost boys (no clever commentary necessary here, it is what it is).

maybe there's some truth to that and by some i mean a lot, but then that takes the fun out of getting all dressed up for halloween: you're supposed to be someone other than yourself. maybe i will have to wear the tights after all. as a matter of fact, aim is out doing some costume shopping as we speak and she has been gone much longer than our credit card can afford (it's rough being a semi-professional blogger these days).

back to the renaissance fair.

we went a few years a go with my sister kathryn and her family. she was in heaven, or rather a magical kingdom filled with elven tribes, royal families and 99% of las vegas' very likely to remain single till the day they die population. kathryn was entranced by the merriment taking place around her and most certainly fell in love with every set of fairy wings that passed her by. perhaps she was hearkening back to her madrigal days in high school when she and a merry band of her choir singing cohorts would get together dressed in their finest renaissance themed garb and sing for the fair ladies and gentlemen of las vegas. cooperfive fun fact: my sister, kathryn, and faithful zombie, megan's, brother were part of the same madrigal clan. no wonder megan loves the blog.

back to the race.

we get to lake las vegas ready to throw the paddle down only to find out the race is running an hour behind. that being the case, we go order some food from a frothy little cafe that can't handle all the business it's getting. we wait like an hour to get our order and i bite into my salmon blt only to discover that the salmon is raw. i figure that meat doesn't get cooked in posh places like this and finish eating the sandwich anyway. i'm still not so sure about that.

as we wait for our turn, one of the boats sinks which is crazy because they seem unsinkable. good thing i'm a strong swimmer. we start talking confidently about winning. we get all ideological about dragon boat racing and promoting peace through our paddling. we give speeches and hand out ipods to attendees with our speeches on them. we spewed fine rhetoric about changing the dragon boat racing world in spite of our having done very little in this arena.

finally, it's our turn for the first race and we lose in glorious fashion. some people are surprised but i'm not one of them seeing as how we had three practices and never had more than 60% of the team present at one of them. plus, most of the competing teams seemed to have done this before.

we wait around for our next race and the kids find the arts and crafts table and go to town. i take off for my second race and get taken to town again. actually, we were leading that one for the first 1/2 and then fell out of sync. as we were walking away the ehmcee surprisingly announces that we have won the entire race. shocked and befuddled, we turned around to collect our prize only to discover that it had been awarded to us based on our promise as dragon boat racers and not necessarily because of anything we had done (because we had done very little, actually).

apparently, we had done such a good job of verbally promoting our cause before the races even started that the dragon boat racing committee unanimously agreed that we had done enough to merit the grand prize in spite of our not really having proven anything. i guess the other people who had actually practiced hard and won their races just weren't popular enough... and who actually gets anything based on merit anymore anyway when there are so many better and less probative ways to award things that were traditionally based on merit?

as such, we reluctantly accepted our prize in spite of what we felt to be a weak justification only because it was a local boat race and not the nobel prize or anything big and important like that.

finally, we finish up and i discover the boys have had their faces painted by arguably the best face painter i have ever come across. i'm pretty impressed with the product until i find out how much it cost. it wasn't too bad, but i thought this was a charitable event. i was giving my paddling services away for free... i would have drafted a blog post for free, couldn't the face painter have chipped in his face painting services for a song? apparently, not.

it was then time to go so we hopped in the car to race home so aim and i could get changed and head to the byu unlv game compliments of blog zombie j dob who gave us some sweet tickets. we headed over to the game with j dob and had a very enjoyable and relaxing evening watching the cougs cruise to an easy win.

as we sat and watched the game, aim became increasingly distracted by the couple in front of us who felt it incumbent upon themselves to profusely make-out for seemingly any reason for extended periods of time throughout the game. this was pretty heavy kissing, too, not just the run of the mill amorous open mouth stuff. i didn't have a difficult time ignoring it, but it was like a train wreck for mrs. blogmaster... she had to look in spite of the disaster. in fact, she started counting the number of times this took place and made it point to tap my leg whenever said kissing occurred just so i would have to witness the debacle. thanks, babe, for just ruining unga's nice run.

note to zombies: this couple was in the row directly in front of us and right in front of aim. these were tight quarters, so much so that a couple of times i thought the guys was going to effortlessly turn his head and try to kiss aim at the same time.

i encouraged her to ignore the love fest taking place before her and enjoy the thrashing taking place on the field. like i said, i wasn't all that bothered by things until aim mentioned that the egregious abuse of pda was driving her to the point where she never wanted to kiss anyone again.

houston, we have a problem.

luckily, the tongue dueling duo took off when they saw absolutely no hope for the rebs (after about 1 quarter) and likely stopped at a motel 8 on their way back home. as i've said before: all's well that ends well... aim's faith in making out had been restored and we enjoyed the remainder of the game making out every time the cougs got a first down... although, i don't think aim kissed me goodnight that night.

aim says i should stop here because the post is too long, so i will. until next time, my friends. in the meantime, go have a fierce make-out session with someone in public but make sure the other person consents to the kissing beforehand.