adventures of a canoelover

No, I’m not Jewish. I’m a Mormon who reads Buddhist poetry while listening to Russian liturgical music. But it has been a happy Sabbath.

I just read a nice article about how productive American workers are. It depends on how you define productive. Adding to the GNP? Oh, we’re good at that…but adding to the quality of life…somehow I think we’re being outpaced by, oh, just about everyone else in the world.

Which is why I love Sundays. I enjoy church services in the morning, hanging out with my friends and holding their babies during the various and sundry meetings. I enjoy the intellectual and spiritual stimulation that comes from interacting with others who share my convictions.

Most of all, I love coming home and taking a nap for an hour or two. Day of rest, indeed. Then we cook together as a family, watch a DVD of Mystery! or something fun, eat popcorn, and go to bed early to the sounds of Rachmaninov’s Vespers or something similarly relaxing. It’s like liquid sound that seeps into your brain and forces you to sleep. I don’t know how Russians stay awake during their all-night vigils, which was what the Rach. Vespers were written for…talk about testing one’s faith.

Had a nice walk today with Stephanie. We solved none of the world’s great problems, Stephanie got five mosquito bites, and I think I sunburned the top of my less-than-adequately covered head, but I took a picture of a limp and wilted black-eyed susan that I think is cool.

I hereby call this sabbath to a close and deem it a perfect day.

My wife and I have this “merry war” about my toys. er, “business tools.” When you’re self-employed in a recreation-based business, the line of demarcation between toy and tax deduction is a fat, gray one with lots of fudge factor.

This little beauty is the Oregon Scientific ATC2K video camera. Waterproof to 3 meters, fixed focus (1.5 – infinity), 30 frames per second, 640 x 480 resolution. Certainly not the most amazing quality, but it cost about $150 including a 2 gig SD card, which holds 30 minutes of video.

Quietwater Films certainly will benefit from this, as I plan to take some ninja-stealth video my next run down the Badfish or the Sugar (currently in flood stage). Fun POV stuff, we’ll tack it on the end of some of the DVDs as easter eggs.

To learn more about this little gem (n.b. – I have no financial investment in this company, period), check out this link.

Other than that it has been a quiet week or two. I’ve been digging into numbers in order to book preseason orders for a few dozen of my vendors for next year. Loads of fun (actually, it is), but it has drained me of a lot of energy usually reserved for paddling this time of year.

Apparently some of the seeds on one of our Jacks in the Pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) were pollinated, hence their vibrant color. It’s worthy to note that Jacks in the Pulpit are members of the Arum family, which includes Calla lilies, Skunk Cabbages, etc. A lot of really interesting and cool plants.

The coolest thing about the family is that a lot of the plants are thermogenic, producing heat to help them poke up through the snow in the case of the skunk cabbage, and helping to dissipate the malodorous scents that draw pollinators, mostly flesh flies, to its inflorescence.

The coolest Arum is this rare one: the Titan Arum (Amorphophalus titanum), or the Corpse Flower (i.e, the stinky plant). The Titan Arum inflorescence looks just like this one from the JITP, only it’s three feet tall. Native to Sumatra, the Titan Arum is really cool and really stinky…and a close cousin of our own little Jack in the Front Yard.

…and the show was great…a lot of cool new product for 2008.

We passed out our Beagle Awards (given to our manufacturers and reps who do an outstanding job) and they were well-received. Wenonah/Current Designs won two, one for Hansi (our rep), who got the Most Face Time Award (he lives at my house more than his own, I think), and Bill Kueper, the new Sales Manager for Wenonah/CD, the James Brown Hardest Working Man in Show Business Award.

I am also bidding goodbye this week to a faithful companion, my Bahiya. which is going to her new home in Michigan. Wonderful boat, but too heavy for my ever aging back, so I’m going carbon and not looking back. She was a wonderful kayak and will be again for her new owner.

The queen anne’s lace is blooming, it’s wonderful.

…for the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market show. For those of you outside the industry, it’s hard to imagine, but the closest thing to it is Toys R Us for grownups (or not-so-grownups). All the new stuff that we’ll see next Spring is there, sometimes in prototype form, but most of our vendors keep their cards pretty close to their chests until the show. Rumors abound, and if half of them are true, it’s gonna be a great show.

We have appointments booked for five of the staff from 7:00 breakfast meetings to dinners to late night parties…15 hour days. Sorta tiring after five days, but since I don’t drink I have an advantage on 99% of the other attendees. They nurse hangovers, I go for a nice run. 🙂

I’m stoked to see the new P&H Cetus LV (low volume). I ordered one for myself for Spring sight-unseen, but I’ve paddled the regular volume and I love the hull. Mine’s Poppy Red deck, yellow seams and coaming, yellow keel strip and a clear carbon-kevlar bottom. I am opting out of the metallic flake gelcoat, I am just not cool enough for that.

I am extremely fortunate to work in such a cool industry. Outdoor Retailer is a lot of work but it’s also like a family reunion. These are our business partners, but they are also our brothers and sisters, and I love ’em all. Even Kelly Blades (see below). Kelly is a stitch, and has taken the new dry suit testing to a new and unprecedented level. Not surprising, given his former run as a Ringling Bros. clown, Clown College and everything.

…and I can’t sleep. I spent a good chunk of the day working on the Rec Kayak DVD that I’m producing with my business partner in Quietwater Films, Jeff Bach. Video production is, well, a lot like work, but I’ll have it done for the Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City. We leave Tuesday. Nothing like last minute production issues to ruin an otherwise good afternoon.

Then again…there’s always this to look forward to:

I had a great Monday off last week. Besides the paddling, the biking was excellent too. The Badger State Trail is the newest rails to trails bike path to open just a few miles south of here.

We rode about 20 miles or so, and enjoyed the 1200 foot long tunnel (except when I ran along the side of the tunnel, which was sorta cool too except for the road rash).

Wisconsin is rich in these sorts of trails. It’s one of the reasons I love it here so much…recreation is everywhere. The butterflies, the Queen Anne’s Lace, the little bridges over tiny little spring-fed creeks, it’s all gorgeous.

The video was shot with my little digital camera, so it mostly sucks, but it was fun anyway. If I ever figure out Vegas, I’ll be able to edit the two clips I took together to recreate my brush with death inside the bowels of the earth.

Hansi from Wenonah Canoe visited us on Wednesday. The new stuff for 2008 looks great, can’t wait to see it in person at the big show. It’s always fun to hang with Hansi, we spent a few hours working on a spreadsheet to calculate pricing, it was geeky fun (and useful too). Playing “what if” with a spreadsheet is fun, I think, but I am a twisted sort of person who thinks statistics are an enjoyable pass-time.

The rain keeps coming…I think it’s time for bed…

…unless you’re a gnat, then they’re the Peregrine Falcons of the Order Odonata. This Ebony Jewelwing grabbed a gnat right out of the air in front of me and landed on a stalk of grass. She was so engrossed in her meal she didn’t mind me poking my finger under her belly and picking her off the grass. She ate for a few minutes then tossed the husk aside and took off, sated with gnat guts.

Damselflies are some of my favorites. Everyone has seen the Common Bluets everywhere there’s a clean little spring-fed stream. The bigger

damsels (the broadwings) are still fairly common. In Wisconsin there are three; the Ebony Jewelwing, the American Rubyspot, and the River Jewelwing. The Rubyspot is also a favorite, as they’re gregarious and land on just about any surface handy (including people, hats, paddles, canoe gunwales, etc.). If you aren’t entertained by damselflies, something is seriously wrong with you.

The dragonflies were out in force too…mostly skimmers of various species…very territorial this time of year.

Just back from the Door County Sea Kayak Symposium…and the week before that, Alaska, paddling with the humpback whales that gorge themselves all summer with tons of krill and herring. Good stuff…great vacation. I didn’t think about work at all.

My kids are the best.

They got me a firepit for the backyard (with some help from Mom), then Ian decided to have a ceremonial burning of his math notebook. He likes math, but his math teacher…not so much. The firepit makes it legal to burn campfires in the backyard, so now we’re legal.

My kids play a digital camera game where they are told to look like something bizarre. I think Whitney invented it. So the person taking the picture says, “You’re a constipated mongoose.” The kids then try to appear as a constipated mongoose. And we take a picture. Improv meets Nikon.

So here’s a chipmunk who just ate a watermelon.

I had a great paddle on the upper stretch of the Sugar River last Friday with my friend Doug. I took a half-day off work and we ran about a five-mile stretch of this lovely little stream. Water was up and clear, and the weather was perfect. Several little breezes would periodically kick up and fill the air with the scents of wildflowers, wild roses, and an occasional barnyard smell that kept things interesting. There was a cacophony of birdsong, mostly birds I did not recognize…but it was wonderful nonetheless.

There were two interesting obstructions — a tree that allowed us to practice our limbo skills (about six inches above the gunwales by my estimation), and a completely down cottonwood that required a short portage. While dragging my boat through the grass, a Red Admiral landed on my shorts and stayed there for a good minute or two.

There were hundreds of American Rubyspot damselflies; we must have been in the middle of a hatch. Lovely things. I couldn’t get any pictures of them, so you’ll just have to look here. A great website for butterflies as well as odonates.

One of the best character traits of my friend Doug is that he can paddle as slowly as I can. This guy knows how to make a river last a good long time. That, and he doesn’t talk much. He’s the embodiment of the famous quotation from Plato: “A wise man speaks because he has something to say. A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.”

Remember…last one off the water wins…

My friend Hansi found this piece of old iron up in the forest by where he lives in Duluth. It’s an old logging spike, and it is sweet old wrought iron. Because of the way it was forged, not cast, it has a grain structure not unlike wood, and when heated and twisted it takes on quite an amazing texture.

Hansi just built a new sauna and didn’t have a door handle for it. So this is his new door handle. It is not done yet, but the basic shape is emerging. There’s quite a bit more work to do, and keeping a 1″ square piece of steel hot enough to work and bend requires a lot of BTUs. I’m using my largest rosebud (50K BTUs, as much as a decent sized furnace, concentrated into a flame about the size of your pinky) and it still cools fast.