Fall In The Water – Another Technical Difficulties Photobomb

“My life is in shambles”

<<<<A Quick Note>>>>

I’m doing an in-person book signing for Climate: Our Changing World at Anderson’s Bookshop Downers Grove on August 16th, 2023 at 6pm! If you’re in the area, you can buy a ticket (which comes with a copy of my book) and hear me talk about the experience of writing this book. I’ll also sign it for you (that part’s free!).

Tickets are $24 each and include one hardcover copy of Climate: Our Changing World and entry to the event for up to two people. Tickets can be purchased here.

For more information on this book and free teacher’s resources, click here!

<<<<Back To The Blog>>>>

I am so tired. Nothing has been going right for me lately (which is, of course, a funny thing to say as I prepare to leave for a new adventure, but, you know what I mean). All technology seems to be failing me when I need it the most. My shitty Chromebook is once again kaput, and now even WordPress is failing me. There was going to be a blog about Big Europe this week, but there is not. It is trapped in save-state purgatory on my desktop at home, though my mother thankfully rescued most of it. There is no proper blog this week.

So I’m typing this up from my cell phone (we already know how that went with the Czech food) in O’Hare airport, where the hired(?) piano guy has been playing the Gravity Falls theme and the Peaches song from the Mario movie. But he’s gone now, so did he ever really work here at all? I am going to Colorado this weekend, this post is already late, and any motivation I had to fix it is shattered somewhere back home with the boots I forgot to take with me. But I keep chugging along. One post a week. Like prunes and fiber, it keeps me regular. Better late than never. Instead of something thought out and good, allow me to grace you with these crusty-ass photos of my past weekend. This post is mostly just an ad for my book signing next week anyway.

So, a group of family friends of my family hosts this annual summer party called “Rock the Dock.” They gather together our whole extensive family friend group, which ranges anywhere from twenty to fifty people depending on the year, including children and adults (and now grown children, too). Everyone converges at their lake house, and we drink, play music, talk, catch up with each other, and go boating on the lake. This boating involves surfing, water skiing, and tubing. It’s an event that’s happened every year for the last… eight years? (barring Covid) or something like that, though I haven’t been since 2018. So it was really great to be able to go again this year and see everyone, especially people I haven’t seen much in a long time.

These are people that I’ve been traveling with for literally more than a decade now, and people I have known coming up on twenty years now. It’s bizarre to think that, for one, we used to all go on massive vacations together all the time when I was in middle school and high school, and for two, that I haven’t seen many of them almost at all in the last four years now. But despite the time difference, everything felt natural. It was a wonderful feeling to get together with these people and just talk like we’d just seen each other yesterday. These are some of my closest friends and quasi-family that I’ve ever had, and although distance has been difficult, it’s great to still be able to just come back together and get fucking smashed.

I won’t talk much more about it since I’m already running low on time and I don’t want to cut into a different vacation I’m on in order to see cherished friends I haven’t seen in a long time, so I’ll keep it brief. At Rock the Dock, we drank frozen blood bag drinks, played Foosball, ate ribs and chicken and salmon, harassed the house cats by constantly picking them up, went on the boat and sped up and down the lake, talked, chatted, swapped stories, drank some more, and just all had a general time, despite the fact that it rained constantly and was cold.

People also made fun of my toe, because I had “accidentally” cut it into a knife.

My favorite part of Rock the Dock is always the tubing, where we take out the big boat and tow this giant floating tube behind. The captain then whips the boat around, spinning the tube back and forth, going over waves and bumps, and inevitably flinging off the passengers. It’s quite a good time, although it occasionally ends a bit painfully. But I love getting on the tube again and again and seeing how far I can fly up before falling off. I also tried surfing! Where you have to hold onto a rope and stick your feet on a board behind the boat and catch the wake. Which, no surprise here, I was unable to do for more than a second standing up. But I did stand up! SO I accomplished something with what little bodily grace I contain.

And then, of course, the inevitable falls; please enjoy these photos, hastily screenshotted from the video of me and my not-quite-step-sister falling off this giant tube. We call it the tubby run.

Crazy? I was crazy once. They locked me in a room. A rubber room. A rubber room with rats. And rats make me crazy.

But that’s a quick and dirty summary of what I did this past weekend, and although I can’t really share more, I’m glad that I get to talk about it a bit. Because now, as the time and distance grows, it’s easy to forget how formative all of these people have been in my life, and how they have helped shape me into who I am today. I am infinitely grateful that they are still in my life, and that I can pick things up right where they left off every time. Love you all, and, hopefully, see you next summer.