I recently had two little adventures at the Whitewater Center. First, I went mountain biking. Let me tell you, mountain biking and I: we are never going to be best friends. This is the third time I've tried it and it always ends like this scene from The Princess Bride: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqaNi0UfOoI

As you wish, tree stump my bike ran over, as you wish. I think the time has come to sell my mountain bike and just buy a cheapish road bike with a few gears that I can use for regular, lazy biking. The main thing standing in my way is my total lack of knowledge about bikes. I imagine trying to write a craigslist post for my bike and all I can come up with is:

One mountain bike. Red.

It's definitely red.

I fared much better when I went kayaking on the Catawba River. I love kayaking; I try to get as much of it as possible in (on the ocean) whenever I go home to the DR. It was so great to be out on the (very) calm river in the evening. It reminded me of rowing while I was in high school in New Hampshire. Something about the low-slung late-summer light was particularly evocative. I only did one term of rowing, because I didn't love the vomiting into trashcans after intense indoor practices, but the river on a spring evening I could've loved every day forever.