Shall We Dance?

 Today's Alpennia blog is very near and dear to my heart: techniques for showing your characters falling (or being) in love that don't rely on sex scenes.

Steering into the wind

 We managed slightly better than a quorum for dragonboat practice today. For some reason, most people have gravitated away from Tuesday practices (which, for obscure and not necessarily relevant reasons, is my preferred day). A big factor is that our head coach doesn't come on Tuesdays and the people who are practicing all out for race season align their schedule with his.So Mondays get a boat and a half worth of people, but Tuesdays we occasionally don't even mange the five people (4 paddlers and a steersperson) that are pretty much the minimum for taking out the 10-person boat. (The regular boats are 20-person.) In deep winter, I do a lot of steering--often I'm the only qualified steersperson there on Tuesdays, but this time of year we can usually count on another of our regulars who doesn't mind steering because he gets his paddling time in earlier in a kayak. But today he waved at us from the sailboat he was helping take out--it looked like they were training up an inexperienced crew, from some of the maneuvers. So it was just me steering and five paddlers. A nice laid-back practice with the advantage of a stiffer than usual breeze so we could alternate resistance training and speed training.

I keep saying that one of these years I participate in the races again, but really I just like getting out on the water and getting in a good workout. I don't need the anxiety of race training.