I've corrupted the Yute

I'm a second-generation river rat. My dad went on a Colorado Grand Canyon river trip in his early 20's and was bitten by the river bug so badly that he became a river guide. That is, in fact, where he met my mother, who was a passenger on one of his trips.

In my teens and 20's, he took me and my siblings on many week-long river trips, one of which was Cataract Canyon, a section of the Colorado River that kills a few people every year because it's so big and nasty. On that trip, the boat I was in flipped and we went through two of the biggest rapids in our lifejackets. The boatman cursed, the two other girls in the boat cried, and I laughed like a lunatic that I got to experience being eaten by the biggest whitewater in the U.S. Everybody's got some crazy in them, and this is mine. I LOVE BIG WATER.
(*I do not claim this is my ONLY crazy, smartasses.)

My dad, who I call the Dread Pirate, now lives 10 minutes away from me, and he spends his summers in a blissful gauntlet of one river trip after another. Last summer, he took me, my husband and his best friend Dan on the Clark Fork River in Montana. Here are some highlights.


Dan looks worried. He knows we're a little nuts when it comes to dangerous fun. My husband Barry is the big, white, almost transparent one.



Here we are approaching the rapid called Tumbleweed, aptly named, as it turns out.


Yeah, baby.


The disembodied ghost hand.


And there is my foot, as I was unceremoniously yanked right out of the boat. I was hanging on TIGHT. And the hands of a massage therapist are not weak.


They didn't even realize I was gone. I had to say flatly, from in the water, "I'm out. Of the boat."

That trip last summer was fun.

The Dread Pirate has told my seven-year-old daughter, who keeps asking when she can go rafting, that she is ready for whitewater when he can throw her into any body of water and she comes up laughing. Well, that kid has been in the pool, the lake, and the Spokane River every day since school got out, no matter how cold the water, so last week when we went camping and rafting on the Salmon River, my dad invited her to come with us. The rapids on the Salmon are no joke. At times, her eyes were so big they took up half her face. When we were done, she said, "Again."

Notice her little arms holding onto the boat for dear life. Haha.


Faith's first river trip, thumbs up.


She wanted to try rowing. The Dread Pirate almost burst with joy.


Faith's second trip, the next day. Bigger water, still smiling.

I asked her at one point if she really liked it, and her response was "Har har har! Bring it on!" The corruption of the yute is compete.

Proof I've been completely hillbilly-ized

I ride ATV's in the mountains with a whelp on the back and whoop and holler when I hit the big jumps.

This week, I am going camping on the banks of the Salmon River with my family. My dad, the Dread Pirate Jeffery, will be taking us white water rafting, and my mother will feed us dutch oven delicacies cooked over open flame.

I'm not bringing makeup, or any hair accoutrements except for rubber bands and bandanas. I plan to spend most of my time in a swimsuit. I hope I will not look at road kill and start drooling.

Be back on Saturday!

The Gays Are Coming!

Every summer, the town I work in is flooded by professional actors who come to do 4 or 5 shows for Coeur D'Alene Summer Theater. They are vivid and enthusiastic and stunningly talented.

**If you've been with me awhile, you may remember last year when my gay spa friend Eric made me, I mean, ASKED me to come to Sunday night karaoke at the Shore Lounge to sing him a Cher song for his birthday. Well, the room was rotten with summer theater people, as as I sat there, I shrank a bit with each mind-blowing rendition. These people don't sing a song, they perform it. They don't even look at the words, and they can make it funny or sad or quirky. And they are all gorgeous. I was bedraggled from just getting off a seven hour shift, massaging rich people, and I had on wrinkled khaki shorts and a droopy ponytail. I had long since sweated off my makeup. Pathetic as my appearance may have been, I held my own on the singing end, and the gays seemed to approve. Eric told me later that they would have been pretty vocal if they didn't like me. You don't mess with Cher unless you can do it right when the gays are around.

So tomorrow I'm taking my husband to his first musical at the Coeur D' Alene Summer Theater. My husband is not a muscial type of guy, normally. The only reason I know he'll love this one is because it's "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". Joseph is his favorite story from the Bible, plus he's a rabid Elvis fan, and the Pharoah in "Joseph" is, essentially, Elvis.

Then, in about a month, Eric's birthday rolls around again. He's having himself another karaoke birthday party, and he insists that I sing for him, but this time in costume. I promised to do so because I love Eric. But now I really have to get it together. It's one thing to be able to sing just like Cher, it's quite another to have the look and the mannerisms. Eric said he wants at least one hair swing and "ho-o-o-o!" Crap. I have one month. The gays are coming.

Lindsey is snarling to herself again

So yesterday my mom, my married sister and I were throwing a Father's Day BBQ for the men. Being only 1/3 of the committee, I was outvoted and the menu was largely ribs and chicken wings, neither of which I eat. (Too much work for too little meat, lots of gristle and fat mixed in...ick.) I volunteered to bring potato wedges and pasta salad, thinking I'd at least have two things to eat, albeit a major carbo load. About two hours before dinner time, my dad calls me up and asks if I can come over early to give him a massage. (That's OK, because it pisses me off if I find out that a family member is in pain and DOESN'T ask me for a massage.) I packed up my carbs and headed over to my parents' house in the mountains.

**Now, just so you have the full picture here, a family get-together in my house consists of my parents, me and my husband and two kids, my unmarried sister Sabina and most likely her boyfriend Chad, my married sister Ashley, her husband Bruce, and their three kids, and, if we're lucky, my neo-hippie brother Jesse. The children are insanely loud and the adults are sasquatches, so it's crowded and aurally painful. There are also some hangers-on who occasionally accompany this crowd of pandemonium. Jesse has a girlfriend, Addy, who is very sweet. They break up every other week. (She has two kids who I hear are super-annoying, but I have never met them. I usually don't like other people's kids.) Chad has a daughter who is 16 and likes to text a lot. He also has a mother who is bi-polar and doesn't like to take her medicine. Oh, and she takes other people's stuff and won't admit it.

As I am working on my dad's seven-mile long back (he's 6'6"), he gets a text message. Chad's mom is coming. My brows lower. I have made a finite amount of potato wedges and pasta salad! I have to hide the fly-fishing bag I use as a purse with the garage sale money in it! How rude of people to throw last minute additions onto a dinner party!
"I'm annoyed," I grumble.
My dad sighs. "Yeah," he agrees. "We'd better let Mom know."
We yell up to her, and she pauses momentarily, then cheerfully bustles about, setting another place. Last minute guests never seem to irritate the crap out of her like it does me, unless her family is coming, and then she's like Mommy Dearest. Those Mormon relatives of hers are like Stepford Wives with their perfection and it sends my mom into a dark place.

Anyway, my mood lasts through the rest of the massage, I get madder when Ashley, who is cooking the wings, shows up late and we have to wait for her to cook her stuff before we can eat. Then my potato wedges start sticking to the pan when I try to flip them, and I growl about the fates aligning against me whenever I try to cook, even if I follow directions to the letter.

But wait! Chad and Sabina show up minus bipolar mom, who has apparently swung to the anti-social end of the spectrum, my potato wedges start cooperating, and I actually try some ribs, which aren't as fatty or gross as I had previously thought. Crisis averted.

More Unphotogenic Pictures

I was feeling pretty good about myself. That is, until most of my hair got pulled out and I saw THESE.



This was the game I made up for Dawn's bachelorette party: How many balls can you fit into your mouth? Believe it or not, I only had nine at this point. And I apparently have narcolepsy.

Now, prepare yourselves. This is, by far, the worst picture ever taken of me. I look like "Mask". I debated even putting this up, but why stop now, right? UGH. Shudder.



I hope to all that is good and holy that that heinous stomach roll is just shirt, but I fear it's the Phantom of the Opera trying to burst through into the light.

DARE anyone argue that I am the queen of unphotogenic?

I'm actually SORE

I laughed so hard at this. I LOVE Will Ferrell.

What the fricking-frack? I can't put the actual video on here. Sigh. I know that means no one will go watch this, but, you know what? Whatever. My kid has been yapping in my ear for the last 20 minutes and my brain is about to explode from audio-poison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=453WwRG265I

I'm 33 now.

And this is what I did to prove it. Yeah, baby.