Mortaine’s Blog

Cancer. The word hung
A shroud around death.
Each moment of life is hard won, tightly wrung.
Cancer. The word hung
Away. Your tongue has sung
Your remission through your lungs.
You clung, without surrender, to your breath.
Cancer. The word hung
A shroud around death.

First poem I’ve written in a loooong time.

So, some folks on my Friends list have remarked that they (a) didn’t know I write computer books, and (b) think that’s really cool.

So I just wanted to point you all to ’s RSS feed for her blog. Laura Lemay is a very good computer book author whose book on HTML was the First To Market of its kind, and taught most of the first generation web designers how to do any of it. Go, Laura! She’s also a very cool person, and I have no idea what she’s up to these days, which is why I was so happy to find her blog.

John and I went river rafting this weekend at Cache Creek. It’s something we both really enjoy doing, something I’m actually good at, something that we can do together…. yeah. It was great.

Anyway, lots of fun, but also tons of sun– my legs in particular are burnt. Whoops. That after two layers of sunscreen. Next time, I will remember to wear knee-length shorts, at least. Also, my arms are sore, my right arm in particular. This time I was smart and wore biking gloves, so at least I don’t have blisters like last time!

And I got thrown out of the raft. I usually take the back of the boat because I’m heavier and about as strong a paddler as John, thanks to 7 summers of Girl Scout Camp. The one time John was in the back, I had to bail out because of a rock. So, we have it down to a technique now– I steer from the back, and he watches the river currents and identifies the rocks for me.

Today, we were going down Elevator (I think), which is a series of rapids that have quite a few rocks. I never know where Elevator’s going to be, except that it’s after Mother, and I know what it feels like when you go down it.

So, anyway, a bit of bad timing or something, and I think what happened is that we hit a rock side-on from the left. I was leaning into it, and the force of the impact sent me continuing forward and right out of the boat.

I held onto my paddle and got myself oriented face up with toes pointing downstream, but Elevator is a loooong rapid, and every time I thought I had hit a slow enough patch to regain control, I realized I was wrong and kept going. At one point, a boat containing a couple of our companions bumped into me, but I was OK by then and just said hello so they would know I wasn’t panicking or drowning.

John, meanwhile, was wonderful. Once he realized that I wasn’t in the boat, he got into the back (because steering isn’t practical from the front) and maneuvered the rest of the rapid with a completely swamped raft. Go, John! At one point, I glanced back and saw him– I was so relieved that he was still in the boat, still had his paddle, and wasn’t caught up on the rock that had thrown me or anything. I gave him the in-water OK sign (SCUBA sign), and we met back up when the water slowed down a bit.

That was the extent of our excitement on this trip, really. At least, for us– another boat in our group got stuck heavily on a rock, but it was slow-moving water so we all waited for them at a slow bend in the creek.