Thursday, May 26, 2011

Stressed out Birthday Swim

Today I slept in thinking I would swim either at lunch at Steiner, or at BL on the way home from work.  I took a couple of my kids to my Mom's house for the day since they're off school and wanted to see Grandma.

When I got to work, my computer went through a windows update install that was downloaded last night.  It went through the install and automatically rebooted.  Then it went back in attempting to reinstall the update, then reboot, then reinstall the update.  Endless Loop.  Tried several things.  Same thing.  Took it over to the hardware pros and they couldn't even fix it.  So my laptop is toast.  I spent the entire day answering email and FB posts over my ipod.  Probably the most boring and nonproductive day I've had in my 12+ years as a software developer.

I decided I wasn't about to spend the full day at work sitting on my thumbs so I left early.  Except I forgot to pick up my kids from my Mom's house, so I had to drive almost the whole way back and get them from my Mom in Woods Cross.  I was in a crappy mood to say the least.  What better to fix that than with an open water swim in the Great Salt Lake!!!!

Cathi, Max and I drove out to the marina where I hurried in and swam out to Egg Island and back.  I was about 400 yards from Egg Island when about 50 seagulls all of a sudden started circling around me.  More and more of them appeared and they were getting brave.  I decided that was probably close enough and turned around and headed back.  Which was fine since I had already hit my halfway point for time allotted on my swim.

I took a couple reading of the temp with my watch and it read 62-63° which felt about right.  Yesterday's swim was much clearer than today.  Today's swim had alot of the brown muck.  I am nicknaming it Brine shrimp crud.  I have no idea what it is, but it looks like diarrhea.   The salt water seems more concentrated in that crud.  And warmer too.

When I got out the GPS read 2.49 miles and it took 1:10.  Not too shabby.  I stopped once for a drink at the turn around point by egg island and then a couple times to see if I could visually locate Cathi and Max on the beach.  I could barely see them.  When I got back I was well into my relaxed state and the frustrations of the day had worn off so that is what counts!  It felt like I was in the water for only 20 minutes though.  I had totally smeared channel grease all over my trouble spots and didn't have any issues.  Then again I was only in the water for 2 and half miles so it's hard to run into much trouble for that distance.

I'm very excited for my 20 mile swim on Tuesday.  Since there is a 40% chance of precipitation on Monday, I'm moving the planned swim to Tuesday.  Currently there is a 0% on Tuesday.    Here's a little info on Egg Island:


I'm loving this guidebook.  Lots of cool info!  Such as those spiders I saw on Fremont?  Those are orb weaver spiders.  Here's a pic I took last year of a male and female sharing a web on an old trailer on Fremont Island:

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