Newfoundland

The coast of Newfoundland is rocky and wind-whipped, free of the scent of decaying vegetation. The outports hug the coast, like barnacles. The interior of the Avalon Peninsula is boggy, with thin soil and shallow "ponds", the local name for lakes. The people of the outports are Irish and very Catholic, only recently risen out of a subsistence lifestyle. These "baymen" are opposed to the "townies" of St John's, which is the closest thing to a metropolis on the Island. The Protestants moved to ST John's as it grew, abandoning the outports to their Irish fishermen (almost in peonage until confederation with Canada).

Spiderman 3

I finally saw Spiderman 3 this Sunday. It wasn't as good as I had hoped; neither was it as bad as I had feared. Some of the combination of humor and angst was ill-handled and ill-matched, but I am not at all convinced that that dissonance isn't appropriate for Spiderman. The movie did suffer from the common affliction of the third installation of a trilogy (both visual and written), where the complexity obscures the purity of the narrative. The biggest surprise for me was that a certain new character did not perish, nor did that character's counterpart. I've never been a big fan of the Sandman, however.

Cache Canyon Troop 14 Whitewater

I went whitewater rafting with Troop 14 this weekend. I ended up paired with Bruce, the boss man. There were fourteen Scouts and six adults - it was even numbers or no going. The first day was my very first day doing whitewater, even though I had canoed, kayaking, and sailed many times before. Each river vessel requires its own techniques, and rafts are no exception. Unlike canoes, however, rafts bounce off rocks. I found the first half of the first day extremely stressful with a precipitous learning curve; later, however, I relaxed a bit. In the evening, Rick, who runs Cache Canyon whitewater trips, put on games and a slideshow. On the second day, I enjoyed myself immensely. The second day featured rapids that required scouting (not Scouting). The two of our boys who were doing Whitewater Merit Badge (Rick, in addition to being an Eagle Scout, is a merit badge counselor) passed.