Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Evanston, August 16

Last night was rough on both of us. Mike woke in the middle of the night with pain in the elbow from an old baseball injury. I was up suffering from my allergy to all the algae we have had in the Lake recently. But today looked like the best swimming of the week, plus neither of us will be able to go to the lake until next week.
So here we are, albeit late since Mike slept late after a night at, ironically given his injury, the White Sox.

At first conditions looked like those we expected yesterday -- small swells. And the going was easy enough outbound. But from the wall it was clear that there was a goodly southeast breeze with 2 foot waves associated with it. It looked like a tough swim home. Mike wanted to go slowly with his elbow, I wanted to spend as little time in the lake as possible with my allergy. So we did what swimmers should not do: split up and swam back seperately. I was on the beach a good 15 minutes ahead of Mike who didn't arrive on land until after the guards were actually on duty. Fortunately this group knows us so Mike was only given a half hearted warning whistle for being on the wrong side of the "do not swim north of this" sign.

The water is now 73. While at the wall I went and tried to get the attention of the lady on the cell phone. It seems that she was on the phone so long that the cell phone gods have turned her into a statue. Hopefully we will see more of this penalty on the beach which was full of cell phone talking women. Today, which was another of our recent perfect beach days, was bring your kids to the beach day and there was a mob of under 5's, including 3 who looked like triplets of about 6 months getting their first therapudic taste of the E-coli at the edge of the water.