BillyStyle

I dig this picture.

And now for an ordered list (because I’m curious of what number I’ll reach) of what has occurred in Billy’s life over the past 30 hours at my dream job:

1. Bailed water out of a sunken boat and got it on a boat lift for the remainder of the storm.
2. Went home teaching. (It’s a Mormon thing, basically, visited some people.)
3. Got up early to tend to said sunken boat and inform the boat owner of what had happened. (The length of this sentence takes away from the un-awesomeness of this one.)
4. Organized some liability release forms so our campers could go into Orlando and ride at the cable park. (Work which should have been done by our un-awesome office manager.)
5. Figured out a way to repair another boat which had overheated and melted some plastic joints involved in running the engine. (The overheating happened more like 54 hours ago, hence not in the list). This process included three trips to Ace Hardware.
6. Replaced the melted plastic parts of second said (how do you say that properly?) boat and began to troubleshoot original overheating problem.
7. Ate a sandwich while waiting for a call from the boat shop, it was delicious.
8. Answered some emails and voice mails which were neglected by aforementioned office manager, who is on a 5 day vacation…a vacation which was made known to the camp owner and staff on day one of the vacation…yeah, not awesome.
9. More boat work, came to a point where more parts were needed, will resume that tomorrow when the parts arrive.
10. Helped Ben move his repaired couch back into his house.
11. Finished cleaning up the now un-sunk boat and put its seats, lead (to make the wake big), and fat sacs (same idea here) away nicely.
12. Got in a functioning boat with Ben and many campers and went wakeboarding…back to really awesome!
13. Put that boat away.
14. Looked for my shirt and sandals in the dark, since I was down to just shorts at this point.
15. Sat and talked with a couple Kiwi (from New Zealand) coaches, venting a bit about the day, having some good laughs.
16. Came home, sat down at my computer, hit some keys.

Lots of un-awesomeness, but ended in awesome, yay! If you’re wondering, I found the sandals, not the shirt.

Florida’s summer weather is different than any other place I’ve lived. In just the past couple weeks, the weather has been what most call summer-ish, so I’m going to base this on what’s happened so far in that time.

The days start out pretty calm, very humid, sticky, and warm. All those make for great morning wakeboard sessions. Then like clockwork, between 2:00 and 4:00pm, the wind gets a bit of a chill to it, then picks up by about 20 mph and the lake gets horrible. Typically lightning, thunder, and sometimes rain are involved. I guess afternoon storms are the norm here. So we’ll usually bring the boats in to the shore and hang out at the camp anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours. After the storm has blown over, the lake is usually very smooth again, and the day ends with a great sunset and a calm lake.

The coolest part about all of this is that when we bring the boats in, sometimes us coaches just play in the rain doing stupid stuff like little kids…while we’re on the clock. Like last week we soaped up the trampoline in the rain to see if we could jump up on it and slide all the way across. Then we went to the water and flew a big flat tube (the kind you lay out on to relax on the lake) like a kite. Good times, good times.

Yes, I am getting a new phone! The bad news is that all my contacts are in my old phone, which is at the bottom of Lake Minneola, FL. That means I’m in need of many phone numbers, so if you know of any phone numbers, feel free to give them to me! I wouldn’t suggest putting your number in the comments here, but if you read this blog and know me, chances are you’ve already seen one of my other requests for numbers or you have my number and can send me a text or some other message to let me know your number. That was a long sentence!

My new phone has a high-tech hands free system, pictured herein.

Today I went to Orlando and made a 2-wheeled purchase. Now I’ll ride me bike the half mile along the lake shore to work, wee! I also went to the Vans Skatepark for the second time. That place is skateboarding heaven.

The bike, since I know some of you will wonder, is a Specialized Hardrock Sport. I pretty much walked in, said what I’d use it for, they pointed it out, I said okay. Done.

Many things have changed since my last post…well, the last post about my situation. I’ve finally moved out into an apartment just a half mile down the shore from The Wakeboard Camp. It’s a decent place. The biggest problem at the moment is my neighbor Lou, he is retired and alone and his only companion is his smoking. Remember that post about how I feel about smokers? Yeah, my mistake on not noticing that his smoke creeps into this apartment through our shared air ducts. I’m going to have to do something about that, it’s really not cool.

Anyway, over the past few weeks, my parents and two younger sisters paid me visits. The parents were here for a few days and then the sisters hung out for a whole week. During that week, we went to Disney World and completely wore ourselves out. I lucked out and found out I have a guy on the inside who got us in for free, so that was sweet. We only had time to enjoy the Magical Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom. I think I’ll be going back some time to check out the other stuff. It was good family fun.

So now with work, things are pretty good. Summer is just around the corner, the heat is already here in Florida, and this is our first busy week since spring break, where I put in a 60 hour week. Although that was 60 hours of hanging out on a boat with fun kids and bikini babes, I still got paid a little bit for it!

There have been some competitions down here and more coaches from the other side of the world (New Zealand and Australia) have shown up to help out. I’m still meeting new people from all over the world every week, which is great.

So nothing too exciting, just throwing a little update out. Here’s something for the Mac users who visit this site. I’m posting this with a little piece of Microsoft software called Windows Live Writer. So far, it seems to work rather well, crazy huh? I may keep using this, I think I’ll see what it’s like to put up a picture in a post. Peace out.

I imagine people are wondering what my new style of life is like here in Florida. I’ll try to sum it up here in a post.

I live at work, The Wakeboard Camp, so that means that about 70 feet from my door is the lake. It’s a mostly round lake, about 2 miles in diameter. So every morning, I wake up and look out on the lake. Typically one of the coaches (sometimes me) will have breakfast made by 8:30, so I’ll go up and eat a little after the campers are done eating. Next, the morning coach will get the boat ready and head out on the lake with the campers. In the winter, we have been running one boat due to the small number of campers. If I’m the coach, that means I drive the boat and coach people how to have more fun on a wakeboard!

Then comes lunch. We lounge around and the breakfast maker has lunch made around noon. We relax and clean a little til it’s time to ride again at 2pm. Sometimes we’ll go out and the coaches will ride at lunch so we get to have fun and the campers can enjoy watching us do some of them flippy spinny things. Then the afternoon coach heads out and does his thing.

Dinner is usually at 6:30, and then the work day is over. So since I live here, even when I’m not on the schedule, I usually end up helping out with little things here and there like driving the trailer to the ramp to get a boat and stuff like that. In a typical week, I’ll ride 4 times or so. This is the winter though, so this is the slow riding season.

There’s also some phone answering and email checking, but they don’t have me doing too much of that yet, and I’m happy to not be doing a lot of that at the moment. I’m here to wakeboard! Saturdays are my least favorite day, because we clean the whole place on those days. I really don’t enjoy cleaning. I’ve learned that over the years. I’m fine cleaning my stuff, but there’s no way I could have a janitorial job, I’d quit on day one. But usually after cleaning, we’ll go ride the rolly weekend water if it’s not too bad.

In the evenings, we go bowling somewhat frequently and I get talked in to going to the sports bar across the street to have a drink (they have beer, I have pop or water or anything else I can think of that’s not alcohol) and watch the local bar-goers.

For all you concerned about my church-going, yes, I am attending church. It’s funny, down here, I really look forward to going to church because it’s different than what I’m surrounded by all day. In Utah, it was just more of the same stuff so I didn’t enjoy it as much. I guess I’m the kind of person that wants what isn’t right before me…or something. Most of the ward members are converts, and it’s a well-attended ward. Okay, that’s long enough for this post.