BillyStyle

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.

Radiohead.

This is a pretty cool game somebody designed. It’s called Magic Pen. You draw shapes to move a red object to one or many flags to complete the level. It gets pretty tricky. If you get stumped like me, search around on YouTube for some videos of it. Cool stuff.

Being in the Bible Belt, I’ve noticed some minor changes in what occurs at church, so I took my video camera along with me.

Some wakeboard campers just told me about this site. It’s kind of like Woot.com, but focused on active sports gear. I just bought me some board shorts that are on there right this very moment. Pretty cool site:

Whiskey Militia

Yeah, pretty exciting post huh? A big grocery store chain down here is called Publix. It took my brain a few weeks to accept that as a name of a grocery store, but I’m cool with it now.

It’s the only grocery store I’ve ever gone into and found myself thinking “What a great store.” The few I’ve been into are clean, well stocked, huge, and have a great selection of just about anything I could imagine. We had an English fellow here at the camp a few weeks ago, and he went there with us and found that they had a British food section. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

So yeah, this post is really awesome and exciting, haha. I was just so impressed by the place that I had to put something up about it. How bout that!

So on Friday, we were out on the boat to watch Mr. Ben Greenwood ride. We had a whole lot of weight in the boat, so it was having trouble getting up on plane. I jumped up into the bow of the boat and, with another guy up there, got as far forward as I could. I ended up sitting right on the tip of the bow when all of a sudden I began to lose my balance…the wrong way. I’m not sure exactly my thought process at the time, but I think my survival instinct kicked in and I believe I shoved with what I could against the boat. I did this as I was falling into the water so I wouldn’t be in line with the boat’s propeller.

So I went down in the water and (again, not sure if I’m telling the truth, but I think it’s what happened) I gave a quick paddle away from the boat on the port side. After a few seconds had passed, I knew I was safe, and popped my head out of the water.

I was wearing Ben’s sunglasses before I fell in, and wasn’t wearing them when I emerged from the water. The boat had stopped, so I was halfway between the boat and Ben. I immediately began apologizing for losing his glasses. He shouted “I don’t care about the glasses. What about you? Are you missing any arms or legs? Are you bleeding?”

It wasn’t until then that I really realized the danger in which I had just put myself. I kind of laughed and said that I was totally fine. I got back in and after the water calmed down (some huge boat was joy riding), he had a great ride.

So the moral of the story is: Don’t be stupid like me!

Luckily I had a very smart and aware driver who continued to go straight when I fell in the water. He said he didn’t want to turn either way because the boat’s behavior when you turn the wheel is unpredictable enough to make that dangerous. He did the smart thing by going straight and backing off the throttle after he had passed by me. Good times!