A Day Out Yachting

“I can't control the wind but I can adjust the sail.”
- Ricky Skaggs

I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but my mother had an aneurism in 2008 while driving to the post office and she managed to dent the old noggin pretty nicely. Thanks to some pretty severe brain damage she is a loopier and slightly  slower version of the mother I grew up with (think MOM 2.0 with the screen that freezes sometimes and that annoying hourglass that keeps popping up). With some local support from groups that deal with brain damage she's been taking classes and kept pretty entertained the past few years and today, for the first time, I got to participate in one of the weekend events. Sort of...

Mum and I were suppose to go to a regatta at the Yacht Club today (and only at a yacht club would they call a simple race a "regatta"). All the participating boats had to have at least one brain damaged person on board in order to be eligible to race, so we showed up at 9:30am to sign in for our per-designated boat: The Briggs. Well, they put out donuts and coffee, so 10:00am came and went quickly (if hectically). They started a slide show which I swear played Enya's Sail Away on a loop and we munched our breakfast. The place was crowded and by 10:30am they were starting to call names to board. We waited as they called every boat, except the Briggs which seemed to be running late. By 11:15am (the race started at 11am) Mum and I were both getting giddy, Enya was playing for at least the seventeenth time, and we couldn't stop laughing. One man kept shouting randomly and another decided that Enya was the perfect music to showcase his awesome robot dance moves. They took away the donuts and replaced it with dip and a bowl of bananas, but no chips, which told us this must be a conspiracy, and the coffee ran out. By 11:30 all the tables had a place on the boats except for ours and there was no sign of the Briggs showing up.

Mum was upset, which she vocalized in a string of words which better suited less economically privileged seafarers. With a great harrumph we exited the Yacht Club. They were obviously, as my mother put it, a Mickey Mouse operation who loured brain damaged people in with promises of a fictitious boat ride only to mock them by playing "Sail Away" on a loop and feed them sub-par refreshments.

It wasn't all bad really, I got a kick out of it, but mum is still brooding.

In other news I bought the new Kindle Fire HD today! You might remember how much I LOVE my Kindle keyboard, but it's time to trade up and I'm giving my old one to mum so she doesn't need a ride to the library for a new book. It arrives in two days so I'll let you know what I think.