a mattress flipped me off... into the river

my alarm went off at 7am this morning and i genuinely wanted to wake up. truly, i did. my roommate saprina and our friend mike were running in a 70s themed 5k at 8am and i had every intention of going and watching them compete in their neon 70s outfits... until my alarm clock went off.

then i decided sleep sounded better.

upon deciding to sleep more, i realized i technically committed to going tubing down the truckee river with friends at 12pm so i set my alarm for 11. when it went off again, i decided i didn't want to go tubing. sleep just sounded better than anything else today. after all, i hadnt really PROMISED to go tubing... or had i? my phone buzzed and a friend was asking details about the trip. dangit.

well, i got up and stood in the middle of my room deciding what to do. to go, or not to go... that was the question. how many events today could i get away with NOT going on when people wanted me to?

i decided that if i didn't like how i looked in my bathing suit, i wasn't going. that would be it. i hadn't had my coffee yet, so i wasn't in a good mood and so chances are, i'd hate what i looked like and it would be my excuse and all my friends would have to understand. i'd just pull the "i didn't look good in anything i tried on" card and no one would be able to question me... girls are allowed to pull that card every now and then. ;o)

i changed andi checked myself out in the mirror, and decided i looked good. damn.

okay, plan b: if i didn't have sufficient river gear, i wouldnt be able to go. wouldn't you know, i found all the river gear i needed and after a few more failed excuses, i was headed with everyone to the river. awesome.

of all the mornings for me to get myself together in a half hour, it had to be today... the one day i've wanted to just sleep the day away?! freakin geez. whatever. i made the best of it.



we got to the river and had a few laughs since i'd decided to carry on my tradition of floating the river on an air mattress. it looks comical, but when the river goes from 7ft deep in parts to 8 inches deep (if that) in other shallow parts, riding it on tubes is quite an ab workout. i prefer to relax and float rather than hike my butt up and go straight as a board to avoid getting bruised from rocks on my butt or tailbone. it can be quite brutal.

today, my brother who is 6'7 took his scuba flippers with him because he had the genius idea for he and i to sit on opposite ends of the double inflated camping mattress and power down the river at great speed. with him propelling us through the rapids and shallows with his flippers, we laughed at everyone else exhausting themselves by hiking their butts up out of the water every time they saw a rock ahead.

it was great fun... until i "pulled a hope" and fell off the mattress backwards in some rapids, slamming my head on a rock. the cracking sound your head makes underwater when slamming into a rock is almost worse than the pain.

the next time my friends saw me, i'd flung myself dramatically over my end of the mattress and my brother was propelling us as fast as he could into shallow water where i could get out safely and situate myself before we through any OTHER rapids. it was quite the drama, especially when my contacts started falling out and i had to get them back in while floating down a river! i'm awesome. not accident proned at all.

i fell off the mattress a couple more times throughout the day, but none as bad as the first and thankfully, no more rocks connecting with my skull.

i am now a deep shade of tannish red and quite enjoying the thought of cruising the river again even though it may mean death. knowing me, next time i'll get strangled in some kind of fishing line or something... it would just figure.

much thanks to nathan for keeping me alive and making surfing the truckee on an air mattress a heck of a lot of fun!

tubing the truckee with umbrella sails

my sister autumn and i are - to say the least - a bit spunky. seldom when we get together, are we doing anything the normal, or obvious, way it should be done. yesterday was no exception.

it has been extremely hot in reno the last couple weeks, and our group of friends have gone tubing a couple times to ease the heat. despite sunscorched flesh and heat exhaustion from being outdoors, it makes the heat a little more bearable if you're in the water and going on an adventure.

yesterday autumn and i wanted to go on the tubing trip down the truckee river, so i checked all three sports authority stores in reno, and of course walmart... not a single store had river tubes.

it was a tragedy.

i called autumn and notified her we would not be able to go down the river. i went home and moped on my couch for a couple minutes, and then got a brilliant idea. i ran to my garage and hauled my huge double inflation, queen sized ozark mattress into my living room. five minutes later, thanks to my electric hand pump, it was filling my livingroom floor.

it was a go!! i called autumn and informed her i was going downt he river on my mattress with or without her. she loved the idea too, so she headed over. i didnt want to be sunburned very bad, so i put on sunscreen and got out my umbrella around the same time autumn showed up with the exact same thing.

a while later and we were headed to the river with our friends, trying to figure out the best way to haul our huge mattress through my neighborhood and to the river's edge. we succeeded, and were soon on our way down the truckee.

it was soon evident that our floating party of seven was not going to stay together. autumn and i were whizzing by them all, as we realized our umbrellas doubled as not only sun shade, but wind sails as well. when people stood up to walk their tubes over the shallow riverbed with rocks and all, our durable ozark mattress just skimmed over the top of em.

many women stared in envy at our floating mattress of relaxation, and our shaded faces as we just floated along when there was no wind... and we could tell many of the men we passed wished there was a way to copy us and not lose their man cards by taking an umbrella out on the river with them.

our friends soon became envious of our speed or travel, and after they caught up to us, they had a blast hooking their legs over our mattress to be carried along with us. tragically, my sister faith ended up kicking open the air hole on the mattress when she threw her legs over, and i couldnt get to it quickly enough to stop a large amount of air from exiting our party float.

it was humbling to stand in the middle of the river trying to inflate our mattress manually, while all the people we passed floated by. it became quite the spectator sport as i yelled sassy comments at my sister faith who had stolen my umbrella by this time, and the other tubers on the river laughed out loud at the fiest happening in the middle of the river.

eventually we got a bit more air in it, and caught up with faith to retrieve my umbrella/wind sail. away we went, on half the air we started with, but still a much comfier ride than most on the river.

thank you ozark, for creating a mattress so durable and awesome as the one we took down the river... and thank you mary poppins for inventing the umbrella wind sail, and giving our imaginative minds an idea.