Dave's Free Press: Journal

violence, pornography, and rude words for the web generation

 

Recent posts

(subscribe)

Recently commented posts

(subscribe)

Journals what I read

geeky politics rant silly religion meta music perl weird drinking culture london language transport sport olympics hacking media maths web photography etiquette spam amazon film bastards books bryar holidays cars palm telecoms travel yapc bbc clothes rsnapshot phone environment whisky security home radio lolcats deafness curry art work privacy iphone linux bramble unix go business engineering kindle gps economics latin anglo-saxon money electronics
Sat, 7 Aug 2004

Note to self

Throwing yourself out of a moving hovercraft is considered silly.

Yesterday we did some "team building" thing at work. I'm not convinced that these things ever really work to build a functioning team - a day of mucking about in vehicles and mud won't fix serious organisational problems. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying them. The highlights for me were clay-pigeon shooting and hovercraft racing.

It's years since I last went shooting, but I'm glad to say that I can still shoot straight. I am partly ambidextrous - I do most stuff right-handed, but I play squash left-handed for example. the instructor thought, based on the way I held my head, that I should perhaps shoot left-handed too. So I fired off a few rounds left-handed. It felt very odd, but I hit two out of three clays, which, while maybe worse than when I shoot right-handed, shows pretty good control. So next time I'll go left-handed all the time. I wouldn't be surprised if, after a bit of practice, I can shoot at least as well from the left as from the right, and maybe better.

Turns out that quite a few of the others really enjoyed shooting too, so we might get together for a full day of making boom-sticks go bang.

As for the hovercraft - we had a timed relay. I went last in our team, and, if I may say so myself, had pretty good control of the thing after just a couple of practice laps. I had problems with going too wide on a sweeping corner at the bottom of the shallow gradient and lost time there. I finished my lap *most* impressively. Sliding into the box sideways and then, because I'm ever so team oriented, leaping out of the hovercraft before it had come to a complete stop - and falling arse over tit on my right arm. I didn't realise quite how badly I'd hurt myself and got back up and dashed back to the rest of the team so we could get a good time. The good news - I got the fastest individual lap out of the whole company. The bad news - I *really* fucked my right shoulder when I fell on it. At least the constant dull pain has gone now, but I have very limited movement in it now before it gets excruciatingly painful. Thankfully, I haven't broken anything or dislocated it, but I need to be careful for a few days methinks.

None of this, it should be noted, will stop me from leaping on and off moving Routemasters. To stop doing that would be to stop being a Londoner, and I would never want to be one of those odd country folk :-)

Posted at 09:34 by David Cantrell
Permalink

Archive