Since the Tupper Lake race, I’ve only paddled the ski. I need to get used to paddling in waves, with the Rochester Open Water Challenge less than two weeks away. Tonight, for instance, Paul D and I did some surfing, but we also spent some time paddling up and down the shore – our theory was that we would experience waves from the side, which is the hardest to handle, but we were in shallow water so if we dumped (and I dumped a few times) it was no trouble to get back in the boat. I haven’t been paddling with my GPS much, so I don’t know what has happened to my training volume other than the feeling that it’s way down. Paddling out in the surf requires different muscles and it’s not particularly fast, so an hour or an hour and a half is about all I can stand, and I probably make less than 3 or 4 miles in that time.
I’ve also settled on a name for the ski. In the past, I named my Skerray “Mary Ellen Carter”, after the song by Stan Rogers, because it enabled me to “rise again”, and the Looksha was “Gideon Brown” after the song by Great Big Sea, because she can “punch ahead in any gale”. I called the Thunderbold “Anne-Marie” after the boat in Stan Rogers’ song “Acadian Saturday Night” because it has “wings on the water”. And so now I’m naming the ski Old Polina because I “fly a long like a song” in it. Or at least I hope to.
I had a great visit with my dad, step mother and kids this weekend. It’s great to see them, especially my daughters. They’re both maturing so well. I still worry about them, but I suppose that’s my job.
In other news, I’m still trying to finish setting up the replacement hardware. I’m experimenting with using LVM snapshots to be able to backup the domU partitions while they’re active – I think what I’ll do is make snapshots, rsync them over to the new server’s partitions, then delete them, and then shut down the domUs and rsync them again while they’re shut down, and then start up the new guys. By rsyncing once with snapshots, that should make the amount of time between shutting down the partitions and bringing up the new ones much faster. I’m also going to look into replacing my current rsync backup scripts to ones that use snapshots as well, because that way I never have to worry about inconsistencies in the file system, especially in the database engines.