Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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12 of 12, March 2018

As promised a year ago, the 12 of 12 for March this year fell on the final day of the annual Scout regatta. It’s an in-tents occasion.

I had been carefully monitoring how well I was feeling during the week after surgery and leading up to this, and although I still felt a bit tired, I thought that I could probably manage attending the whole event, provided I rested when I needed to and didn’t get too carried away. I was, in fact, under strict instructions not to do anything more strenuous than pressing camera shutter buttons. As a consequence, this is everyone else getting the very heavy George Bass launched so that we could have a second under 15 team competing in the 500m rowing sprint.

I then ambled along the beach to be in prime cheering position (and also in a good position to take a photo of the Monday morning busy-ness of the beach; there are multiple events for different age-groups and water craft running simultaneously).

Way off in the distance — brought closer by a 40x zoom lens — the under 15 rowing sprint got underway. That’s our lighter boat, La Perouse — on the right, with everyone hoping that this time they would manage to hang onto the oars (they lost an oar in yesterday’s long distance event, but still managed to win with only five active rowers).

It’s a bit of a tradition and joke that the kids can hear my encouraging yells of “Go, La Pero-ouse” even when they are so far off-shore; but I don’t really think I’m solely responsible for the fact that they are well out in front.

And they won (and kept all six oars this time).

Despite its heaviness and younger crew, George Bass was not disgraced in the event; and both boats were welcomed ashore with cheers (and, yes, there are lifejackets on board for all rowers).

The strict instructions I’d been given to avoid strenuousness (apart from taking photos and cheering), meant that pack-up time involved figuring out how to give clear instructions to the parents who came down to help, and how to resist the temptation to pick up stray tent pegs (okay, I admit I might have failed once or twice on that … but only once or twice, and only tent pegs … and that is truly remarkable for me).

The kids and a couple of adults manhandled Griffin back up off the beach; my job was to make sure we remembered to collect all our boats and accoutrements.

At closing parade we received some trophies; a couple of which we’d won in the past but also a new one which we’d never won before, for our under 15 girls rowing crew (and some of the girls in the team were quite young). 

And here we (nearly) all are at the end of the event (a few kids had already left). Jake decided to make a belated but dramatic entrance.

But the day didn’t end there, because things had to be taken back to the hall and unloaded. My non-strenuous contribution consisted of pointing to where things needed to be put away. 

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