9km swim

On Sat, went to be a spotter for John's friend's 9km swim competition in English Bay.
We "woke up" (can't really say woke up cuz I could not sleep at all on the couch) at 4:30am (I actually got up at 4:20am to take a shower), and we drove to Kits to pick up Les. John had his first and ever lesson at boat driving, he tended to over-steer it but got the hang of it after a lil while.
We drove the boat to Sandy Cove, that's where the race started.
Les piggyback me to the shore (since we could not beach the boat) so that I could pee without getting my feet wet. We left poor John all alone in the boat.
Then Les changed into his suit and piggyback me to the boat and threw me into it.
We waited for quite a while before the race actually started, possibly half an hour.
Oh, and I used my dragon boat paddling techinque to steer the boat when the engine's off.

We had a hard time figuring out which one was Les at first cuz most of them wore orange hat and the number on top of it were not visible from where the boats were lining up.
It wasn't until a few minutes into the race that we figured out where he is (his black chin wrap helped, however, there's also another person wearing it).
We were having quite a lot of problem with steering our boat cuz most of the time the boat had to be in neutral (otherwise it'd run too fast and ended up too far away from the swimmer), and there were tide that forced us out of our planned position. There were quite a number of times that we were way too close to Les and in danger of hitting him. To counter that problem, we sometimes had to turn the boat around, a big circle, and I guess that confused Les a lot. Also, given the destination were so far away that it's invisible to our mere mortal sight, Les did a lot of zig zagging around, i.e. no idea where he should be headed. I had to really shout at him to have him stay on course. I guess that really affected his time. Ended up last in the race (4:09 hr), and almost couldn't meet the 4 hr deadline. However, he totally did not seem winded at all during the whole race. He had energy to shout back at us from time to time, very clearly I might add. It's like he's just jogging slowly.

After the race, we drove back to Granville Island and returned the boat.
The person charged Les's card $30/hr (we used up 6hrs) instead of the $25/hr that he claimed he would charge, and then he also charged insurance which he also claimed that he would waive. And then there is also the fuel charge, $25.

Then we drove back to Kits beach, picked up Les and drove him back to his place.
He invited us to have brunch with his folks. We politely declined cuz we were way too tired.

We drove to Brentwood mall and picked up the Harry Potter book. Painless. There were no line up AT ALL!!! I think it's just stupid to line up overnite for a book, even more stupid to block off the road for ppl to line up.
Tried out the Starbuck's green tea frappuccino blended creme, it tastes absoultely weird. Probably because it's green tea, not Matcha. Jugo Juice's Might Matcha tasted much better than that, and probably healthier, it has soy milk, skim milk, and low-fat frozen yogurt.

I "napped" (too bright and hot to fall sleep) for a few hours before venturing out again. We went to SilverCity and saw "War of the Worlds", it's better than I had expected. There were quite a few things that didn't make sense tho. For example, y wouldn't the aliens have thermo sensor? y wouldn't the roads be totally blocked out by dead cars? Y did the aliens wait millions of yrs?
The special effects and the story were pretty good. Quite scary a few times.