I don't wanna speak French

One of the things I did at Pinewoods this year was perform in the ceilidh, which is a sort of talent show that happens on Thursday night. There are jokes, and silly magic tricks from Torf, and upside-down step dancing, and proper musical performances, and so on.

With great stealthiness, such that even my wife did not know about it, I wrote and practiced a parody of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance for acoustic guitar. In my perception, my performance was paltry — stammering, lyric-forgetting, ham-handed on the guitar — and I was pretty down on myself afterwards. There were many very talented musicians there, and I wanted to impress them with my technical chops, which I don't think I did. But the audience did not seem to agree — there was a lot of uproarious laughter, and many bunches of people stopped me afterward to say how much they'd liked it, including the better-known Pinewoods parodist Lyle Ramshaw (who said he may have to retire after hearing mine!). So it is perhaps a little miserly of me to be so self-critical. I'm told there is video evidence; maybe you'll be able to judge for yourselves.

The lyrics won't make a lot of sense if you're not familiar with Scottish Country Dancing, and less if you don't know the Gaga. For those who know both, here you go: ( Rah-rah-rah-ah-ah! All-ah-allemande! )

Turtles all the way down

Barring my ongoing issues with perfectionism, Pinewoods was almost entirely splendid. I knew it was going to be special when I was skinnydipping in Round Pond after the second night dance, backstroking from the dock where everyone else was to the tiny secret water stairs that lead to my cabin, and a shooting star flashed overhead. The streak of white fire had a gap in the middle, like a Morse code "M" or a broken I Ching line.

I spent a lot of time in or on the water, including a sublime (and slightly stupid) afternoon private skinnydip during a thunderstorm, with thunder rolling across the sky all around me; a canoe trip with kdsorceress through the secret passage to Little Long Pond, during which we saw turtles and swans and geese; a solo kayak trip along the same route, on which I saw just one baby turtle swimming madly away from me in that ungainly way baby turtles have; and multiple hours gliding over the bottom of the pond with my goggles and my neutral buoyancy rocks™ (mocked though I was for carrying two big rocks around, they were indispensible).

I found various bits of rubbish on the bottom, including a T-shirt and an ivory necklace and a Gameboy cartridge and a mitten, but my greatest catch was a juvenile snapping turtle, about the size of a coconut. He was not at all pleased to be brought out of the water for photographs, and tried energetically to get his beak into my fingers, arching his five-inch snakey neck back over his shell to bite me and scrabbling at me with his little claws. I found a leech on his left hind leg, and in an attempt to be Androclesiastic I pulled that squirmy, slippery little bastard off while the Australians offered helpful leech advice ("Hev you got a metch?"). Took about five minutes. Once I was done, I released the turtle, which swam crankily away, muttering in Turtle, then looked back at my hand to find the leech had attached itself to the tip of my thumb. Well, crap. Leeches have hooks at both ends, so by the time I'd detached its mouth its tail had got a grip, like painful velcro, and vice versa. I did finally remove it, and I wasn't bleeding, and the leech survived, so there's an experience for the bucket list I guess.

Leeches are not the only biting fauna in the ponds. I was skinnydipping (yet again) in Round Pond, alone, inhaling the serenity of the crystal water and the blue bowl of the sky and the green perimeter of trees, when I felt a bite-and-yank on a particularly delicate (yet manly) part of my anatomy. A ten-inch bluegill had darted in to bite me. After I stopped shrieking (in a manly way), there it was, hovering in the water about three feet away, eyeing me hungrily. It was persistent, too, circling around behind me when I tried to wave it off. Bluegills have teeth, like the piranha; I have seven tiny parallel scratches, about a quarter inch long, right where I don't want them. I wonder if it was spawning season: Wikipedia says that "anglers find spawning season to be a very successful time to fish for bluegills as they aggressively attack anything, including a hook, that comes near."

Also in my catalog of injuries: I twisted my ankle at the Thursday dance, generating a nice puffy bruise on my instep, and got distracted while photographing ducks and fell down the camphouse stairs. My shins are scraped and bloody (people keep asking if I'm okay, but not as many as pointed out my sandal tan), but I saved the camera and got some pictures of ducks. Woo, ducks.