So, my good friend decided that Sunday, my day off, I needed to be up at six am to make an excursion to Lake Cochiti, a liquid cesspool of fiery death populated by killer catfish and deranged seamen.

I told him that there was no way I was getting up at 6:00am, and that he would find me asleep on my driveway and maybe I would be awake by the time we got to the lake.

Well, I ended up having to get up because my dad took his sleeping bag and the lawn chairs were gone and there was no way I was going to fall asleep outside with little roaches scurrying over me.

My friend did find me asleep in the driveway, even though he didn't come till an hour after he said we were heading out. I was there with my blanket, pillow, and sign explicitely stating that I was in the process of a nap and to be handled delicated. However, he hadn't gatheried the coterie yet, either, so instead of delicately lifting me into the transport vehicle, he poked me until I woke up. Oh well, thought I, I will probably get plenty of sleep at the murky lake bottom anyway, knowing my swimming skills.

Thus, we headed out, me with my bible (because I was missing church) and quantum physics book, my ex-roommate's brother (what a way to refer to a guy!) with a book about glorious American spacetime hegemony, my bestest friend with the Car Keys of Slowity, his girlfriend with the Muffins that Must Be Eaten, and our mutual friend with the Inflatable Raft of Me Not Drowningness.

Keep in mind that I don't get out much, and this was the first lake I had been to since fishing when I was four.

Anyway, the most striking thing I discovered upon arriving was that... I had to take my shirt off. Seriously. That's what everybody said. Now, I might have put up more of a fight about that, but knowing that the odds were pretty good of me sinking to the watery depths, as is, getting rid of extra water weight was not an opportunity to be ignored.

I'm just glad no nearby babes were blinded by shimmering pecs of geekiness.

Step number two was to slather myself in sun tan lotion. I knew to begin with that no amount of sun tan lotion could possibly protect my sun-deprived tummy from eight hours of exposure, but this was time to minimize casualties. We broke out the bad boy of suncreen, the orange flagon of SPF 50. If you weren't a pasty white to begin with, this stuff was opaque enough to re-tone your skin. And of course, it was quite waterproof.

Naturally, I slathered it on everywhere, knowing that any spot left unslathered would be erupting in fiery sun-induced agony later on. That would have been fine, except for later in the day we decided that flinging pond muck at each other was about the most hilarious idea anyone had ever come up with. I lasted about ten minutes before being shot in the eye, attempting to rub it out, and thus introducing a significant quantity of superfluous anti-sun goop into my retina.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! BURNING PAIN IN EYE! CAN'T SEE!"

Twenty minutes later, after much washing of my eye, my vision was still impaired by a combination of squinty-agony and a thin white film. Thus, I began to see the downside of waterproof sunscreen. Unfortunately, I didn't exactly have many eye-friendly solvents besides water handy with which to restore my eyesight.

Oh well. At least now my eye had UV shielding.

Later, we dug a channel off of the lake running to a little mudpit we made. It was very, very muddy. We also erected a large boat hazard tower of rocks in the water, dragged some submerged trees ashore and propped them up with sticks and clay, wrote BLAMA on the beach, and made a large clay cookie with watermelon seed sprinkles and marsh grass decorations. I think the next visitor to the beech will have a lot of questions about what bazaar occultic rituals have gone on there.

Whilst exploring, we discovered large schools of small black fish congregating near the shore. I wanted to find out what they were, and since they weren't particularly bright about their dispersion pattern, I grabbed a handful and set them ashore. They turned out to be catfish. As we scrambled to get them back in the water, one of them stung me. Ingrate.

Apart from the fiery burning pain from catfish, sunburn, the many lacerations on my hands and feet from the lake rocks, and various inexplicable pains, it was a lot of fun! I fell asleep on the way home, showered, slathered myself in aloe vera, ate dinner, then fell asleep again (~19:00) until 08:30 the next morning. There is much healing to be done, but hey! Healing is a skill that must be fine-tuned through much practice! Use it or lose it!

That is the cursory overview of my lake experience. And I only almost drowned once. So it was a lot of fun. :)