Posts

Nothing to Do with Swimming, Part 2: Shetland

-
Image
After London we went to the Shetland Islands, home of the eponymous ponies, an hour's flight from the northern tip of Scotland.  Shetland is composed of several islands, with the largest one (Mainland) budding off in several directions like a rose bush in the spring.  The northernmost islands are remote (Yell, Fetlar, and Unst) and are only served by ferry service, while the other ones are connected by short bridges or are very close, with hourly RoRo service (roll on, roll off for cars).  Orkney and Fair Isle are short plane flights away to the south (in eight-seat, perhaps home-made aircraft, that is expensive, barfy travel).  You can also journey to Orkney, Fair Isle, and Shetland by ferry from Aberdeen, and most people do -- though a 12-hour trip through the North Sea is not exactly the Queen Mary. We were in Shetland to see Up Helly Aa, the pride-of-the-island fire festival held every year on the last Tuesday in January.  Shetland isn't so much Scotland -- ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nothing to Do with Swimming, Part 1: London and Edinburgh

-
Image
The unexpected aneurism in the wife of one of my swimmers, and the Chevy Chase-like vacation of my cousin made for some deep thinking.  Well, I don't really do deep.  But I know what I want, now. The swimmer and his wife were just about to set off on a three-month adventure in the Far East, young kids in tow, when their trip -- and their lives -- were changed forever.  The cousin didn't have a life-changing event on her trip.  But she and her husband saved for years to see France, and then they selected a tour that must have been dreamed up by a six-year-old with a birthday party agenda.  I want balloons!  And cake!  And a piñata!  And games!  They saw like ten things a day riding on a bus with strangers and a tour guide, for a week, managing to somehow cover almost all of the country's hot spots in one memory-blurring crush.  And to top it off, they both ended up with Covid. The swimmer's wife is hospitalized now, making small gains eac...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Do, But I Don't

-
Image
Last month, I went on two very different trips that, looking back, had a lot in common.  And it isn't often that a wedding and a swim meet have anything in common, so it seems like I should elaborate. The first trip was to Charleston, SC, to attend the wedding of my cousin's daughter, Becca.  While her dad and I are fairly close, the 30-something bride and I never spent much time together or communicated, aside from a few Likes exchanged through the years.  This is probably because she is a distant enough relative that I never had to buy her presents, which would've at least (hopefully, though you never can tell) earned me a thank you note once in awhile. Her groom, the love of her life since college, seems like a good guy.  The wedding was in the manner of all large weddings today:  at a destination, and unaffected by normal limitations on reasonable spending.  Today's weddings have proposals which are scripted and captured by video (in the perfect light) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Let's Meet!

-
Image
The best part of Masters Swimming definitely is going to swim meets.  You'd never know from the leisurely 10-hour day that the meet is composed of hundreds of moments of individual terror.  Not for me, of course.  For coaches, meets bring little terror.  Lots of stress, for sure.  Describing a missing relay mate to their teammates when they have five minutes before the start.   "You know Bob.  He's the guy with that bad kick!"  "Tessa!  The one with the hair!"   And explaining to someone how to do a back-to-breast turn when I've literally said that 700 times before (and then watching them DQ).  But our meets are infrequent, with only a few each year. As if to make up for it, Masters Swimming has a lot of meetings .  There are meetings in our local region, Pacific, and meetings with our national governing body, US Masters Swimming.  I remember telling a non-swimming friend once that I was on my way to the annual Aquatic S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Formal Occasion

-
Image
Because it would be nice to have the vital information for everyone on MEMO's handy in one place, I googled for a free site that would collect it.  It's only taken about three months, but I finally have the majority of people complying. Who knew the first question ("name") would be such a stumper!  Several people put their first names only, as though it were kindergarten again and I was asking them to label their cubby.  And what's with people who don't use capital letters?  Or people who ONLY use capital letters?  My sense of organization is deeply troubled by that, and I've got to go in and fix these flaws. Next up was the Emergency Contact, which also isn't as easy as it sounds.  Because of the lack of imagination on the form-creator (me), it was left as an open question.  SIXTEEN people put down the name of their BFF/next-of-kin/anyone they knew with a car and failed to leave me any way to contact said person, short of hollering their name as...
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't Stop Believin'

-
Image
I have no idea how I found myself logged into my daughter's Google Drive account (no, really!), but I saw the title of one of her college Creative Writing assignments that she'd been mentioning for weeks.  She'd been telling me about the drafts and the feedback and the revisions, and on and on -- all that goes into the sausage of a short story -- for weeks.  So I read it.  And it was wonderful! In a closely-related development, I got into super mom trouble for doing that, even though I was practically dragged to the screen by the electrons and waterboarded by the cursor to read on.  But if you have teenage daughters (this starts at age 14 and continues for the rest of both of your lives), you know how many ways you can get in trouble for being supportive. One of the themes was how swimming broke her heart, when puberty hit her with a wallop and best times stopped coming when she was a freshman in high school.  Until then every season-ending meet was a lo...
3 comments
Read more

I Know This By Heart

-
Image
So I accidentally forgot to blog since Blogspot turned into Blogger.  But I'm back and it looks like I'm starting from ground zero, unless you want to search for distancelane.blogspot.com, which used to be where I ranted. At Laney College the pool is located in almost the exact center of campus.  People often walk by, mostly on the walkways above, and stop to ask me questions.  I know my teacher colleagues work in really cool smart classrooms where everyone is seated at desks, but the pool actually is my classroom -- so bothering me is kinda annoying.  And seeing how it's the last week of school here and I've heard absolutely everything (for the 63rd consecutive term), I thought I'd take the time to rant about the Top 10 things people say to me that are most irritating: I s the pool heated?     It's tiled, striped, divided by lanelines, not shaped like a kidney, and has starting blocks and a working lifeguard -- just like the ones you've seen on...
2 comments
Read more