The swimming life of Marcia Benjamin

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...

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...

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...