Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

The holiday season has arrived. Just after Thanksgiving Mom, Dad, Betsey and I went to Target....yes, you read that right....Target to get a tree. They were the only folks selling trees the day after Turkey Day!!!

We picked out a 6 ft. beauty and took it home. Let the decorating begin!!! I went crazy and purchased a million things for our lil apartment to make the atmosphere nice and festive. I wanted to get it all done because we left for Canada two days later.....now we can come home to a cozy place. Lets just hope the tree doesn't die while we are gone. :)

We got to Montreal on Tuesday. Canada, Russia and Australia are the other teams here and we will play five games before heading back home for our own tournament, the Holiday Cup, next week. Brenda has been giving regular updates about the games on her blog if you want to check that out. She is far better at recapping the games than I am! :)

How is Canada you ask? COLD!!!! It is snowing up here! Today it was -20 degrees C. We take the metro to the pool complex and it requires a little walking outside. Which means I wear all of the clothes that I brought with me to and from the pool. But despite the way the frigid air numbs your face it is rather refreshing to be out in the fresh air when you spend the rest of your time inside an indoor pool complex or a hotel.

Speaking of hotel rooms...Betsey is my roommate on this trip and we have embraced this winter wonderland. No....we do not go out and have snowball fights or make snow angels. Instead, we keep the curtins in our room wide open so we can watch the snow flakes floating down to cover all the buildings outside. And have a constant flow of Christmas tunes emitting from one of our computers, while we play Text Twist on the internet. Much warmer than the alternative plus we should conserve energey for our games. :)

Oh the life of a water polo player! I love my job.

NOTE: If you don't know what Text Twist is.....well it is a great way to pass time, procrastinate, or learn to spell, in my case. It is addicting! TRY IT! Just google it. It is a Yahoo game.

Our pet.

Meet Bangkok. He is our beta. We acquired him after attending the wedding of our goalie Jamie. Her center pieces were beautiful glass vases with orchids and river rocks. And fish! Swimmin around while we ate and celebrated the night away. When we were leaving we were able to take the fish as little momentos. Brenda got Bangkok into a plastic bag, put the bag in the little bowl you see, and put him in my trunk. Then forgot to tell me! So the next morning when i was packing the trunk to go home I found him. He was alive and probably hungry and really wanted to be out of that bag. But we got him home and he has been quite happy on our book shelf.
Until recently. He has moved from his very tiny living space into a much bigger vase. Just like the one that we first met him in. Ever since we put him in this upgrade of a tank he has been quite agitated. Betas by nature are fighters. When they see other male Betas they puff out their gills and if they were in the same tanks they would fight till the death. Bangkok has never puffed up for us.....until today. We put him in his new home last night and when I came to feed him this morning he made a menacing shark-like swirl around the bowl and then faced me.....and PUFF. Out came his gills and he undulated backwards, in what I am sure he thought was a very intimadating fashion. When I fed him he snapped so fiercely at the food pellets it almost launched him out of the bowl. Dang....what aggression. Where the heck did it come from???

Do Betas hate space? Maybe he liked his teeny-tiny original bowl? This is a whole new persona our fish has adopted. I am thinking I liked the old one better. Geez.

Halloween lasts 24 whole hours.

Just needed a little strech after the Dodgeball, 3000m swim, and some 6x5.
Aids in digestion. We ate breakfast at our favorite place in Long Beach. The Potholder Cafe. The waitresses are just as crazy as we are. They were Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Seuss. Some people had never heard of them. Where did those people grow up???

Costumes in Action!!!!!

I LOVE Halloween. Spectacular holiday. You can be or wear anything you want. And you shouldn't feel stupid about it because it is a requirement of the day. I think that more places of business should look positively upon the wearing of costumes.....it promotes the act of smiling and that produces endorphins.....which make you feel good. So you would work better right?

Good thing I work where I do. :) We started our day off playing dodge ball. In costume. I was a ballerina. Was I ever one in real life? Maybe for a split second back in the eighties.... before i was seduced by the chlorine fumes, and my ballet teachers told me i was never going to be flexible if i kept up that swimming stuff. Well fine then.....off to the pool I went, and out the window went my opportunities to wear a tu-tu. Until Today. I made it out of an abundance of pink tulle, elastic sequins, and a lil ribbon. Thanks to Ali G's sweet old school sewing machine, my adult tu-tu is spectacular and will be around for years to come. Nat got her fantastic costume right off the back of the guy working at the Halloween store for only $10.

I got pegged in the tu-tu during the game....the dirt adds a little character to my costume. :) It was a sight to behold. All of us running around in costume. Bets demonstrated excelent technigue when battling for the ball. Squishing it away from the opponent works perfectly!

100% participation!!!

I am very proud of our team and coaching staff!!! EVERYONE dressed up today for practice.

You be the judge.

Does this look more like a skeletal vertebrae and ribs or a spider web?

Punkins

Bought the pumpkins.
Carved em.

Ready for "Trick or Treat"er's!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Citius. Altius. Fortius.

The team spent the past week at the Colorado Olympic Training Center. A week of training, fitness tests, team building, and a few efforts to improve our program in the future by making teaching tools for younger athletes. Very productive!

DANCE.

My roommate Brenda just texted me this saying....she saw it somewhere and thought I would like it.

And I do! It is very true.

"Life isn't about how to survive the storm, but how to dance in the rain."

Get out there and DANCE!

Working Hard

It is back to the grind. Weights. Run. Core Work. Agility Exercises. Swimming. Drills. More Drills. More Swimming.

Week three and we are starting to become brain dead, sore in places we never knew had muscles, and plagued by extreme muscle fatigue.

We still have over 300 days till the Olympics.....that equals many, many more hours of practice. What gets you through this???

LAUGHTER!!!
Here is an example for ya......

The End.

A few reasons I know that my vacation is definitely over:

1. I had forgotten in my post major tournament haze what it felt like to be sore/out of shape. My leg muscles are now reminding me every time I try to walk up stairs, get out of the car, sit down on the couch, go to the bathroom.....that they do not like what I am doing to them. This is only day three! More advil please.

2. The clean clothes I made sure to have ready for the beginning of training are still sitting in piles on my floor. It will take way to much energy to put them in the closet.

3. The last time I bought milk was almost 2 months ago. I need to go to the store now that I will be staying in my apartment for longer than 36 hours at a time. Which was about the maximum time I spent in Long Beach between all my crazy adventures.

4. It is back to acting like the rest of the world that wakes up around the same time every morning to go to work. Alarm at 6:30? No likey.

Back to work for now....but I'm already dreaming up the next vacation spot to hit. :)

ORO!

We have won the Pan American Gold Medal!


Which means we have qualified for a spot in the 2008 Bejing Olympics! China here we come!!!

Our Venue.

Our venue here in Brazil is in the Maracana Sports Complex. Which has the large soccer stadium (from opening ceremonies), an arena (for volleyball) and our outdoor pool.

This was a picture of it the first day we got here. They had not finished decorating the pool deck and you can not see the huge stadium of seats that is behind me.

It seats about 2,700 people. In our game against Brazil last night 2000 people came to cheer on the home team.
They did not exactly look like this.....

(That was the opening ceremonies crowd)

But they were loud non the less......until we started beating the Brazilians. Then is was the quietest I have ever heard it at the pool. I love Brazilian sports fans. They are passionate and boisterous, waving flags and dancing around. Whether they are cheering or jeering. It doesn't matter. They make a super crowd. !!!!

Fun in the pool.

I was trying to recall the last time I got in the pool to just fool around. Like.... no zipper suit. No whistles. No drills. No polo balls or goals.

Yesterday morning, instead of taking the hour long drive to the venue for practice, we made up our own circuit of dry-land exercises and then got in the pool to stretch out our legs and get the feel for the water since we had a game later in the day. This pool is right out in front of our apartment building.

Here is us having fun.