Notes For Me ( and You)

With the swimming season wrapping up tonight with the end of season banquet, we are offically in mid-summer. Mid, that is as in between swimming and football. This is our best slot for a vacation and we will be heading off for a few days shortly.

Only problem with vacation this time of year is that the garden is just coming into full flow. This means that our designated water person will be amply rewarded for coming by every other day.

So far the report on the garden would be bush beans A, pole beans B-(growing well, but the pods become too seedy too quickly). Tomatoes – still to early to tell, same with cucumbers and squash.

It has been a dry July – after all the rain before – but the past few days have once again brought on the afternoon storms to freshen up the rapidly browning grass.

This is the peak of the outdoor swim season, with various meets almost every day for a few days. Here in Montgomery County we are fortunate to have what is believed to be the most competitive, most heavily supported, summer swim season probably anywhere. Each neighborhood pool fields a team with boys and girls from 6 or 7 years old up to 18 year old, many of whom have been of at college for a year. The points scored by the 7 year old count just as much as the 18 year old! The really cool thing about the culture in which these swimmers grow up is that you are never to good to swim for your local pool.

This weekend Jake was (un)fortunate to be going head to head – actually head to chest would be more accurate, since this kid, Jack Conger, is at least 6 foot tall at 14 years old – with the USA national record holder ( 13-14) in 200 meters back. Who held the record before – a certain Michael Phelps! Of course Jake lost – big time – but if this youth goes on to fulfill his potential, we may be watching him on the TV soon.

Great weather for all this swimming – not too hot, and the cycle of constant storms we were in for a few weeks has stopped. I actually have had to water the garden now.

I was very fortunate in many ways yesterday. I had a relaxing day and received some very nice and useful presents. We also were able to have Nancy’s mom and dad over for dinner. I missed Peter who is away at work camp, though he did call – which was very wierd, and kind of sad, in “flash-forward” kind of way.

This weekend was also the start of summer swim season. All of the news on the swim team is available on the team web site , which I run. This was the first Saturday morning meet that I can remember that was interrupted by thunderstorms, a problem that is usually associated with the Wednesday evening “B” meets.

Alex is picking more hours as a delivery driver for Pizza Palace. Peter, as I mentioned is away at work camp with the youth group from St James Episcopal Church. Jake starts working today as a youth assistant at our church’s bible camp.  So no one is really sitting around !

Finally the weather is supposed to dry up this week, at least for the first few days. The garden is growing well, including some weeds that are in the middle of the veg beds – I have not been able to get to them without clomping in the mud and squeezing the clay soil into bricks.

The Washington Post has a nice article on the swimming scene in the Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia area. Jake is up against some tough competition.

Warmer weather returns this weekend so I hope to get outside and take care of some overdue car maintenance including an oil change on the truck and taking a look at a slow leak on one of the van’s tires.

I am also going to try to decide whether to expand the vegetable garden space this year, possibly to grow some garlic and onions. However I may wait one more year with what I have got, especially as we will be gone for almost three weeks mid summer.

Here is a link to a farming blog which provides a frequently updated look at a small Vermont farm. I have been following along with them and their cheese making for a while now, and actually ordered some cheese making supplies – but so far have not actually done anything !

The first really cold air of the winter has finally arrived, along with a dusting of powdery snow. Tonight we will be in the single digits ( -13 deg C) and probably no higher than the teens for a high tomorrow (-8 C).

Good thing this weekend is an indoor sports marathon – swimming, soccer, and lacrosse. What is even better is that this is a four day weekend, with the Martin Luther King holiday on Monday followed by a day of for many for the Inauguration of President Obama.

Chilly AND windy today!

The past 48 hours as recorded on my "Misterhouse" computer

The blue bars in the chart indicate the calculated wind chill. As you can see it was cold  – but no precipitation. Moisture is forcast to move in by Wednesday but by then the wind will have turned southerly and the temperature will be climbing – so no white Christmas this year.

I had to feel sorry for Jake, heading out to the pool for swim practice tonight – and worse heading from the “bubble” to the car to come home, wet hair and all.

On a brighter note, I am now on leave for the rest of the year, off work until January 5th.

If you have not been involved in swimming, the prospect of spending three afternoons and one evening at an indoor pool while your child swims for a total of maybe 10 minutes might seem at best painfull. For me, while it may not be my first choice, it is really kind of a cool way to spend time.  This past weekend Jake was swimming at the Sports Fair meet, held at the very nice pool at George Mason University in Virginia. This was a pretty big event with teams from as far away as Princeton, NJ.  He had a great time, lowering many times and making the finals ( top 16) in the 200 back. While he shows no signs of being the next Phelps, he is doing really well and the level of fitness he gets from swimming makes him an outstanding player in every other sport he plays.

At Jake’s level, these events are all about the time – there is very little head to head competition. Sure there may be one other kid in your club that you want to beat, but for the most part it is a competition against the clock – and against yourself. That makes it different from most other sports. Track and field may be similar, but at least there you can see how you are doing. In the pool you have very limited awareness of how you are doing until you finish and see the scoreboard.

Jake has the right internal motivation for this sport and it was so good to see him get rewarded for his efforts this weekend by being part of the evening finals of an important event. Sure he didn’t “win”  – that is he did not come in first – but he finished the weekend feeling rewarded and I left happy with his smile. A good weekend all round!

Despite being members of our neighborhood pool for over ten years, I never actually swam! Sure when the kids were little I stood in the shallow end and threw them around a bit – but you never saw me between the lane ropes.

But this year I have actually been trying to swim a little each week – it is a little because that is all that I can manage at this point. I do need to exercise and my knees ain’t so great for jogging and going no where on a gym eliptical is rather boring. So it is time to try some swimming. We will see how long THIS lasts.