October was a busy month!

There's only 3 days left in October. That flew by fast! I was so busy with traveling, entertaining a house guest, regular swim practices, swim meets, social activities... whew!

My month of October started with a flight home from Orange County, CA. I had been there for 5 days to attend the Masters Swimming Annual Convention. I was one of two delegates for NCMS. We voted on a couple of big, important things, including the new structure for awards at Masters Nationals. It will now be scored in 2 different divisions: Club Teams and Regional Teams. In addition to voting, I sat in a lot of long, boring House of Delegate and other Committee meetings, ate out at fattening and expensive restaurants ($16 for a chicken Caesar salad - are you kidding me?) and schmoozed with some big-whig Masters swimmers (like Karlyn Pipes-Nielsen) and some really cool Masters coaches (like Tom Boyd)

Immediately after getting home to Durham, I had a couple of hours to snuggle with Rob before he left for work, and then I had myself a good 2 hour nap before I packed my bags again and headed to Asheville for a quick 30 hour trip. I had a nice bed waiting for me upon arrival. I met a bunch of new people, walked up and down hills in uncomfortable shoes, enjoyed a free lunch, coached a little bit, swam a little bit, and then drove back home. Yes, as you can tell, this was a job interview. I thought it went pretty well. I was extremely tired on the drive home, as you can imagine. I had to stop off somewhere just east of Morganton to take a nap. I got home around midnight, slept 5 hours, then got up to coach my normal Wednesday practice.

After practice, another nap, still trying to catch up on sleep deprivation caused from all the traveling and stress and poor eating habits while being out of town. Nap was cut short, as I had to get the house clean for my Mom's visit. She flew in around 10pm that night (October 3), and when I left to pick her up at the airport, I wasn't satisfied with the level of cleanliness my house radiated, but oh well, what could I do?

My Mom visited for a week. It was very nice to see her. My birthday (Oct 6) fell in the middle of her visit. I turned 29. My Mom took me to the mall so that I could pick out a cute outfit to wear to my birthday dinner. And the birthday dinner was great! We met at Tyler's Taproom in Durham, and luckily it wasn't crowded at all, thanks to the World Beer Festival being held that same night, so we had a huge table for all of us to enjoy dinner, beers, conversation, and a really yummy homemade cheesecake (made by Heidi's husband, the one and only, Master Chef Jeff!) There were 23 people at my birthday dinner - making it my largest attended b-day party ever!

After my mom left (Oct 10), I figured life would get back to normal. It did, but I was living in great expectation for the big trip to Bermuda, so I didn't get much done. We shopped and packed for the trip on the 17th, dropped off Gunnie and Taylor at the dog sitter's house, and went to bed, excited like a 5 year old on Christmas Eve, hoping to awake the next day to see a shiny new bike under the tree with a tag on it that says "From Santa".

Morning came soon enough, and after wiping the sleep out of our eyes, Rob and I met up with the 2 coolest people on Earth: Gretchen and Jeb (they fall right up there with the coolness factor of Santa, though). They are the ones responsible for us being able to go to Bermuda. There's no way we could've afforded the tickets and hotel on our own. They were so nice, they used their frequent flier miles to get us cheap tickets to Bermuda, and they said we could stay in their room for free. So went to Bermuda, swam an open water race, snorkeled a little bit, rode our bikes from Hamilton to the west end of the island, ate a really scrumptious but way overpriced filet mignon and lobster dinner, and in general, had a lot of fun. I've got a ton of pics, but haven't uploaded them all yet. When I do, I'll post up a slideshow.

We got home on the 22nd. It was not a good flight home - I almost had to use my barf bag on the plane - I'll just leave my description at that! 5 days after getting home from Bermuda, whoop-whoop, you guessed it, another big deal...Swim meet! At least this was a local event. We kicked some butt at the Hillsborough meet. Official results haven't been submitted yet, as they were having some technical difficulties with meet manager. But with us having 18 people swimming for DAMA, I have a good feeling we did pretty good in the team points standings.

I'm now gearing up for a big November - which won't have much traveling, if any at all, but my newest endeavor will be the addition of the new Tuesday and Thursday night practices to our schedule. That means I'll write 4 more workouts every week, be on deck coaching an extra 2.5 hours, added to my "normal" 24 hour work week. The extra hours will be nice on my paycheck, but in the beginning, I'm sure throughout the whole month of November, I'll feel strange going to the pool on Tuesday/Thursday nights.

There's always something new going on for everyone, I guess. But I do feel like October was a really busy month for me! It's no wonder that I haven't blogged in a little more than a month!

Sometimes I wish I could be a dog for a day - one of my dogs... sleep most of the day on a variety of cozy, cuddler beds strewn about the house, perk up at the sound of the back door opening, run around and chase squirrels in the back yard, bark at the kids coming home from school across the street, back inside for another nap, eat, drink, nap again...ah, that would be a nice day!

Perhaps I'm sleep deprived still from all the excitement I had during October? Hmm, maybe a good night's sleep will help with that...

off to bed now, thanks for reading!