Swimming:
(From SD)After the bad news about my hip, I have been swimming to try to stop the steady weight gain. The good thing about admitting that I am so badly out of condition that I need to start from the very beginning is that it doesn't feel quite so embarassed that it just about killed me to swim a mile last week, so I can take pleasure in the fact that this week, while not fast, I could complete the mile without going into lactic shock. The other is that I remember how much I love swimming. Its been a long time since I actually tried to do swim training, and despite how slow I am, it just feels fun. I have a hard time running on a treadmill or to riding a stationary bike without getting bored, but swimming lap after lap doesn't get boring to me for some reason. Its exhilarating. Thinking back, I can't remember why I gave up swimming as a workout.
Band
JP gave a great performance at the mid-state. I was hoping that someone else would blog about this. But I guess not. If we ever get our Vegas movie studio going, maybe we can post some video footage. The initial performance had to be rescheduled because we were hit with a snow storm that closed down the region. So instead of being at Middle Tennessee State University as usual, it had to be moved to a nearby high school. The advantage of this was since the auditorium wasn't big enough to hold as many people, they actually gave out tickets for each of the different band performances. This really helped because normally its kind of hard to get a good seat for the gold band performance, but with the tickets we had a good spot. The performance really impressive. They played about four pieces which were modern arrangements of songs including
"All Creatures of Our God and King" and four traditional railroad songs. Its amazing the quality of music
that these kids can produce.
Snow
As noted above, we have been blitzed with snow this month. More than we have ever seen while living in Tennessee. We even called off church because of the snow and the kids are going to have to make up a snow day now because they have had 6 snow days so far this year. The sad thing is that we discovered that there was a not so slow leak in one of our sledding tubes, so we were unprepared to take as full advantage of the sledding possibilities as we would have liked. (It turns out that skim boards make great sleds except you can't steer them at all and they catch edges too easily otherwise.) It would be cool to post some of the pictures (what do you think AM?)
Reunion
Today in church there was a family sitting at the back of the chapel. I thought that they were the parents of one of the families in our ward. After sacrament meeting, the woman came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm (her name) but my married name is (name). Aren't you ..." When she said her maiden name, I immediately recognized it as one of my classmate from AF High School, but I admit it took several mental adjustments to match her current face with how I remembered her from 20 years ago. Not that the years had been unkind, but she just looked like a middle aged women which is not how she looked when last I saw her. Anyway, we got to talk briefly. She has four kids, one graduating from high school this year, and they live in Memphis. They just were passing through and by random chance happened to pick our ward to come to sacrament meeting to.
The Blindside
Speaking of Memphis. AM and I went to see the movie the Blindside based (more or less) on the true story of Michael Ohr, a kid who was befriended by a wealthy Memphis family and was drafted as a left outside lineman by the Baltimore Ravens last year. I found it really quite moving as it touched close to home. (Perhaps you have to live here to connect to having all the SEC coaches at the high school practice buttering up the high school coach or to know why someone living in Memphis would have such strong loyalty to Ole Miss and absolutely hate Tennessee.) After talking with our friends in Memphis, it turns out their kids go to the actual private Christian school that the family attended, although the movie changed the name.
