Getting ready for the MOMS

I haven't seen my mom, Liv, since Thanksgiving. We usually have her over for Christmas but she and my brother David opted to visit my other brother, Robert, this year. That was OK, although I missed her for our usual Christmas visit, it's more important that she and David have a place to be Christmas day. Since Robert doesn't usually have guests or go out on Christmas, I guess he and Rowena would be happy too. So this weekend, mom and my mother-in-law, Ann, will be staying with us.

Yesterday, I had my second class of ECO 108 and I am convinced that Prof. Dawes is a terrific teacher. It must be pretty tough to speak without aid of amplification to a lecture hall of 340 students. It was a little tough on me though since I got home at 3:30 am from work and had to get up at 8:45 to get ready for class. Be assured, I could have used toothpicks to prop my eyes open, not that Prof. Dawes or the Economics he was teaching was at all the cause of my exhaustion; to the contrary, he's quite entertaining and I find the subject interesting. When I got home, I had myself a little breakfast/lunch (brunch?) and then took a nap to get ready for my swim meet at Sachem East. I had to bag the accordion practice, I really needed to sleep.

The swim meet at Sachem East was a little different inasmuch as it was a double-dual meet with Deer Park/No. Babylon. The situation is that DP/NB wasn't aware of the roster limitations on combined teams and subsequently had too many swimmers. Subsequently, the teams have to compete as two separate teams. Therefore, officially, this meet was contested as Deer Park vs Sachem East, and North Babylon vs Sachem East. The scoring is a little different due to the fact that you have 3 teams competing for the same number of points.

Typically, you have 2 teams with 3 entries from each team in a 6-lane pool. Scoring for relay events is 8-4-2-0 and 6-4-3-2-1-0 for individual events. In a double-dual, the scoring is similar to 4-lane pool scoring: 6-3-1-0 for relays and 4-3-1-0 for individual events. This is because there are only 2 entries from each team in a 6-lane pool. (Team A has lanes 1 & 4, Team B has lanes 2 & 5, Team C has lanes 3 & 6). The scores are tallied with each of the contests separately. Sachem East claimed the day and beat both DP and NB rather soundly: DP(27) vs SE(74) and NB(40) vs SE(62).

When the meet was over, I had to hustle off to work; I got there by 6:30. I had a night of platemaking so my back was killing me by the end of the shift. I got home at 4:30 (real time). It was 10° with a lot of ice in the walk, I had to spread a little salt so Mel wouldn't break her neck when she left a little later, make sure that the cabinets were open, to prevent the pipes from freezing, and then it was off to bed.

Today, I need to catch-up on some accordion practice and since I have my hours for the week and nothing critical is going on at work, and Monday shift being canceled, I am about to embark on a 4 day weekend.