Canal skating & coach conference

My top three highlights from the week are: 

1. I went ice skating on the canal twice! 
2. I reached an ambitious personal goal by playing the piano for a cumulative 30 hours in the month of January.
3. Jeff and I went to the Nike Track and Field Coaching Conference in Portland on Friday and Saturday.

Family highlights from the week:

• Jay swam another PR in the 500 yard freestyle on Thursday. His time is down to 6:28! Jay's buddy Noah outkicked him at the end and beat him by half a second to claim the school record, and I love their friendly rivalry.
• Rose and I went to her parent teacher conferences together at the middle school and listened to her teachers gush about how amazing Rose is and how much they love having her bright mind and kind heart in their classes.
• Amber read a lot this week and is in the middle of enjoying the Percy Jackson series for the first time.
• Jeff weathered the exhausting storm of getting home at 11:30pm from the swim meet on Thursday night and leaving at 7:30am for the overnight coaching conference on Friday morning. That turnaround included writing and printing materials for the high school track coaches' meeting, picking up the school district van that we drove to the conference, and holding the high school track coaches' meeting at a restaurant in Portland before the conference began. 

Journal excerpts to fill in the gaps:

Monday, January 27th: I went ice skating on the canal today! It was my first canal skate of the season. Jeff suggested that I check the ice in the morning before the temperature got above freezing. So after dropping Amber off at school and picking up a Walmart grocery order, I went on a short run and then climbed down into the canal over by our old house across the street, to test the ice. It was surprisingly thick and solid, even though it has been getting into the high 30s/low 40s every afternoon for the past week. It has been in the teens all night and early morning though, so I guess that was enough to get a good layer of ice. I climbed out and walked back to our house, grabbed my skates and a folding chair, then walked back across the street to ice skate! It was so fun!! I ended up staying in the shade because when I skated on the sunny ice, several loud cracks boomed beneath my skates. The shady ice was fine though, and so smooth! I felt so happy while I ice skated and my good mood lasted for hours afterwards. I love ice skating!

At 6pm after school pickup and all of the afternoon driving to swim, piano lessons, and the library, Jay asked for a haircut since he's dressing up as twins with his friends for school tomorrow and they all got buzz cuts to match. I am so tired now! 

I did so much laundry today. 2 loads for Rose and 1 huge load for Jay, plus one load of whites. Two of those loads had to be dried twice because they had thick big items in them. When Jay got home tonight, he saw his basket of laundry sitting in the laundry room and dumped it in the washer, poured liquid detergent all over it, and started the wash cycle. I came out and saw too late that Jay didn't know I had already washed it and laboriously dried it twice! Blahhhhh, nothing like a repeat load of laundry to make my work feel futile! 

Tuesday, January 28th: This morning I put on my running clothes with plans to run after taking Amber to school and getting our piano tuned. The piano tuner came and glued the black key back to the piano. YAY! He also did our "complimentary first tuning" on our new piano. It sounds even better now! Anyways, once the piano tuner left, I was too hungry to run right away, so I ate second breakfast. My energy was waning and it was after 10am, so I decided to change out of my running clothes and into ice skating clothes and ice skate instead of running. I walked across the street carrying my folding chair and bag of ice skates, climbed down into the canal, and skated for an hour! It was so fun! I smiled the minute I glided across the ice for the first time. 

What is it about ice skating?? It makes me so happy! It wasn't exactly an aerobic workout, but it was still motion that used my leg muscles. I enjoyed my time out in the cold fresh air, gliding back and forth on the shadiest patch of canal ice. I got pretty ok at skating backwards too, although there were several tumbleweeds frozen into the ice that were harder to avoid while I was going backwards. I ran into one backwards twice, and nearly fell! It was hilarious. Tumbleweed half sunken and frozen into the ice! I laughed a out loud several times all by myself on the ice. My ice skates are so dull, I don't have much grip on the ice. I'm in the process of researching how to sharpen them. 

After my ice skating session, I ate lunch and played piano. I read for a bit and then it was time to go to Rose's parent teacher conference. I timed that so once the conference was over, I was waiting for Amber when she got out of school. After half an hour at home, I drove the swim kids from the barn to the pool.  I made penne with a very good thick meat mushroom spaghetti sauce for dinner tonight. I love spaghetti. Amber had plain noodles with cheddar cheese. Of course. 

Wednesday, January 29th: How is it already the end of January? Time is weird. Yesterday I finally weaned myself off of decongestants after 11 days, so right now I've gone 36 hours without taking a decongestant. I totally crashed this afternoon and slept for almost 2 hours! I have had real Sudafed in my blood during daytime hours for over a week, and I never took a single nap during this whole head cold, even though I didn't sleep well at night. That all changed today once the pseudoephedrine amphetamines were out of my system! And I am still so tired. Whew. 

This morning I ran 30 minutes on the treadmill before 7am. It was good to get a little aerobic activity in before I ran out of energy. I didn't ice skate today because I was too tired. But I did play the piano for 90 minutes! I didn't exactly want to play quite that long today, but we will be gone for the last 2 days of the month at the coaching conference, so I had to do extra to meet my goal, haha. I am so close to my goal of playing piano for 30 hours during January! Wahoo! 62 minutes to go! 

Leftovers for dinner. Relief Society presidency meeting during youth activities tonight. 

Thursday, January 30th: This morning after school drop-off, my friend Liz came over to lift with me. my other two workout friends l couldn't make it today, but Liz and I had fun chatting and pumping iron. We talked for a long time after we finished lifting! 

After I showered and ate, I played piano until I reached my goal of playing 30 hours in one month! I did it! Wahoo! It felt good to achieve that goal. My back and shoulders were feeling pretty tired from lifting, so I was relieved to be done sitting at the piano when I finished my last 62 minutes of playing. 

Jeff and Jay are at a swim meet in Moses Lake tonight, so they won't be home till late. Rose, Amber, and I had a pleasant dinner of leftover spaghetti for me, freezer chicken nuggets for Rose, and a freezer hamburger for Amber. It was a very tame day.

Saturday, February 1st: Jeff and I went to the Nike Track Coach Conference in Portland this weekend. We left yesterday morning and got back home to our house tonight at 7:45pm. It was an intense 37 hours. I am so tired! We carpooled in a school district van with four other coaches. It was a 3 hour drive to the hotel where the conference was being held, but we drove another 40 minutes through Portland to Beaverton to eat lunch and go to the Nike employee store. All attendees of the coaching conference got 40% off at the Nike Employee Store. We had to show our IDs at the door to gain access to the exclusive store. Four of us coaches ended up getting matching shoes with red flames on them. The conference itself was good. Some parts excellent (meeting an Olympian and listening to the elite athlete panel), some meh (I got stuck in way more technical field event lectures than I expected). It was a fire hydrant gush of information that my brain stopped being able to process around 2pm today, haha. I am also on introvert overload from all the people-ing!

The shady section of ice on the canal was plenty large enough for skating. I brought a folding chair into the canal because it is much easier to put on ice skates while sitting in a chair than while sitting on either the sharp rocks or the freezing ice.

Skating around the tumbleweeds.

Ice skating is such a rush! I felt immediately HAPPY when I glided onto the ice. I'm not very good at ice skating, but it is so much fun!

I had a feline visitor while I skated on Monday.

The middle C# black key on our new piano randomly came off last weekend? Thankfully the piano tuner was already scheduled to come this week, so we only had to deal with the wobbly rattling key for a few days before he came and glued it back on.

Canal ice skating, day 2. 

I skated 3.5 miles in an hour on Tuesday morning.

This was the only picture I took at the Nike Employee Store: Coach Winger loved the long puffy coats. It was hilarious and awesome.

The elite athlete panel included two time Olympian distance runner Karissa Schwiezer, Canadian Olympian distance runner Justyn Knight, and elite middle distance runner Christina Aragon. The panel moderator was hilarious and we listened to their conversation till after 10pm on Friday night.

I need to start a list of Olympians that I've met! Haha. I feel a little bad that I didn't actually get to talk to these awesome runners--the picture was a tad rushed, but Jeff got to talk to Justyn Knight:

Justyn Knight's cousin used to coach at Sunnyside High School with Jeff, so of course they had to talk. Justyn was so cool and gave Jeff a big hug when Jeff mentioned working with his cousin. This evening was totally worth the late night introvert overload.

I went on a refreshing damp 5 mile run along the bike path near the hotel on Saturday morning. It poured rain for most of the day and night on Friday, but stopped raining in time for my run at 7am on Saturday morning. It felt so good to have some quiet alone time on my run in between two very social days. Also, it was much lighter outside than this picture makes it look.

We went to Chick-fil-a for lunch on Saturday between coaching classes. We also picked up some Voodoo Donuts--our Portland tradition.

We actually went to a Voodoo Donut across the border in Vancouver, WA instead of making the awful drive to the original downtown Portland location. The Vancouver place was only 9 minutes from our hotel and the donuts tasted exactly the same. We brought this box home to our kids. That maple bacon bar was my dinner on Saturday night. It was SO GOOD for 3/4 of the donut, but then the intense sugar and fat caught up to me and I could barely finish the last few bites, haha. When we got home I had the last little bowl of leftover spaghetti to give my stomach something healthier to focus on.

While we were driving home, Jeff and I agreed to make the kids wait till Sunday to eat donuts, but when we got home at 8pm, their enthusiasm and pleading changed our minds.