A holiday recap

I wrote earlier about the great week in Montpellier with Dino and BJ, after that I spent most of July in Sweden with the main focus being swimming. The group I help out with was in the final stages of preparing for Swedish Nationals and the Olympics (for 4 of the guys). All in all everyone swam well in most of their events so it was a good end to a long season. The boys who went to the Olympics also swam well, although I think we were all taken by surprise by how fast everyone else swam. PBs and Swedish records, even times under the WR before the Olympics were often not good enough for medals. The swim club has been in the Swedish news this week for all the wrong reasons - due to economic troubles they've made redundant 2 coaches. The worst of it was that Johan who has been coaching Therese Alshammar for the past 4 years under an agreement with the club was told a month before the Olympics - not the best psychological help a month before the Games. And the other coach has been at the club for something like 20 years and was told around the time of Nationals, just before his holidays... so it is all a bit messy there. But I just help out on my own terms so if it all goes to chaos then I'll step away and find something else.

After Nationals, at the end of July, I headed off to London to catch up with friends and go to Larry and Martyn's 30th anniversary party which was a great night, followed by a very early morning trek out to Heathrow to catch a flight to DC to visit Dad and spend a week on the beach in Mexico... see the pic from last post!

I'm back in the swing of things at school, as well as the swimming coaching (slowly building up for next season), and I'm also doing some online study - a subject as part of a Masters from Melbourne uni as well as a subject from a uni in Sweden. Both are to do with the use of IT in education, so this means Sundays on the laptop doing work... which is what I'm supposed to be doing now. Instead I'm sitting in Paolo's cafe writing this!

I will now try to do a little bit of work...

thinking slowly,
rich.

the brats are back...

Yep, the darlings of West Beverly High are back in school. Well only the newbies today... ahhh, so fresh faced and nervous. Slowly getting myself into gear for the new year, think I have the first lesson planned?!
'spose a trip summary might be due... but not tonight - have spend the last hour or so reading online posts, blogs and wiki entries for an online course I'm doing... teachers being nerdy - love it!

And all the while I try to keep this image in mind...

holidays...

ahhh...

Margaritas... beach... Isla Mujeres... (check a map!) life is really tough... so tough the internet connection is being driven by an iguana on a treadmill, that's one letter per minute - so appreciate this sentence!

chilled,

rich.

(A pensioned iguana, after 50MB of good service)