mattie g

1 minute ago, Terpeast said:

Have you seen a recent sst map? and the forecasts?

Orange and red everywhere, except for a few small blue spots. Frankly, it tells me everything I need to know about this issue. 

Lots and lots of underwater volcanoes?

Ended up with a few sprinkles (literally) after bedtime. Not worried, as we'll get ours this week.

12 hours ago, hstorm said:

Congrats to your daughter!  We were also shorthanded this weekend and it showed in the final score.  Lots of familes away for the week (or for the weekend) with school just getting out.  My son and daughter did great, so very happy about that

Rough going tonight at our home B Meet.  Had to start 20 minutes late due to thunder and meet was called around 7:45 when another storm blew through.  We made it through free and back with only ~1:15 of actual swim time between pool closures.  Pretty efficient use of the little time that we did have.  I always feel bad for the non-A Meet swimmers when a B Meet gets called off, but at least getting through free/back gave most everyone the chance to race.

Congrats on your kids doing well!

It's always rough when lots of kids are missing. It's understandable, but never fun, especially for the coaches when they're putting their lineups together. My guess is that your team is bigger than ours, and we feel the pain big time when we miss kids, but no matter what it's always a blow to go into meets knowing you don't have your full team available to you. The positive to that is that it gives other kids a chance to swim in A Meets!

Wow...free and back in only 1:15? That's flying! And agreed on the non-A Meet kids getting their chances to swim!

We hosted last night and somehow got through the whole meet without a delay! Storms stayed to our west and south the whole time, but even so we still ended at about 9:00. It was a fun meet though, especially because we swam against our closest neighbors whose kids generally go to the same schools as ours, so we all know each other. It was also my 5-year-old daughter's first race! Great start (if I do say so my biased self) and got all the way across with no issues!

The US Men looked really good in both the Mexico and Canada matches and were deserved Nations League winners. Not going to dissect the matches, but I was really pleased with what I saw!

As for Berhalter, the discourse is ridiculous. I have absolutely no issues with his reappointment nor, does it seem, do the players. We have three years until the World Cup, and if things don't go well through Copa America, then we can make a change leading into 2026.

On 6/16/2023 at 11:16 AM, hstorm said:

Looks like a beautiful day tomorrow for the first A Meet.  Our last evening practice was yesterday.  No practice today because of our annual end-of-school party at the pool.  Always nice to switch to the morning routine.

Only downside tomorrow is that we are away and have a 45-minute drive to the other pool.  We dodged any long trips last year but are paying the price this year -- our other away meet is also a 45-minute drive.  Early mornings . . .

Turned out a little chillier (and breezier) than ideal because our hosts' pool was mostly in the shade during the meet, but our kids were seated in the sun, so they looked comfortable enough!

We had lots of good swims, including personal bests and a team record! And I have to brag on my older girl who won her first A Meet heat ever with her own 50 Free personal best! I have to say that I felt bad for the other team reps because they were missing more swimmers than they expected, which led to a pretty lopsided, unfortunate final score. Plenty of closer meets to come, though.

19 hours ago, Terpeast said:

really like the enso orientation here, but global ssts are frighteningly warm all over

Lots and LOTS of underwater volcanoes!

38 minutes ago, Paleocene said:

https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=nrnmidat-02-24-1

You can see it in a big arc reaching from MN through the midwest to PA... headed our way

HRRR doesn't seem super enthused about our latest weather-hype phenomenon. Maybe some smoky haze, but nothing like what it was last week.

On 6/12/2023 at 9:23 PM, MN Transplant said:

Special for @mattie g

 

https://wtop.com/local/2023/06/drought-monitoring-triggered-on-potomac-river-drinking-water-backups-could-be-tapped/

I appreciate the heads up!

I think we'll be fine though.

1 hour ago, vastateofmind said:

You highlight two very critical must-have volunteers for efficient meets -- a knowledgeable/organized referee (newbies and experienced alike) who can keep the proceedings moving along at a steady pace, and a kickass clerk-of-course (preferably with runners/assistants!) who's not afraid to accost the coaches to get their swimmers to the staging area ON TIME, or chase down the swimmers themselves.

As a former S&T judge, for about 15 years, I was always fortunate to work with awesome refs, starters and CoCs at our pool. Always encountered at least one "peacock referee" during a given season at an opponent's pool, but that's par for course. I've mentioned it before, but one of my favorite teams to compete with was @H2O's neighborhood pool, with whom we hold B meets each summer...his pool has some of the easiest and friendliest officials and families I've encountered in all of those NVSL years, with experienced officials, a comfy/spacious pool and surrounding grounds, and ALWAYS a great concession stand.   

For sure. If there's one thing I've become more appreciative of, it's how the referee sets the tone for how the meet will run and how the clerk of course keeps sh*t moving. First B Meet makes sense for a new ref to work, but I think he was a little overwhelmed. Hopefully he comes along and gets more comfortable as the season progresses.

We're lucky to have a fantastic CoC who worked last night (at home meets, she's a monster!), but with the chaos on the deck and the other team's coaches/reps not really doing anything about it, there was only so much they could do. I honestly have no idea why they even had marshals since there was barely a thing they could do to keep the deck clear.

That's high praise for H2O's pool! I hope other teams feel the same about ours!

2 hours ago, H2O said:

One, just ONE clap of thunder held us up for 30 min.  No rain.  We didn't finish until 9:15ish.  And thank god the other team was small.  Otherwise i think I'd still be at the pool timing.  My voice is so shot.  But we had 3 food trucks in the parking lot and man did they do business during the delay.  

Fun really begins Saturday with the first A meet.

2 hours ago, hstorm said:

Same here.  9:05pm finish (and then a 15 minute drive home . . . which is par for the course; we are a good distance from any other pool).  Long evening for those of us who needed to stay until the end.

At least it's the last week of school!

Team size is all relative, but last night's other team is bigger than ours, though probably on the smaller size of the NVSL spectrum in general. And even with that, after the 30-minute thunder delay, we didn't get done until about 9:35 .

It was a bit of a sh*tshow, to be honest. Their swim club's footprint is tiny, so it's absolute chaos on the deck; they also had a first-time referee who, while a very nice guy, didn't do a great job of setting the tone for moving things along. Also, from what I could tell, there were a number of times when kids from the other team were supposed to be there to start, but they weren't there so the officials waited for the kids to be found.

Luckily, they're five minutes away, so it wasn't a long drive home, but still lots and lots of tired faces today!

I can't wait to get through this last week of afternoon practices and to the first A Meet and morning practices after!

Our meet finished so f'ing late last night. Kids at the bus stop were miserable this morning

We host a B Meet this coming Monday, and while we need the rain I really hope it holds off. Kids love those meets, as does the team because B Meet concessions make a HUGE difference for us!

Some very light rain with a distant rumble of thunder or two that delayed our swim meet last night. And damn...it was chilly by the time it finished (at like 9:40 pm)!

3 hours ago, H2O said:

@vastateofmind @mattie g

We had our TTs on Saturday and it went really well.  Only swam our team as we have like 150+ swimmers.  Its stupid huge.  I think we had over 20 heats of free alone.  But somehow we got that done in like 45 min and only took 3 hours to get completely done.  We even had new S&Ts doing it with plenty of DQs so not like it went smooth.  

But its a crammed two months.  B meets already starting tonight and then the grind sets in.  We will have the usual pep rallies and team events and themes for each A meet.  Getting enough people to volunteer can still be a chore.  I had to pull people from the crowd for second shift timers cause people just don't sign up to help.  Well if I gotta stand and time your kid then you can help stand and time your kid and mine.  But some people are fun to be around and as long as you make it fun for others you can slog thru the long meets and hot days.  

 

And also destroy a diet with all the food you need to cram in during meets to live.  Donuts, burgers, pizza.  RIP my diabeetus, cholesterol and clothes.  

Our team has 95 kids this year*, and that includes the littles, so we're able to cruise through things like time trials and B Meets against teams that are pretty close to our size (we have two teams in our B Meet group that are substantially bigger than we are). And we also only swam ourselves in time trials (never even considered having another team involved!). Same as you, we had two new S&Ts helping out, but our timers time for the whole meet since we don't have enough families to be able to split the shifts. The best thing was that the kids danced on the lower and upper decks after we were done. Now...THAT made it feel like summer swim!

Most of our folks are pretty cool, but as with any large group of people we have our pains in the azz. I just try to ignore them.

* 95 kids is five more swimmers than last year, which was almost ten more than the year before that. if there's one thing I'm really trying to contribute to this team is to get more kids and more families involved!

50 minutes ago, vastateofmind said:

GOOD on you...volunteers are SO hard to come by. My wife and I served in almost all the NVSL volunteer lead positions...with hers culminating in swim rep for two season. (UGH!)

Personally, as much a time-suck year-round club swimming could be, it was all worth it for the more "casual" summer swim season, where I could bounce back and forth between S&T judging (best seat in the house!) and serving as announcer (or more accurately, DJ Mikey Mike, when it came to playing the all-important MUSIC in between the official stuff   ).

NVSL can be a huge PITA sometimes...but it's offered even more rewarding perks off and on through the years, especially for developing camaraderie and friendships in your own neighborhood. In a teeny, tiny, itty-bitty way....I'm just a bit jealous of you and @H2O that you're still in the summer swim game.   

I think having a smaller team can help in many ways in getting folks involved. We all know each other well and there’s a little bit of light peer pressure without anyone overtly putting the pressure on. What’s interesting is that I was just looking at the NVSL officials list and our team has more officials than many of the much bigger teams, which really surprised me!

Sounds like you had an amazing experience, though I totally get your feeing of it also being a drag on your summer! I can’t agree enough that it builds relationships and a true neighborhood bond that would be hard to recreate in other ways. My wife and I have developed friendships with other families that likely would never had happened had it not been for summer swim, and being the social creatures we are we’re profoundly thankful for it!

16 hours ago, hstorm said:

Wow … you are much faster than us. We didn’t wrap up until ~11:30 (though also didn’t start until 9). Great to be back in the swing of things.

You can probably credit that quick wrap-up to two things: 1) A relatively small team with not all kids able to make it and 2) A clerk of course who takes no prisoners! We started at 8, so in all it was pretty quick.

It helps that our primary clerk of course is also the pool ops lead and wanted to make sure we were done well in advance of the pool’s 11am opening time!

It really was great to have finally had the kids in the water in the morning. Good luck to your team this year!

10 hours ago, hstorm said:

Beautiful morning for time trials. Good luck to all the swim dads (and moms)!

Turned out to be an amazing morning. A little chilly to start, but by the time we finished (about 9:45) it was really nice.

Mornings at the pool make it really feel like summer!

1 hour ago, Kmlwx said:

69 on the dot in Colesville! For June 9th that is amazing. 

I think this is being lost with all the smoke discussion. The temperatures have been outrageous for quite some time now. To have lows consistently in the 40s and 50s through much of May and the first week of June is amazing. Since the beginning of May, Dulles has had only three nights with lows of 60 or above.

17 hours ago, vastateofmind said:

It's SO hard to believe that time trials are ALREADY here...and another season is ready to start! You and @mattie g have my heartfelt sympathies...   

I honestly love it. It's a pain in the ass and kills my ability to do much else in the summer, but I really wouldn't have it any other way. I went so far as to get S&T recertified last weekend and will be doing new Starter training this Sunday. I figure I have to keep myself involved after I retire from the Team Rep gig!

12 minutes ago, mappy said:

The purpleair site is lovely, and that little box that opens you can actually download it as a csv file and see each reading and time in a table format. I can go back to the 6/5 when levels were in the teens/20s and all the way to today. #datanerd 

My team does data analytics for a government client. Talk about nerding out and going down serious data rabbit holes on this stuff...

6 minutes ago, SnowenOutThere said:

Don't know about your pool but all of the 10 plus coaches in training (high school kids) are in the water for the whole practice they coach making sure the kids don't drown and yes the air quality was bad enough to be harmful for developing kids which I'm pretty sure still includes teens. I've only been going outside with a mask on since yesterday and before that I've gotten nasty headaches and congestion. I've also been tired but that may or may not be related to the smoke. Either way the right decision was definitely to cancel it. 

We have a few teenagers who help our younger swimmers, but they're mostly walking on the bottom while helping the little ones with their strokes and the like, i.e., not doing any strenuous activity. That young group is a lot of 5s and 6s who are beyond a learn-to-swim program but who still need to build stamina to get across the pool regularly. Our other 8&U kids are swimming without coaches in the pool. Our Juniors program starts the week after school is out...those are the ones who need a crew of teenage coaches there at all times to keep them safe. Sounds  similar to the kids your 10-plus coaches (really good number of coaches, by the way!) are working with.

Good on you for wearing a mask! I think there are a lot of folks who won't because they'd rather show that a little haze doesn't bother them. That may seem at odds with how I've been talking about this, but there does come a point where it's just not a good idea to be bullheaded about it and to accept that there are health hazards associated with this awful AQI.

31 minutes ago, PrinceFrederickWx said:

I had a brief rain shower of 0.02".

Quick question: does precipitation help the air quality situation in any way, or is there no effect?

I would imagine it helps in the immediate term, but the prevailing winds could eventually bring in smoke from other areas.

2 hours ago, SnowenOutThere said:

Pool closed yesterday for afternoon practice thank god, didn't want to have to coach in that. You need to remember when making your decision that by making it "optional" it fill forces the coaches and kids that coach to show up. My morning outdoor actual swim practice didn't cancel today but elected to not go. 

Sure...we realize that. I'm not terribly concerned about the coaches who are walking around the pool barking at the kids to stop doing flips, leaning on the lane lines, and staying in their streamlines after the start. The air quality wasn't *that* bad yesterday afternoon such that simply being outside was a danger. Our concern is with the kids who are going hard in practice and breathing hard in the process, and our intent is to let the parents make the decision they feel is best for their kids. In the end, we cancelled anyway, as the coaches outvoted my co-rep and me on holding/not holding practice.

Now...with air quality like this morning there's no way we'd have made a decision to practice - optional or not. I wore an N95 in the city this morning because it was nasty as hell, and I wouldn't ask our coaches to be outside for three hours coaching in those conditions...let alone even suggest to parents that we'd practice in it!

3 hours ago, H2O said:

Oh and to make mattie g even happier, my pool officially closed today.  

So did mine. Ugh.

3 minutes ago, mappy said:

I feel the pain friend. Mine was supposed to be until 6/21, but because we had no days off for snow they get out Tuesday instead. 

Lucky you guys! I have no idea why ours are being kept in until then since we also had no days off, but we persevere...

Picture I took from on top of a building at 10th and F, NW at about 8:00am. The Capitol should be visible on the middle left, but no dice.

Edit: It's interesting that the smoke is much more noticeable in the picture around where the sun is shining, but in person it all looks pretty much the same (and definitely not blue like on the right/west).