friday night.

I am so awesome. Want to know why? Well let me tell you...
I spent this friday night watching a throwing video and making notes on how to better coach my throwers. Sounds really productive - which it was. Sounds really boring - which it was. I'm not sure how I can express to you how tedious that throwing video was to watch, and I only watched the first of seven parts. How long did it take? An hour and twenty minutes. Practically everyone was asleep (all the animals and my dad), and it was all I had in me not to as well. Thankfully I did get a few good pieces of advice to use with the throwers and I brainstormed ideas for jumping workouts among other things. I hope that I get the chance to use the things that I worked on. I'm having an absolute blast coaching, but it gets difficult because I'm not the head throws coach so I don't totally get to do my own thing. Also, it is hard because I don't always get to work with the same throwers, and there are other throwers who I would really like to work with that I don't get to. Hopefully eventually things will even out and I'll settle in some more, come to better terms with where I am in the coaching pecking order. I may even end up getting to go out to practice every day during the week, which would help working with everyone on a more consistent basis. I can't imagine that it would be easy as a thrower to be coached by two different people with two different styles. In fact, when I was in high school I probably wouldn't have liked it at all, and maybe would have talked to my head coach about it. Just the kind of person I am I guess. I really hope that my athletes like me well enough, and like my coaching. Maybe someday they'll tell me all about it.
Well, that's my fun friday night for you. Hope yours was more exciting than mine!

hannah montana valentines.

oh yeah. this is what i want to do for valentines day.



afterall, what's more romantic than dinner and a movie?

weekend in slo.

part one: friday, before slo
Going into this weekend I knew that Friday was going to be crazy busy, and i was not disappointed. It started with my usual 8:30am running class. After a longer than normal run I hurried home to get ready so I could leave again right away to drive to Malibu. The hour drive to Malibu was pretty sweet, as always. I could make that drive every day if I needed to. Then I spent an hour and a half down there getting a new hair cut and such. (I don't always go there to get my hair cut but the person who I really like to cut my hair works at a salon down there so I make an extra effort to get down there.) As soon as that was done I grabbed some Starbucks (yum) and headed back on up highway 1 for the hour drive home. Thankfully by this point I was ahead of schedule so I had some leisure time. When I say leisure time I mean that I had a little bit longer to get all my stuff packed for my trip to SLO. All of my excess time wasted away waiting for my mom to get home so that I could take off. Finally she got home, I had all of my stuff together, I filled up my gas tank and hit the road. The drive from Ventura to SLO takes about 2 hours no matter how you shake it, so lets do the math: 1 hour to Malibu + 1 hour back from Malibu + 2 hours to SLO = 4 hours in my truck in one day. This generally wouldn't have been too bad except for the extra long run in the morning so by the time I pulled into town my legs were all stiff and tight from sitting while my hands were the same from holding the steering wheel. The bonus to all of this is that Nat lives off the first exit in SLO but the downside is that it took me almost 5 minutes to get a half a mile with all the traffic once I got off.

part two: friday night
Once I arrived at Nat's I unloaded my small amount of stuff, changed clothes, called Laura, and headed back into the car (this time with Nat) to go downtown. We met Laura and a friend at Natural Cafe for dinner. It was a nice little bonus that Laura wasn't leaving to take the high school girls to camp until after their basketball game, because then I got to see her. We had a nice dinner and some good quality time before heading over to Downtown Brew for the Sherwood concert. I was so excited to see Sherwood again. Being that the concert was on the 1st of February, it will probably be the highlight of my whole month. We got there and headed in to the sounds of We Shot The Moon (the first band to open) and attempted to get a decent place to stand. It wasn't too bad especially considering that things change significantly after every band that plays. We Shot The Moon was pretty decent. The music was good but the crowd was a bit tough. The Higher cam on next and they were okay. The music was decent, but all we could do was laugh at the performance. It's not that it was bad, it's just that the lead singer reminded us of a boy band member (a la Backstreet Boys, or NSYNC mixed with Hanson). It was later confirmed when they covered NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye." Next came The Matches who were really good. Not much else I can say aside from that. Then finally came Sherwood, what we'd all been waiting for. They were amazing!!! Which is nothing less than I expected. They played pretty much all of my favorite songs (except "you're like a ghost" but that's okay), and as always it was really fun watching the crowd. Some people were a little more intense than I usually am, but for the most part it was amusing. The exception was this one drunk guy who decided to stand by us for a while (it got annoying) and who later decided he was going to crowd surf again, and again, and again. He also got dropped again, and again, and again. I didn't want him to get hurt, but I didn't mind when he fell, even if the girl in front of me did step on my feet with her heels. So after standing for 4 hours (after sitting for 4 hours), with our ears ringing, and throats tired from yelling and singing we hit Cold Stone for some much needed ice cream. Usually on a trip to SLO I make an effort to go to Bali's but sometimes you can't settle for anything other than some cheesecake ice cream with graham cracker pie crust (yum). After relaxing for a few we headed back to Nat's place and almost straight to bed. We're getting old.

part three: saturday
After a great night's sleep Nat and I rolled out of bed and headed over to Nautical Bean for coffee and breakfast (which was more like lunch). We ran into a friend of Nat's who we both went to school with but I didn't know, or really place exactly where I knew him until later. (Turns out he was a good friend of the guy who I carpooled with in middle school and high school.) Then we headed back downtown to do some shopping. I managed to pick up the new book in the Secret History of the Pink Carnation series at Barnes & Noble (the Ventura B&N didn't have it). We also hit up Apple where I spent my gift card from Christmas, and checked out the new MacBook Air. That thing is CRAZY thin. Part of me thinks that it would be awesome to have one of those, but then another part of me thinks that they're a little ridiculous. The majority of me, however, thinks that they are way too expensive. After exhausting our interest in shopping downtown we went to Old Navy and spent Nat's gift card, followed by a trip to Trader Joe's to pick up stuff to make Naan Pizza for dinner. (That is sooo good by the way. If you want to know how to make them, I'll hook you up.) Later we went and saw Juno which was a great movie. It was funny, and serious, and well acted in all the right places. Actually it was well acted all the way through which made the it. For dinner we made the Naan Pizzas and lounged around at her place. We ended up watching That Thing You Do which I always like to watch but forget how much I do. It felt funny sitting around on a saturday night in a different town, when it seemed like we should be out and doing something. Oh well, it was nice to hang out and relax.

part four: sunday morning
Although it was Super Bowl Sunday and I was invited to a Super Bowl party in SLO I decided that I wanted to come back to Ventura for church. Catalyst was having a guest speaker named David Kinnaman who wrote the book unChristian, and I was really looking forward to hearing him speak. In order to be back in time for church I had to get up at 6am, and leave SLO by 7am. Lucky for me in addition to leaving for home at that time of day it was raining. To prepare me for the day I got a huge coffee from Nautical and headed off. It felt much earlier than it really was because there were few people out and darker than usual. Anyway, I made it in time for church and it was great. David Kinnaman's sermon was really good and really interesting. It was all about how Christians are perceived by people ages 16 to 29. Like I said really interesting. I bought the book and I'm looking forward to reading it. My dad beat me to the punch on starting it, but I'll read it as soon as he's done. Should be great.

So that was my weekend in SLO. It was a pretty great weekend. I'm sure I'll have another great one again soon.