mattie g

I despise squirrels, to be completely honest. Though we did have a very cute ginger squirrel that would clean up the sunflower seeds that fell out of our feeder this spring. Haven't seen it in a couple months, so I'm guessing its reddish fur drew too much attention from the local hawk or fox populations and it made a tasty supper for one of them.

I just threw a shoe at a squirrel that had one of my unripe tomatoes in its mouth. Then I chased it. Hope I scared the shit out of it and it doesn't come back, but that's unlikely. F'ing squirrels... Edit: I threw a shoe, not a show

I shouldn't complain because we got absolutely dumped on for like 15-20 minutes the other day, but missing like this in much the same way for days on end is incredibly frustrating!

I recall you mentioning your experiences before and I 100% understand where you're coming from. We have a family for whom swimming is *the* sport and one of their kids is one of our All Stars (the other is a coach and the other is one of the top in their age group). They're an absolutely wonderful family, but I get concerned that the kids might run into that burnout phase, which I don't want to have any responsibility for. There are a number of other year-round swimmers on the team - some of whom are quite good - but I don't have quite the same concerns about them flaming out...hard. I feel that a huge part of my job is to maintain that fun atmosphere - I dress up according to our themes, I dance (for a minute or two) after the meets or just on deck during meets, and I go out of my way to cheer each and every kid in the pool no matter their skill level. I'm a very competitive person (and was a very competitive athlete back in the day), so I feel that being competitive is a key to having fun, but winning at all costs and being competitive are two entirely separate things! Summer swim is supposed to be pure fun, so I've been doing my best to build the team so that we can actually fill lanes (we're still not quite there yet) while also making sure that the culture is built around enjoying every moment of an intense summer swim season! With all that said, I understand that teams need to go up and go down the ladder so that there's some semblance of parity in the divisions. It's not a perfect science, by any stretch (our season is testament to that), but I do think the league does its best to match up teams of similar size and ability (I won't get into what it's like in the top divisions because they're playing a completely different game than the rest of us). We might surprise some folks next year, but I also know that it's likelier we'll get knocked around a little, so I'll just set the expectations at the beginning of the season and emphasize (again) that we're all out there to have fun!

Our little team ended up with eight(!) swimmers in NVSL All Stars this year. Pretty incredible considering that I think the most we've ever had in one year was four! With a 5-0 record (all very convincing wins), a Division Relay win, an All Star relay team, and all those kids in Individual All Stars, there's really not much more we could have possibly done this season...except win the Sportsmanship Award! I came into the season feeling good about 5-0 and relays win, but never thought it would happen the way it did. Couldn't be more proud of what all of our kids - from the youngest first-year swimmers to our year-round senior swimmers - accomplished this year! I'm a little nervous about how many divisions we'll jump next year, but it should be a really nice challenge for our kids and coaches! Really looking forward to sewing up the season this Saturday at All Stars and taking a little break to get away...

Same thing has been happening for the last 3-4 days.

This time of year is too popcorn-y to reliably bust a rainfall deficit across the area. Agreed that we just need remnants or a coastal-type low to get a nice region-wide dousing.

This makes a lot of sense...and it appears that even the best long-rangers are using the experience of the last few years to hone in on things a bit better. You're one of the best and I really enjoy reading your write-ups each year, and while I'm not going to worry myself over what may or may not happen, I would certainly prefer to see bullish progs than bearish ones!

Concerned that the cells that popped up just to my east will rob the atmosphere of the energy needed to sustain that line out west. Too many close misses to the south and east in this period (except for one storm two days ago) has me a little on edge (no pun intended).

If the MD side of the Potomac trains again today, I'm going to kick a virtual puppy. Had that one big cell IMBY at about 7:00 pm or so yesterday, so that was good, but the really bug stuff at night slid to our south. Could definitely use some more rains today - the nearby creeks looked barely affected this morning!

Your mouth to God's ears!

Long-range guesscasting based on ENSO analogs hasn't worked too well recently. I think I'll continue to not worry about winter until it's here...and even then forecasting at shorter ranges has generally been unreliable so I'll probably just let things happen as they will without concerning myself over it!

Definitely a let down for those of us on the western side of the Potomac.

Always good to see some initiation *relatively* close by.

Not sure. It's been pretty damn dry over the last few weeks, but we were quite wet prior to that - we also lucked into a couple brief downpours in the last couple weeks, so maybe it's just enough to keep things going. I haven't watered the front lawn once and it's doing fine, but it gets a decent amount of shade throughout the day and doesn't grow terribly fast in general. The backyard gets a ton of shade now as neighbors' trees have gotten bigger in the last few years, so yeah...I guess that's a lot to do with it.

100% agreed. I don't know a lot of technical weather details, but this is one thing that I've learned from simple observation over many years.

My lawn is pretty much doing fine right now, except for a few spots that are browning, I've only watered a couple times - nice soakings to get it through the driest periods - so I just want to get into the potentially stormy period coming up without needing to fire up the sprinklers (because I honestly despise having to water the lawn). Garden is doing fine. Had LOTS of problems with starting my seedlings this year, so ended up grabbing some plants at the local nursery. I got them in the ground quite a bit later than I normally plant, but a few tomatoes have pretty much caught up while some others really struggled for some reason. Also seems I got some crap potting soil for the jalapenos and herbs that I like to plant in pots, so they're really not showing any promise. Just a bit of a tough year overall, but there's plenty of growing left to do. Could certainly be worse!

Prepping to host NVSL Divisionals this Saturday for the second year in a row. Gotta say...I'm a bit more worn out this year than the last couple years (got the O.L.D.), but we're making it work! Thank goodness the weather is looking halfway decent! Our team did really well this year, so we're expecting to move up a couple/few divisions next year and be in as high a division as we've been in for many years. Hope the league doesn't go crazy and move us up too much, but it'll be interesting to see how the kids respond to going against some bigger teams!

It was just to fill a lane. She was as big as a 5-year-old, but still...that's just nuts. We've done the same with filling lanes with younger ones. We have lots of kids (6-8s) who could probably just fill a lane and make it across the pool this year, but we try not to throw kids in there if we feel it might be intimidating for them or somehow lower their enthusiasm for swimming if they don't do well. We have a 7-year-old boy who swam all four strokes as a 5, but he's a bit of an anomaly (to say the least). The coaches entered my 6-year-old in Fly last week, but she refused to swim it . I was a little disappointed, but it's not the end of the world. At this point, she just wants to swim if her best friend is also swimming, so B Meets are where it's at right now. Of course, now she's putting up a fuss about swimming Back this weekend, even though she's perfectly capable of not coming in last!

We had a few rumbles of thunder that delayed our warmups, but we shortened them to 10 minutes apiece and got the meet started at 6:35 pm. Went pretty well and finished before 8:30 pm. And it was a really well run meet and everyone had a great time! Kids had some great swims - even the many who had to fill in for all the other kids missing - and we did end up winning the meet. Our 11-12 Boys went 56 low (and destroyed our team record) in Free, and went 1:03 in Medley, so we're just waiting for our first call to All Star Relay in a few years. Always neat when a little team like ours gets the chance to swim against the big teams! Also...one of the other teams had a f'ing 3-year-old swimming in their 8&U relays!!!

Relay Carnival for us is literally 3-5 minutes away and we have 12 passes for the lot (and I get one as the Rep ). Not looking forward to the inevitable delays, as you guys have mentioned, but nothing we can do about it. My main worry is that families just drive home to wait out any storms and don't get the SwimTopia app alerts we send out. Before you know it, we've only got three 8&Us going to clerk of course while we frantically text the parents to get them back to the pool! If we go into tomorrow, we're going to have some issues with our 15-18s because a bunch of them are scheduled to guard at our own pool tomorrow. We're already missing a lot of swimmers to camps and such this week, so we had to pull from the lower rungs of our ladders to fill the relays, but hopefully those weakened groups can make a respectable showing and we can pull out a Relay Carnival win!

Was a little chilly later in the evening last Monday, but overall it was a great night. Saturday was glorious! Tonight will be a tad toastier, but this Saturday will be rough. Heard that NVSL is considering suggesting early starts to this weekend's meets should both teams be amenable to it.

Haven't been around for a while after I switched projects in Jan-Feb and had to get up to speed. Weird to be back. Hosting out first swim meet tonight. Summer is truly here!

March is an awful month in which to have a birthday. I don't mind the weather in August, but it's a bit of a grind as swim season ends and we're waiting for school to start. For me, the first couple weeks of September is truly awful since we usually get hot, but the pool is closed.

6 degrees below normal at Dulles is chilly...and it was chilly region-wide outside the typical UHI areas. I feel that it's disingenuous to use obs at DCA and BWI as examples to disprove the notion of a day or period being cold.