Busy in meetings all morning. Whew. Busy at work is definitely better than not-busy, though, by a large amount.
Practice this morning was mostly drills: pause drills, where you stop for about 3 seconds at a predefined point in the stroke and hold it, and a tricky advanced drill known for some odd reason as "cutting the cake". Pause drills depending on where you pause, can help with any number of things: quick hands away, swinging all eight bodies together, balance, clean catches, timing. We do them a lot, at every level from Intermediate on up. "Cutting the cake" consists of alternating a normal stroke, then a quick arms-only stroke with the blade in the air instead of in the water. It’s tricky to keep together, and works on timing, balance, and quick arms.
Once again, DI didn’t show and we had only Yosemite Sam to work with. Not altogether a bad thing, as YSam is perfectly capable of coaching a class by himself, and has been much more pleasant to work with lately. Also, DI has probably been staying late, working with his precious Juniors. Still, though, it’s not fair for DI not to show up without notice, to us or to YSam. He’s been doing that a lot lately, and between that, his uncertain temper, general irresponsibility (like not looking for chaperones for a Juniors’ regatta trip until less than a week before) and the fact that he’s feeding us a lot of wrong information, I think it’s getting toward time to Do Something. ‘Something’ would probably be a meeting with his boss at the city, either with or without prior notification to DI. Unpleasant (though his boss is very nice and very interested) but it looks like it may be necessary.
Actually, his boss is very, very nice; I just got off the phone with her (on unrelated matters). She was telling me how she and her husband head up North on their motorcycles every weekend. She’s in her mid- to late-forties, small, ashy blonde, cheerful. Picturing her on a Harley (her own, too, not riding shotgun) definitely adds a new dimension to my mental image. I love talking to cool older women, because it shows me the breadth of my possible futures.
Posted by dichroic at May 16, 2001 11:31 AM