Let the madness begin

Greetings from Slap-Happy World! Well, ok, not this morning anyway. But the last few days I've been wandering around that strange wonderful for nearly all of my waking hours. That's right, it's football season again! Modified two-a-days started at 8 am on Thursday. So it's been a few long hot days in the life of Annie. I'm not complaining, I'm really happy to be back in my little world of high school sports, just trying to convey the full experience for all of you.

So, in the celebration of my life getting back to it's normal, crazy state, let me show you my training room. My training room in it's "this is as perfect and clean and wonderful as I'm going to be, so you better take a picture before the children come through and ruin it" state.

And this is from the other direction, just to give the full effect.

And the glorious-ness that is a fully stocked and organized training room. Oh tape, how the kids will try to steal you.

Seriously, that's 1280 rolls of pristine 1.5" tape, and though you can only see the one large box in the bottom right corner, there's 20,000 8 oz Gatorade cups crammed into my tiny office. What's sad, is that I'll probably run out of cups before the school year is over, and the tape will hopefully just get me through. Which is why, to the bewilderment of the athletes, I hoard them.

And a nice stocked and organized field kit before I destroy its beauty by having to rifle through it to find a particular size band aid in the 2.2. seconds before the bleeding kid has to be back on the field for the next play. sigh

And on an icky note, this is the stack of medical forms that I spent several hours inputting into the computer, sorting, alphabetizing and filing.

The icky part? This probably isn't even half of them. The really icky part, those are all the ones that I've received to this point. Which means that I will have to tell kids that they can't practice on Monday because I don't have their forms. The really really icky part, that's not supposed to be my job, it's supposed to be up to the AD to do this because it's a matter of eligibility, not medical reasons, that we have to have them.

So, as you can see, my job isn't glamorous all the time, in fact, it rarely is. I so happen to have an amazing training room. Seriously, I've worked out of broom closets before (literally) and been at colleges that hadn't updated the training room since the 50's. Maybe I'll take some pictures of the other training room I have, once I get it cleared out of all the junk that has been dumped in it over the summer. You'll see the difference.

Moving on, I've spent some good quality time with Kaylee this week, which has only added to my adventures in Slap-Happy world. BFF Bridget's mom has been in the hospital since last Thursday night with some issues that are related to the uterine cancer they diagnosed since she's been in the hospital. So, I've been trying to help out with Kaylee duty as much as possible for Bridget to be able to spend some time with Mama Fox. Yogurt popsicles make for excellent blog fodder.

The illness of Mama Fox leads me into my new knitting project. A comfort shawl for her.

It's the Tri-Aran-Angle from Knitty. For those not acquainted with the concept, a comfort or prayer shawl is knit to give comfort in a time of need, to be knit with prayer and love in every row and every stitch, nothing but good thoughts for the recipient.

Something that non-knitters usually don't realize, is that in knitting something like this, we knitters also take comfort. It gives us something to do in a situation where we feel helpless. It goes down to the reason that we knit. It allows us to put all the love we feel for the people we knit for into what we're knitting, so that we know, even if the recipient doesn't, that every time they happen to wear that knitted item, they are surrounded by that love, those good thoughts and well wishes and prayers. So to all you non-knitters out there, remember that the next time you receive a hand knitted item. That in all those hours that it took to make, the knitter was thinking of you, loving you, wishing you nothing but happiness.

Alright, I think that's enough of Mushyville in the land of Slap-Happy. Let's see if we can find something a little less emotional. How about a dishcloth?

My first attempt at anything resembling entrelac. It's the Garterlac Dishcloth. Out of some self striping kitchen cotton. Love it, as much as I can love a dishcloth anyway. Made me feel very clever. And here's a shot of where I'm at on the Spring Forward sock.

Close to the end of the leg. I'm hopeful that my motivation to knit will return after the insan- I mean two-a-days, have ended. The real fun starts tomorrow, when all the rest of the sports show up. Can I get a woot?!?