greetings from (cold) sunny florida

Finally a moment to update. We arrived an hour late on Monday, after making it to the airport and onto the plane just fine, but then the raindrops started to fall while we waited for them to close up the doors. Apparently the storm was blocking one of the takeoff routes, so they closed that and sent us to a waiting area known as the 'ballpark' for about 20 minutes. We were about ten minutes behind already, just from not leaving the gate, and then we had another half hour wait for the runway that everyone must have been using.

The initial 10-15 minutes were so bumpy that I thought the plane would break to bits, but thankfully, it did not. However, I didn't get my bloody mary until almost two hours after we got on the plane. I really could have used it about an hour and 45 minutes sooner!

Then our taxi driver stopped for gas with us in the car!

The weather was beautiful when we arrived and we had a couple of good hours on the beach. Our hotel room has a beautiful view of the ocean out the front and a great view of workers at a construction site out the side! They're building some sort of annex to the hotel we're in, and they start crawling all over the 'footprint' at around 6:30 every morning.

Yesterday I had a splitting headache, which was compounded by the fact that the temperature had dropped by about 20 degrees and the winds were whipping. Last night I tossed and turned for a couple of hours because I never took a rest to try to make the pain subside during the day. I finally feel better but I can tell it's still there so I'm going to have to be careful with it today. I took a TON of over the counter pain killers yesterday - four tylenol and six advil throughout the day - so I'm trying to space them out better today. I got up, showered, ate (I had no food yesterday morning either so I bought some granola bars for the room) and now I am waiting for the sleeping beauties (Brian and E) to wake up so we can head to the pool.

Speaking of the pool, Megan has had a GREAT meet so far. She texted me that her 500 free time was 5:05 - which is amazing! - and I thought she was joking. She came into the meet with a 5:12, so that's 7 seconds off of a time she's had a hard time even maintaining this year. The next day, she took off nearly two seconds in the 200 free, putting her at 1:55 from 1:57. She had been seeded 127th and came in 47th. That might still sound like a far-down finish, until you consider that basically means she has the 47th fastest time of all the Y swimmers in the country. And to have moved up 80 positions is pretty good, too! In the 500, she moved up about the same, finishing 55th. There are so many fast swimmers at this meet.

Today she has the 100 free and tomorrow, just a relay, so she's doing the time trial in the 1650, which is what is known as 'the mile.' So I am both looking forward to that and dreading it, because she should be able to swim it really well based on her performance so far, but I always feel like a child abuser watching her do a 66 lap race. Someone last year said it's like watching paint dry, but I don't think that's true, because paint probably dries faster than this race gets swum. Last year her time was 18:14 when she did the mile at time trials. So I'll update after she's done.

It's been a little difficult to get online because all we have is Kevin's work computer and the internet has been slow. I can't work my gmail for some reason, I get error messages and then the individual emails won't open, so I've just been using Facebook. I lost my camera, so all the pictures that I have been taking (with my phone), I've been posting there so I can see them larger then 2x2.

In other news, there are a couple of boys here around Brian's age, so he's been running around with them, and the location of our hotel this year is better than last year as far as things to do, so they have dinner at night in the hotel and then walk to a little shopping plaza and get ice cream. Brian is loving the freedom, and I don't bring him to the meet at night. Right now, he and E sleep on still, so since I want to leave in half an hour, I really should try to wake them up - I'd actually like to just leave them here sleeping ... E has been very good about coming to all the sessions but I'm sure she wouldn't mind missing one to catch up on sleep and some schoolwork. So, off I go. Stay tuned.