Pre-Game Thoughts

Our first game is this weekend. I am quite excited. Yesterday's practice went extremely well, apart from the boundless energy the girls had for chatting and goofing off. We finished off practice with an offense against defense drill. I lined up the fullbacks, sweeper, and goalie in their positions, and I had sets of three girls start at midfield and take the ball down the field, trying to get past the defense and score on goal. The defense was pretty good and there were no shots on goal at first. But as the drill progressed, the offense got better and had some great passes and even shots on goal. And I taught the defense to immediately go wide as soon as the goalie made a save. They were great at turning the ball around. And the best thing about it is that the girls really enjoyed the drill.

Sorry if this is boring to most of you non-soccer fans. But I am really excited about our first match!

Team Blizzards

My team picked a name at the last practice...Blizzards! I think it's a good name and very age appropriate. Our uniforms are black and white. Other suggestions were The Panda Bears (because they are cute and fuzzy), White Rapids, and Black Panthers.

At the first practice, I asked the girls to pick a few jersey numbers they wanted to have. The numbers 2-5 were extremely popular. But I was surprised that no one picked either #9 nor #10. Which famous soccer players wear those numbers?? Mia Hamm is #9 and Pele (among many other famous players) is #10. When I asked the girls which famous female soccer player wears #9, it took them a few minutes to remember. What??!! If our apartment was any bigger (and I was any less sane), I would have all the girls over for soccer game watching every week.

Cutie

Another thing I have been terrible about doing is posting cute pictures of our kittens. How is this for completely adorable??!!

My Team

I have been quite terrible about posting. Sorry! I have been busy…

I am coaching a girls, under-14 team in AYSO. It’s quite fun. My initial motivation for becoming a coach was being able to have practices twice a week, which would get me out on the soccer field, doing soccer drills and running. I stopped playing in a competitive adult league about 1 year ago, because my back just couldn’t handle the intensity of the game. So I though being a coach and working out with my team would help me determine whether or not I wanted to get back into playing soccer competitively. I will not make my girls run laps or sprints while I sit around and watch.

But now I have a new motivation – I want to show them everything that I know about soccer. The 1.5 hour practices aren’t long enough for me to cover everything that I want to do. I have a super long list of drills and skills I want to cover and not enough time to get it all done. We have a practice game this weekend. I am excited but nervous. I have never coached this level before and I don’t know what to expect. Some of the girls on the team have obvious talent and skill, since they’ve been playing for 5+ years. Some of the girls are new to the game, and while they understand the basics of the game and are not afraid, they lack skill.

I know it’s just for fun. But everyone has more fun when they win or at least the matches are close. So hopefully we’ll have a good season. Wish us luck!

Harry Potter

I just finished the final book of the Harry Potter series. I loved it. What a great series. It took me a while to finish the last book because I didn't want the series to end. I won't say too much in case you are still reading the last book or plan on reading the series. I highly, highly recommend it. I actually started reading the book again. The only book I've ever read twice was Crime and Punishment (and that's because I had it as an assignment in both high school and college). I started rereading book 1 last night and it was hard to put down. Again, I really recommend it if you haven't read it. It's an easy read and quite enjoyable.

Priceless

"A woman was arrested after she called local police to help 'get her money back' after she was unhappy with the crack cocaine she purchased."

One of the fun things about being a cop.

My Husband

You can take the white boy out of Boston, but you can’t take the white boy out of my husband.

I sent my husband to the store to get cilantro to make salsa and he came back with Italian parsley. He even did the sniff test but was unable to differentiate between the two.

GDL

Our first stop on our 2 week Mexican vacation was Guadalajara, Jalisco. I had been to Guadalajara (GDL) many times before as we would usually begin or end our family trips to Mexico with a few days in GDL. But this time around we did a lot more sightseeing than I can remember. My brother-in-law, husband, and I met up with my parents-in-law at the GDL airport. My parents arrived the next morning and met us at the hotel.

Now, the first and one of the bigger highlights of the trip actually occurred before we arrived in Mexico. While we were checking-in at LAX, the attendant mentioned that we were not sitting together. I was about to raise hell (I had booked all the tickets separately but had called the airline twice to confirm that everyone was sitting together), when the attendant added that my husband and I were sitting in first class. And, we were able to wait in the VIP lounge until it was time for our flight. Unfortunately we only had 2 VIP lounge tickets, so my brother-in-law and I stuffed our faces with 2 bite lox and cucumber finger sandwiches and 3-drink cans of juice, while my husband waited outside, starving. There was also a full stock of miniature sized bottles of beer, wine, champagne and hard liquor, but even though we had been deemed first class passengers, we decided 7:30 am was a little too early to start drinking.

The first class experience was quite nice. We got a two-course breakfast with a cloth placemats and napkins, real silverware that included a spoon and 2 sets of fork/knife, and real dishes. The cut-up fruit was followed by breakfast crepes. My husband even accompanied his breakfast with two glasses of wine – 8:30 am is not too early to drink when you are in first class.

GDL is a nice city. It’s very busy and very European-like. A lot of the government buildings are covered in gorgeous murals that often depict very violent or controversial subjects. One example is the Jose Clemente Orozco mural of Miguel Hidalgo during the Mexican Revolution found in the Palacio de Gobierno.

Most of the architecture has a Spanish influence (duh!) and is very beautiful. Below are images of one of the main drags in GDL with the Catedral in the background, inside of the Catedral, the Palacio de Gobierno, and a couple of a huge and neat building that used to be a nunnery (?) and was now a museum.

Tlaquepaque is a suburb of GDL and it is considered the artistic center of GDL. We went there for a few hours and mostly walked around the square and the hundreds of puestos or stands. The highlight was a little ceramic museum with some incredible work. My favorite piece was a hug vase made of ceramic laid in a mesh pattern similar to what you would find in a doily. A picture is below.

Tonala is another good suburb of GDL that offers lots of neat, colorful Mexican stuff, like tables, paintings, and those frosted glasses with the blue trims great for serving margaritas. We all talked about renting a gigantic Uhaul and driving it to Mexico to get lots of “stuff”. The owner of the restaurant we ate in turned out to have managed the Sizzler down the street from my parent’s house in Southern California. He amused us with his stories of working in the restaurant business in Southern California.

Almost all the food we had in Mexico was so good that even after two weeks of eating Mexican food, I was craving it when we got back to the US. The only exception to the food was a camarones a la diabla (spicy shrimp dish) I had in GDL. I’ve had the dish before plenty of times in the US. It’s actually the dish I usually get whenever we go out for Mexican food. However, the way it was prepared in Mexico was so bad I didn’t eat very much of it. The sauce tasted like ketchup and the shrimp had not been cleaned properly. I also preferred the sangrias in the US to those I had in Mexico. The Mexico sangrias seemed to be made of lemonade combined with a standard, mass produced sangria mix and a little vodka was added to make it alcoholic. Not very good in general. But everything else was fantastic.

While I am listing my complaints, I was annoyed that the hotel in GDL charged about 20% more if we used a credit card instead of cash to pay for the hotel room. I would expect 3% or 5% more, but close to 20%? That's ridiculous!

Most of the pictures I will post were taken by my brother-in-law. He had a very nice digital SLR camera and went crazy with it. The first picture in this post is one of my favorites from the trip. It was taken from the balcony of the hotel we stayed in GDL.