Katy and a bunch of friends went to coronation Saturday night. It is basically a formal homecoming dance at her school. Her date is the one in the tux. She seemed to have a good time. They all had dinner at the Yonenaga’s before hand and ended up there afterwards. She seemed to have a good time. I assume y’all that are her facebook friends (she won’t let Elizabeth or I) know all about it by now.
A while back, Katy noticed the last regular season game for the Sharks would be on her birthday. She thought that we all should go. Our neighbor was nice enough to arrange tickets for us and we went. Our whole family and all of Katy’s grandparents. All in all an nice way to celebrate Katy’s birthday. Next we have to figure out what playoff games we are going to try to see. Katy is a hockey fan for some reason.
Katy had her first diving competition of the year. It was an invitational at Paly. She has been sick and hasn’t been diving for a little over a month, but she still managed to do better than she was last year. She did well, when she gets more back into the swing of things, she should be greatly improved this year.
We refused to eat it. It was chunky and looked like this:
Katy started driving today. I think if you are in another state you might be safe (but don’t count on it). Here, once she has her permit, she has to have an hour with a professional instructor (she did that today) before she can drive with us. She has 4 more hours with the instructor and then she has to log 50 hours (10 at night) with us in the next 6 months then she can get her license. By they way, those are chorizo stains on her permit.
We picked up Katy and Margaret from camp yesterday. It turns out that Katy got “peed” on by a bat, now she is getting shots for rabies. It turns out that rabies is transferred by saliva and the drop landed near her eye, so just in case, she is getting the shots. The other thing about rabies is that once you have symptoms, it is too late.
Katy and Margaret had their piano recital today. They are now with the advanced set of students.
Katy has completed her first season of diving for her high school team. It was interesting to say the least. Katy was on the JV team. She was the only freshman on the team. She was put on this the JV team before the coach saw any of them dive.
It seemed as though every meet that Katy was in, the weather was as bad as possible. In her first meet, it was rainy and cold. We all waited around for a very long time waiting until things finally started. The other team ended up not showing up. They still had to dive, but they won that part of the meet by default. This was somewhat typical for the season. There were a few very good divers at a few of the schools, but all in all, it seems that diving is a very small part of the swimming program in local area high schools.
The funniest thing about the divers, is none of the high school pools have a hot tub for the divers between dives. They all tend to have rubbermaid cattle watering troughs for the divers to sit in while they wait. Even Santa Clara that is supposed to be a world class site has these. (Stanford has a real hot tub).
The diving programs were very unorganized at Los Gatos High. We found out that we should assume diving is the day before the swim meet that we got lots of mail about. We also figured out that if we went to the other high school’s website, we could generally find out more information about what was actually going to happen.
Katy seemed to have a good time with her first foray into competition. By the end of the season, she was one of the better divers on the team. She was the best coach for the team as well. Her Stanford coach has told her that if she keeps diving there, by the end of next season, she will make CCS.
I didn’t get a lot of pictures from the meets because of the bad weather and other factors. Here are a few pictures from her first meet. The next set of pictures are from Palo Alto High as well as an invitational all girls meet with Presentation and Mitty. I was very proud of her at the Presentation meet. On her 3rd (I think) dive, she came out too early and hit the board with her foot. It made a huge bruise that hurt her to dive for a while. During the meet, she just kept going like nothing happend.
She also competed in a US Diving competition where she did both 1-meter and 3-meter at Santa Clara.
This year for her birthday Katy decided that she wanted to take her friends roller skating. Everyone tried it (except for me) with varying success. It was a bit dark, so the pictures are what they are.
I took my fancy new camera and took some pictures of Katy diving. I got a few dives at 8 fps and a few HD videos. Katy is getting better at diving. She is also fearless in the eyes of the coach. Lots of the other girls were not doing dives because they were scared. Katy just got right up and did a dive without hesitation. She later told me that it was really scary and she was shaking for 30 minutes after, but she did it anyway. I don’t know what the dives are, but she is loving it. I think the dive she did was a comquat zerflatz, but i could have the name wrong.