Sea Change

Wow…peace and quiet. Yesterday when I arrived at the Rec Center, I noticed they had replaced the front entry carpets with nice new ones. As I went downstairs to the pool, I thought to myself – wow, it’s quiet in the hallways. As I walked into the locker rooms – it was clean again. For the past few months, the tile floors were always wet, paper towels randomly tossed on the floor, and the soap dispensers in the shower in various states of disarray. It took a few weeks in early June to figure out what had caused the change from a ‘nice clean place’ to a less than clean place. Then I realized – kids were out of school. It wasn’t until I saw the summer camps that I realized where the influx of chaos was coming from.

Upon stepping out of the locker room to the pool – there were no screaming kids, nor running kids getting yelled at by lifeguards. There weren’t kids floating mid-lane across 14 lanes of lap swimmers, like a massive game of Frogger. Ahh…school had started again. Interestingly though, one new addition was the local swim team was back practicing again. Not sure where they went to for the summer.

But ya know what? Despite all of the madness associated with frogger while in the middle of a long set – I almost kinda miss all of the activity. In some ways, for long sets being able to look across the pool for that 1 second during each breath (alternating views every three strokes) and see something interesting broke up the monotony. Be it trying to time it breaking the surface just in time to see a kid do a huge cannonball off the diving board, or trying to beat the 4:30PM, 5:30PM, 6:30PM cutoff times for clearing out the pool to allow kids to go to the bathroom (mid-summer they instituted a policy that all kids 12 & under had to exit the pool at specified times, because they were having ‘issues’ with younger children – the problem is if you finished your set at exactly then, it was a bit of a madhouse in the locker room).

The other bummer with the end of summer is that the outside deck will be closing soon – it may have already closed, I didn’t check yesterday. It was kinda nice on slow evenings/weekends after you finished your swim to go lie in the sun and 90* weather on the deck chairs for a little while to relax. Not going to be doing that in December, that’s for sure!

But there is one last piece of good news in there – they are now having their semi-annual 14% off Rec Center passes – woohoo! Btw, who on earth decides on 14%? Was the extra $1 savings over a simple 15% sale too much to handle? At any rate….