This year Scott and Hayden went to a week of swimming lessons at an outdoor pool. By some stroke of luck, it was actually warm enough to swim all week. Not only that, but it was sunny and nice enough to want to stick around and play in the wading pool each day before leaving. This is all pretty remarkable, since Calgary is a high altitude, high latitude place and summers are not known for being consistently hot. There aren't many outdoor pools in the city, and those are all from an earlier era, when people must have been hardier or had misconceptions about how weather works.
I remember having an outdoor swimming lesson before. Mine was down in Murray, Utah, when I stayed with my Grandparents for several weeks when I was about nine years old. I remember that I was considerably taller than the other kids in the beginner class, because I had never taken lessons because I couldn't really put my head underwater for many years on account of having tubes in my ears. So, we were bobbing around and making bubbles and stuff, and it was pretty ridiculous. I recall that our instructor was named Buffy or something like that. And she got really embarrassed one day when she demonstrated to us how she could dive off the high dive and the front of her suit came a bit unzipped (but we would have never known if she didn't tell us).
The most vivid memory I have from my outdoor lessons was that I ate a whole bag of Twizzlers licorice beforehand and I got ill while in the change room and puked all over the floor. Little red Twizzler-bits all over the place. Then I felt better and I went out to the pool to swim. You know, if you puke a bunch of licorice, it doesn't taste bad at all. It's almost like getting an serving of Twizzlers for free... with none of the calories.
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