making memories

So you see, yesterday I was at a swim meet in Tennessee and I could not blog, but luckily my dad made a placeholder blog post so that I could come and fill it in when I got back today.
So yesterday morning, at 4:07 in the morning, I woke up and realized I still had some time to sleep before we had to get up. So at 4:45, I got up and rushed to school to get there before 5:15. And then we got bagels! But after the bagel I fell asleep and surely we were there. At 7:45 we jumped in the water to warm up. Which is the most fun activity ever before 8 in the morning.
So anyways, I swam two events in the morning, one towards lunch, and another at night. But yesterday was such a fun day filled with so many memories.
First, I showered a record number of 4 times yesterday to keep the chlorine out of my hair. That was a blast. And at the end of the prelims, we all showered and there were probably 40 girls in the locker room, all wet and gross and hot. But some nice girl from another team that I don't even know let me share her shower, and a bunch of people from our team started Christmas caroling in the showers. Everyone else was rather scared. Then we attempted to not get wet as we put on clothes.
Then we went back to the hotel and in no time at all we were back to the pool for finals, shimmying into our wet swim suits again. But that wasn't a problem, at least I was swimming in the finals. So we all went down to the pool deck to do the cheer that the seniors made up at one kid's house at a swim team meeting and we were all laughing and sweating and probably looking especially attractive. And then we did the timeless "donuts and cheese" cheer, which really does not make sense nor relate to swimming, but it's a tradition, so we have to do it. And everyone was looking at us strangely. But the best part was when the sophomores were asking "wait, do we actually have donuts and cheese here?" Oh, sophomores..
So after finals, we found out that we came in 3rd our of 26 teams, and we went to CiCi's Pizza - at 9pm - for dinner. And the poor employees had to brace themselves for our insanity. All of the families in there were a little horrified when we stumbled into the restaurant like a herd of some hoofed animal and basically took over the restaurant. And later we played arcade games and got ridiculous prizes, and after we went back to the hotel at 10 and played games outside on this ghetto-ish, anthill-infested patch of grass next to the hotel. We played Red Rover and freze tag and basically we ran around like madmen until 11:30.
We pretty much stayed up from 4:30am to midnight - basically 20 hours of nonstop craziness and mayhem and fun - hanging out, swimming, cheering each other on, singing, dancing, eating, and making some pretty fabulous memories. I can't remember laughing so hard at a swim meet before. Good times, good times!
And all the while, we had parents creeping around taking pictures..let's just wait and see how attractive we look on the slideshow at the banquet..