Maggie Rants [and Raves]

Team Spirit

by Maggie Franklin | June 1, 2009 | Bookmark +

I don't actually have to go in to the salon until much later this afternoon, which means that this turns out to be one of those Monday mornings when I get to sit around the house drinking coffee.

 

Actually, I had plans to sleep until about 10:30 before making my first pot of coffee — yes, first pot. Honestly, no, I don't have enough time before work that I would go through more than one pot before leaving the house today, but the BF refuses to embrace the miracle of coffee and was less than enthusiastic when I moved in with him and announced my intent to find a 12-cup coffee maker (my former beloved coffee maker now lives with Mom). There was some ranting and raving around the house about how vile and nasty coffee is and how there was NO WAY I could possibly require a coffee maker that held 96 ounces of coffee! Never mind that coffee pots measure "cups" in 6-ounce increments, which means a 12-cup pot would only yield 72 ounces anyway. AND I drink coffee in 16-ounce mugs which means I would only manage to squeeze 4-1/2 "cups" of coffee out of a 12-cup pot ... Wait. Wait. (yawn, stretch) Sorry about that — it's way too early to start doing math.

 

Suffice it to say, I own a five-cup coffee maker that sits cowering in the darkest recess of our kitchen counter, trying to stay out of the way.

 

As it turns out, probably through a combination of last week's thunder-storm (highly unusual for us here in central Cali, and I'm sure a few of my esteemed colleagues can still recall me standing on the balcony of one of the condos at the Premier Orlando show back in '04 long after all the East Coasters had deemed it time to come in from that storm!) and our neighbors having been, ummm, well let's just say they had to move, leaving what I can only estimate as 379 feral cats to roam the neighborhood in search of food, not to mention the equally out of control rat colony that apparently lives in their grapefruit tree (why don't the cats eat the rats?), the BF woke me up this morning to announce that the dogs had chased something out of the back yard and now reeked of something we didn't really want our house to smell like. So I got to give dogs baths at 7:45 in the morning. Lucky me.

 

What this means is that I now get an additional 3-1/2 hours in my week to bite my own nails and fret about my impending competitions. Lynn (Lammers) says they are supposed to be "fun." You know why my team captain says competitions are "fun"? Because she wins. I have a long way to go before nail competitions are "fun" for me. I suspect they will continue to be nerve-wracking for a while yet to come.

 

Added to the stress that most people seem to understand is the fact that I am now on a team. Not just a team, the team. The current world champion's team. Lynn Lammers' team. She put a team together in hopes of winning the team championship as well as the individual championship this year. For some goofy reason you need a team if you want to win the team championship. Go figure. So she tacked up a notice at Beautytech (yeah, I spend a lot of time at BT — good thing NAILS and Beautytech go way back) looking for volunteers. As I've mentioned, I've always wanted to be a top competitor and her offer coincided with my personal decision to "get on that" as it were. I figured it must be a sign. So more than just nervous about competing, I really want to do well and make my team proud. There are others counting on me. That's a lot of pressure.

 

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