Youth Olympic Dreams: Day by day, the Games are getting closer

Curling has been quite slow since the team was last together in Brandon. I have worked at two camps, and spent some time in coaching seminars in the past few weeks. It’s always great to see the kids out on the ice being so enthusiastic about the sport! I was at a coaching seminar the past week and sat in on a presentation from Pat Reid. Wow! She was an amazing speaker and I took so much away from her presentation! I talked to her afterwards and she knew who I was. She told me that she was good friends with Derek’s (Oryniak) grandmother and that she had been following our Olympic Journey. School is slowly but surely catching up. Some of my teachers are already giving me material that I will be missing in January. I guess I will be spending a lot of my Christmas break working on getting ahead of everyone so I am not too far behind on my exams when I get back home. My teachers have all been really great about giving me some extra time to do things, and they are all so understanding about how stressed I can get. My physics teacher (physics is the most stressful class right now) always cracks jokes to get me out of my ‘physics pouts’. I am also starting to pull my marks up. In November there were a few marks that were lower than I would like to see, but now I have everything in the 80s and hopefully it will stay that way! I started applying for university as well over the past couple of weeks. I applied to the University of Prince Edward Island, University of New Brunswick, and St. Francis Xavier University, all for kinesiology. Within a week I had heard back from UPEI: I made it! I was so excited to get my first acceptance letter! We even had a presentation from the University today at school and it was awesome knowing that I’m in. During literally half of the presentation – when they were talking about admissions and whatnot – I had a huge smile on my face because I did it! Now, just to get some of those entrance scholarships going… My school has also had our Christmas Prom. As much of a huge tom boy as I am, I love getting dressed up. My best friend, Meaghan Arsenault and I both got our hair done, and she did my make up. It was such a fun afternoon getting ready! Our dates arrived, finally, in the evening and we inhaled some pizza before posing for pictures and taking off in what seemed to be 100 different directions. Meaghan and Tanner had to go to a bunch of different places to get pictures with their families, and Dominic and I had to go to family houses, work and friend’s homes. We did finally make it to the dance and had a great time. As much as my life is starting to slow down, I still have a long way to go. It’s less than a month now until we leave. As I write this, it’s 26 days  until our flight leaves for Innsbruck. Wow. It is crazy how fast it’s coming! I am posting tweets on Twitter with the countdown every morning. It’s less than a month now, and nothing’s holding me back!