50 m almost all to myself

Over the last bunch of years, all my swimming has been done in a City pool, unless I've noted otherwise. A couple swims at Talisman, a couple at Mount Royal or SAIT, a few open water are the exceptions. Overall, the City pools are pretty good, especially Renfrew. I really liked swimming there. The staff are great, and there's a good dynamic in the patrons. Mainly older European or Chinese people the times I was swimming, but the entire time is full of Guten Tag, Cho San, or Bon Guorno. I met  and got to know a bunch of people there, Lynette, Deb, Lori, Todd, Jarret, Jamila, Justin and his wife Lisa, Brenda, Ms Backstroke, the two Italian dudes, Lana (a para-olympian, which I hadn't known at the time) and a bunch of other people on more casual terms. The only thing, ONLY THING I don't like about Renfrew is that the pace clock is essentially unusable to the people who want it the most, since it's lined up with the floatie lane.

Plus, the hot tub there is amazing.

Yes, I meant to have those 7 words be a paragraph on their own. The tub is that amazing.

The other pools are somewhat less desirable. Canyon Meadows occasionally has the men's shower room smelling like something crawled into the drains and died there. But otherwise it's good, with the pace clock in the right place. Plus it's the closest, and I know a few people there too. Glenmore is nice, aside from the locker room guy that creeped me out. It's just a bit tricky to get to. Inglewood is a funky old pool, very shallow at the shallow end. No, really, very shallow. As in, you'd better have your flip turn nailed. Bob Bahn grossed me out. Three drunks peeing put out more fluid than the showers. And the patrons there were pig ignorant about sharing lanes.

Swimming at Renfrew really worked out transit wise, since I could drop Linda downtown, hit the pool, and then proceed on to whichever job in the NE I happened to hold at the time, or head home if I wasn't working. Over the last year it hasn't worked out quite as well, and I've been a bit of a slacker.

I used to swim at Talisman Centre, back when it was called Lindsay Park, back when I was working shift work in the mid 80's. It was nice then, and after the renovation it's really nice now. It's just expensive compared to the City pools. But it's nicer, and has a track, and all sorts of fancy-pants weight equipment I'll never use, and gyms, and I don't know what else all. Well I do know about the 10m dive tower but I have better sense than to go off it.

So I finally bit the bullet and got a pass. Today I shared a 50 m pool with 3 other people at most. I only swam 45 minutes, and it was a bit slow, but I wasn't pushing it. Lots of kick, and pull, and some fist drill. Such a nice pool. And close to work. Let's see how this works out.

After the swim I went down for the bone scan. This is a two part deal. The first part is a preliminary scan and an injection of radioactive goop. The green glow hardly shows at all, and my work peeps were polite enough not to mention it. After a few hours I went back for the second part, 5 or 6 scans of my feet and knees. She asked if I had pain in my knees or any issues with them, so they picked something up. She took a couple shots of them in particular.

Then they sent me across the hall to the x ray machine, and had three done on my left foot. As it turns out, they only put the 3 x rays on the CD, and now I have to go back and get the bone scans put on there as well. Which is what my doctor really wanted in the first place. I was hoping for the news of what's happening in that foot, and I suspect with them wanting x rays, that there is something broken. Which would be bad. But I am remaining positive, till I get told otherwise.

In other news:

• My yoga teacher's entourage is taking good care of her. That got real exciting for them for a while but seems to be getting better.
• My contract at Talisman (the company) has been renewed until the end of March. I sign the paperwork on Thursday. Yay!
• The first episode of The Borgias was really good. We'll be buying the season's worth of DVDs.
• I am looking forward to putting up the Christmas tree. There are times I haven't. The plan is to time lapse movie it.