Hello everybody!
I am finally home. I had a great trip and now it is time to get down to business and take care of everything that needs attention before the year 2009 begins. I came home on November 1 just in time for our team gathering at Allyson Felix's house.
We had a really good time eating, playing spades and this silly game called guestures. You may have heard of it. It is like charades only you have a little box that gives you words to act out and you have 30 seconds for your team to guess as many as they can. It was fun to see a bunch of grown people doing silly things while acting out words like 3 stooges, scuba dive, and many more. Even Allyson’s dog Chloe who is now famous got into the action, (
she is featured on spikes videos, be sure to check her out) but she cheated because you can not make noise or speak while giving clues and her barking was definitely noisy!
Allyson put together a really nice slide show of pictures that each of us had taken over the past year, I really enjoyed seeing all the pictures that came with so many memories. We gave out silly awards such as the “What What What” award was given to Dawn Harper (if you remember her reaction to winning the gold medal this year) and the “I Can’t Understand You” award going to our French training partner Bruno Naprix and my award was “My hamstring, My knee, My Whole Body Hurts” award (describing my many injuries over the years) to name a few.
This was just our way of having fun with each other and laughing at ourselves. It was a small but most certainly fun because we had time to just be ourselves, eat what we wanted, and not worry about training. Those days are soon to be over!!!
Today I am so excited because I am headed out to Riverside (town where I grew up) to meet with a community foundation that is going to assist me with my philanthropic efforts in regards to work with kids in the inner cities through education and sports programs. This has been something that I have wanted to do for many years and it looks like it is finally going to happen. I am working on my website that will tell you more about it. One of the sports programs that I am including is cricket. I want kids here to learn about the sport that teaches etiquette, sportsmanship, and ambassadorship of goodwill. Remember when I told you my brothers are American born cricket players and I showed you pictures of me learning to play? I really did enjoy it and I am going to continue with my lessons while we implement our cricket program.
Joanna