It's Raining Cats and Dogs (JAN - FEB)

It’s such bad weather in California! After my trip to the Netherlands, I went to visit Emy and Marcello so I could give them smoked eel from Holland. I chose the worst weekend ever to do that. There were three storms that week, and I had to drive through two of them (there and back). On my way back, I counted 12 accidents! Most of the outer-lanes were flooded and at one point the car next to me unknowingly drove right through it, creating a car that flushed my car for at least five seconds! I couldn’t see a thing! I actually thought it was pretty cool but still worried about keeping my steering wheel straight and staying in my lane. In another storm in February five people died! The storms are really crazy and terrifying. It might not rain very often in California, but when it does, she’s shows what she’s got!

This year I decided to take intersession courses. Normally, a class takes 16 weeks, but in intersession (winter) you can take the class in only four weeks. This however requires true commitment, as every class is four hours long, Monday through Thursday. Everybody always recommends that you just take one class, but I had to take two. I need a total of 60 units to transfer to a University. That meant that I needed six more classes, and since Softball season is in the spring I only wanted to take four classes.

In the winter I took Sociology and Astronomy Lab. In addition, I still had softball practice. This is what my schedule looked like:
8:30 - 12:05 Sociology
13:30 - 15:30 Softball
15:45 - 19:20 Astronomy Lab

It was very intense, but luckily for just four weeks. I was really excited about my astronomy class. In the Fall I took Introduction to Astronomy, and for my General Education I also needed a laboratory class. However, the weather did not allow us to take out the telescope that often! Weirdly for California it was a really rainy, windy and cloudy period of time. We were supposed to take the telescope out every night, but because of the weather conditions we only got to do it three times. I got to see the Moon, Venus, Mars and even the Sun! The sun was very interesting. It was mainly just a big red dot, but on top of it we could see the outburst of a solar flare. In all the classes we couldn’t go outside, we mainly watched the series Cosmos on Netflix! We got out early pretty much every day, had no homework and no intense classes. I was lucky with this class, because it made two intersession classes was perfectly manageable!

In the spring semester I’m taking Art History Honors, US History from 1876 Honors, American Government and Analysis of Social Problems. Absolutely horrifying classes to me, but that’s what I get for saving the worst General Ed classes for last. At least I hear if I get accepted to Universities before I get my final grades, but of course I intend to ace them all. I was supposed to take Calculus 3, but I had such a terrible math experience last semester that I want to avoid math for a while. Also, since this is such a high math class, they don’t offer many of them. One was during Softball and another one overlapped two of my other classes. Therefore I was forced to sign up for a night class with a terrible teacher. Everybody told me not to take his class, so I dropped it an hour before the first class. I didn’t even feel like showing up at least once. \History is very hard to me, I’m not to good at comprehensive reading. Luckily my dad enjoys it and he helps me with me weekly quizzes. I enjoy those two hours a week, because it’s some bonding time while we’re so far apart.

Our very first game day of the season was definitely a confidence boost. We won 29-1 and 17-0 against El Camino Compton. These games were terribly boring because or at-bats took forever. Still, we had to reach five innings before the mercy rule would count. I threw a strike-out every inning. In total, Carlie and I threw 10 strike-outs in 10 innings. However, the day didn’t end very well. I usually leave my phone in my car during games, because I don’t use it anyways. At the end of the day, it was not in my car! I searched it a hundred times. What I think happened, is that I unknowingly put it in my sweater pocket when I went to the bathroom and it probably fell out. Because of the two long days, it was gone for seven hours. I tried calling it, texting it and tracking it through “Find my iPhone’. Someone obviously turned my phone off, because it was offline and everything went straight to voicemail. My phone is really old (I’m waiting for the iPhone 8), so it didn’t truly bother me, but my drivers license was in my case. The next day, I suddenly got a message from somebody through Facebook. They said they found my phone and that I could pick it up at the college. I still think its weird that my phone was turned off with enough battery. The first thing people do when they lose it, is call it. But I’m happy I got it back so I didn’t want to ask too many questions. Ironically this all happened in Compton, which is known as the ghetto. I did not think I would get it back.

I’m really sad to say that to of my best friends, Taylor (TayGal) and Taylor (T-Mac) have quit the team. I will miss them on the field. TayGal was the short-stop, and my go-to when I was in the circle. She would even cheer me on in Dutch. T-Mac was a catcher, we spent a lot of fun time together in the bullpen.

At the women’s and men’s locker rooms there are some big banners for each sport with all the dates for the home games on them. This year my picture was chosen for the background! At the end of season I’m allowed to take it home.

LACMA is a museum in Los Angeles that I was very interested to see. One day, admission was free, so me and Cayla made the drive through terrible LA traffic. At one point, I looked at a painting in the distance, and thought to myself: “That looks like the Netherlands”. So I walked up, and it was! I made the same guess with the painting next to it, and the one next to that one, etc. Turned out the entire room was filled with Dutch paintings. I thought it was funny that I could tell even though I’d never seen those particular paintings before, or even the exact landscapes. There was just something about them that screamed “DUTCH!” We did not stay for very long. It was incredibly busy and disgustingly hot in the building from all the body heat. It gave me a headache and put me in a very bad mood.

We had a team building sleep-over at Coach Munch’s place. It was a very fun, long night. The next morning we went to Huntington Beach. We went in a bicycle cart and later had lunch at Ruby’s at the end of the pier. It was really busy. Apparently a girl who was a surfer had recently died and people were gathering together for her memorial. An incredible amount of people showed up. The entire pier was full of people. In the ocean, surfers huddled up in a big circle and were drumming on their boards. They also threw flowers in the middle of the circle. Even a sea lion showed up, I thought it was very special and beautiful.

Since I have scoliosis, sometimes my back and my neck gets really tight. The other day I went to get a massage, and the next day I was in so much pain I could barely walk. Luckily we had no games that week. I went to the Orthopedic Specialty Institute and got an X-Ray as well as an MRI. Turns out, I have L5S1 degenerate disk disease, which means that one of my disks has dried out. As a consequence, the disk has started to stick out a bit and is applying pressure to a nerve. The nerve is now oval instead of round. The doctor said I could get physical therapy, and epidural steroid shot or steroid pills. Since my pain has greatly (but not fully) decreased, I have chosen to just do the physical therapy.