volleyball vagabond

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

IKEA - a Swedish Design

IKEA is the best and worst thing that has happened to me in Sweden. It is a store with endless opportunities of ways to recreate your kitchen, bedroom, foyer, dining room, living room, or bathroom with their ready-to-assemble furniture items. You can physically insert yourself into any of their display rooms and generate an imaginary life for yourself. Did I mention they also have a restaurant? Check out this scene from 500 Days of Summer for an inside look:

Luckily for me, the first-ever IKEA store was founded in Ämhult, a mere 43 minute drive from my new hometown of Ljungby. Rumor has it that Ingvar Kamprad, the 17-year-old founder of IKEA wanted to open the store in Ljungby - as he is from a small village just outside of the city, but was turned down as Ljungby already had a "similar" furniture store. Talk about your missed opportunity.

Daniel and I purchased a dresser, bathroom cabinet, bar-chair, small bedside table, and ceiling lamp for a grand total of $253.96. Upon departure with all of our new goodies, we were overly satisfied with our economical efficiency. So many great purchases for a fairly low price, and items we could keep and use for years. Then we had to assemble the pieces. There is no language in the world, except perhaps hieroglyphs that can help prepare you for and IKEA instruction manual:

The sheer frustration of this seemingly impossible task was breaking us. We managed to assemble the chair and the ceiling light unscathed, but the bathroom shelving unit was a real jerk. It seemed best for our relationship to call it quits after our 4th failed attempt to straighten the door of the cabinet. The next day, we awoke refreshed, and ready for our final piece: the dresser. A few minor hiccups kept us busy for the entire day, taking small fika breaks here and there to ward off any tension that may be bubbling under the surface.

Dressers in our bedroom: both from IKEA

Bathroom cabinet

It's fair to say that IKEA brings more to the home than just the ability to create the perfect image of your dream bedroom or kitchen; IKEA helps solidify relationships. If you can make it through the carrying-boxed-items-up-the-stairs + the what's-the-word-for-Phillips-head-screwdriver-in-Swedish + Meghan-can't-read-pictorial-instructions, then your relationship is bound to last. Thank you, IKEA.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

My Life as a Swedish Chef

The original Swedish Chef first premiered on The Muppet Show in 1975, 14 years prior to my existence on Earth. He is famously known for his incomprehensible mock Swedish spoken aloud as he prepares some faux recipe for his TV viewers. In every episode, he fails, resorting to some ridiculous antics. Unfortunately for you, dear readers, I am no where near as entertaining.

No. My cooking is much more tame. I recently spent an entire day searching the web on Pinterest, PoorGirlEatsWell.com (yes, that's an actual website), and AllRecipes.com for the easiest meals possible. I've come across one website where you can enter all the contents of your refrigerator and pantry, and it will generate meals you can make based off of these items; the best we had was grilled cheese. YUM! So when reading further, I found a few articles that seemed doable...at first.

The eager chef and sous-chef ready to tackle the kitchen!

The other night, Daniel and I attempted to make Twice-Baked Potatoes. I research many recipes for the easiest, and received different ideas on the temperature at which to cook the potatoes. We started the first 30 minutes at 175 C, and increased it to 200 C for the second 30 minutes. Unfortunately, we didn't know to wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil (thanks for the late tip, Piper) so they were a bit undercooked. Even so, our hunger was satisfied with this beautiful masterpiece:

The finished product: 2 potatoes, salad, and 2 skin-fries each

It was a tough feat, one that will be an ongoing battle between me and the kitchen appliances. At least nothing's caught fire or burned too badly...except for Daniel's thumb.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

52 Days of Summer

My summer with Daniel started June 7. We traveled 1,526 miles (over 24 hours of driving) in just FIVE days. Our Trip: Atlanta - Lake City - Lake Park - Boca Raton - Miami - Key Largo - Ponte Vedra - Athens.

This was all just 2 days before our week-long trip across the country 4,821 miles from Atlanta, GA to Fairbanks, AK. Despite the exhaustion (and occasional complaints), every second of this trip was 100% worth it. How many people have an opportunity in their life to go to Alaska?

4 wheeling along the Alaskan pipeline

Enjoying the scenery in Denali National Park and Preserve (Mt McKinley)

We spent the next week in Athens packing up my apartment, realizing that there is NOTHING to do in an American college town during the summer, and preparing for our next journey across the Atlantic. We traveled 5,500 miles from Atlanta to Budapest to begin our 2nd coaching tour with Bring it Promotions' Southeastern team. Keep in mind that this was ~~not~~ a direct flight. Our team finished 2nd overall in the tournament, losing to reigning champions Falconara juniors from Italy. For a group of college athletes that had only met 8 days before, we were extremely pleased with all they were able to accomplish.

2013 BIP-SE team, Global Challenge tournament: Budapest-Pula-Venice

We finally concluded our seven weeks together traveling 1,089 miles from Venice to Ljungby via bus, plane, train, and car. I could not have asked for a more memorable summer. As sad as I am to be leaving Sweden and our summer together, I know that this is just another stepping stone in creating our lives together.

My trip back to Athens continues adding back over 4,578 miles and a 6-hour time change between Daniel and me.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Curricular Activities

Besides my stint as the volleyball team’s “video coordinator”, I spend most of my days in my Sports Pedagogy classes, conveniently located in the Ramsey Center. I’ve managed to make a few friends, but have limited time to hang out due to my busy schedule. It’s nice that my program here is relatively compact, and most of my classes are made up of the same students. My professors aren’t too intense, but exams and papers are starting to pile up, so I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

Since my undergraduate degree was in Exercise Science instead of Education department, I have a few undergrad level courses I have to take to fulfill my teacher certificate degree needs. Hence, my classmates are split between undergrads in my Teaching Net/Wall Activities and Foundations of Sports Pedagogy classes and graduate/doctoral students in my Instructional Planning and Analysis of Pedagogy in Sport classes. There are a few people who I am in every class with, making our subgroup a little bit closer. I'm lucky to have a good core group of peers who are all (obviously) interested in the same things as I am (sports).

I was able to go to an art studio called Pints and Paints with two girls (Erin and Meg) from my classes to celebrate Meg's birthday. As I'm sure you were able to get from the name, you drink pints while painting...it's a fantastic combination attempting to distract you from your atrocious painting skills (or in my case, lack thereof) through consumption of alcohol. It obviously worked:

Just made a little bit of a mess

Everyone's final masterpiece

My finished painting - hanging proudly in my apartment

Some of my undergrad classmates came by our first home tournament at the start of the season, and rumor has it that they are planning something interesting for this upcoming weekend vs Alabama and Arkansas. Stay tuned for more curricular happenings......

Life as a Georgia Peach

I have now been a pseudo-resident in the state of Georgia for almost two months. Most of my time has been spent wearing Nike shorts, one of my many “Georgia volleyball” team-issued t-shirts and sneakers – nothing of which is too out of my character. Incorporating red and black into my wardrobe required no real effort, due to my previous college volleyball experience at University of Tampa (also red and black). Since many of you are as new to Georgia volleyball as I was, I have provided a “cast of characters” to try to help you, my faithful readers, sort out who’s who.

Name - Description

Lizzy Stemke - Head coach; She’s my boss; married to Kevin, mother of Kerrigan

Josh Lauer - Asst coach; married to Deb, father of Eli

Colleen “Neels” Bayer - Asst coach; married to Dave, mother of Max, Ben, and Sam

Matt “Huskey” Huskey - Volunteer; lives with the Lauer family

Laura Welch - Director of Operations

Trina Topping - Athletic Trainer GA; my roommate on all team trips

Vanessa & Megan - Athletic trainer undergrads

Matt, D, & Keenan - Student managers for the team

Trina and me at the airport

Some of the Dawgs sending up their love

In addition to the above-mentioned individuals, we have the Dawgs themselves; Bri & Choi are our lone seniors, followed by underclassmen Britt, Allie, Stacey, Elena, Lauren, Chloe, Tirah, Gaby, Jasmine, Maggie, Kaylee, Des, and Megan. The team plays in the volleyball arena, which is located inside the Ramsey Student Center.

My job as video coordinator entails setting up video recording for all practices and matches, taking Data Volley statistics during practices and matches, and Data Volley statistics of scouted matches for upcoming opponents.

Data Volley set-up at FSU

Due to everyone up until this point in their season competing in tournaments (meaning at least 3 matches per team per weekend), I’ve had quite a lot of Data Volleying. Luckily regular conference matches have begun, so we are going to only be scouting for two teams per weekend. Not to mention we have traveled for THREE consecutive weekends, stayed in 4 hotels, been on 3 flights, in addition to travel via charter buses. It’s becoming quite problematic to remember which hotel we’re staying at, and which key goes to the door.

Thus far in our season, we’ve hosted the Bulldog Invitational (vs GA Southern, GA State, Troy and Slovenian National team), traveled to Florida State (vs FSU, FAMU, and FIU), traveled to Michigan State (vs Albany, IPFW, and Michigan State), and traveled to SEC opponents South Carolina and Mississippi State.

[note: matches in BOLD are wins, matches in ITALICS are losses – aka we are 7-4]

We are hosting Alabama and Arkansas this upcoming weekend (September 21^stand 23^rd, respectively). Check out our schedule HERE! If you want to watch the Alabama or Arkansas matches online click HERE then select SPORT tab and click on Women's Volleyball to view our videos.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Summer Lovin', Had Me a Blast!

This summer, my boyfriend and I spent 5 weeks together. Consecutively. Ok, so we had a 4-day hiatus upon his departure from the USA and my arrival in Munich, but basically we spent every waking moment together. Essentially living together with one's relatively new boyfriend is like being on that game show "Deal or No Deal"; it either works or it crashes and burns. We definitely had our frustrations - mostly when we were stuck in one place for more than 5 hours (ie. tropical storm Debbie kept everyone in Jacksonville inside for 3 days straight, our single day road trip from Athens to Maryville, TN back to Athens, or the flight + train from Amsterdam to Halmstad). Those times were tough, we would both admit, but looking back they are now hilarious.

The trip began in Orlando, FL with DISNEY!