Julianna’s Prom
Liza's girlfriend Julianna asked her to Junior prom, so I had a chance to take some photos in a not so usual setting. At least, no skates.
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Lynwood Invitational
Lynwood again.
Actually, Lynwood is probably the best club in the United States (except for Lombard, of course). Amazing skaters. Now they have their own Invitational, and it was organized beautifully. Pretty much everything, from schedule to programs and video stream, was perfect.
Girls skated well, but still lost to Lillian (naturally) and to Evelyn Otiniano from Spring TX (narrowly). Liza got bronze, Annie got fourth. Their quartet had no competition.
Anne: Photos | Style Dance | Free Dance
Liza: Photos | Style Dance | Free Dance
Quartet: Photos | Video
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Lynwood
The first league meet of the season. The second one actually, but girls skipped Aurora, their routines weren't ready, so they only skated Style here in Lynwood. Free Dance is still not ready.
Photos only, no videos. BTW, at Lynwood I had a revelation: the problems with image quality that I have been struggling with turned out NOT to be a result of my inability to figure out the optimal set of settings. No, it was the lens. All this time it was the lens, and I couldn't even imagine that G-Master lens would be able to be that evil, so I kept looking for better settings, getting the same result again and again. And this time around I finally replaced 70-200 with 90mm prime, and got decent results despite having to use ISO 10000. Got to get rid of that lens now. Who could have thought. Here are the photos:
There is one video though, not mine and no connection to Lynwood: Isa takes a media class in her school, and one of her projects for that class was to create a commercial for something, no matter what. She made a commercial for Edea skates, and casted Annie for a part in it. Here it is:
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The Diet Starts Today
After some serious research and thorough consideration, our family is switching to the Macrobiotic diet, which is supposed to be anti-inflammatory (among other things it can allegedly do). The reason for this self-inflicted atrocity is Annie's arthritis. Not sure how long we will be able to last: the diet comprises mostly carbs and some obviously inedible things like seaweed. Proteins come almost exclusively from soy stuff like tofu or tempeh, and various beans.
Should it work out without driving us all insane, I'd consider it a miracle.
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Americas Cup
Girls are skating at the Americas Cup in Orlando.
This is one of their official posters, I have nothing to do with that and have never seen this photo before.
Here is the first day videos, Style Dance. Annie skated with some muscle pulled and after a week of no practice because of that, and got 10th with a pretty good score including very decent components. We hope she will be able to skate tomorrow. Liza did awesome and got 8th.
Free Dance videos coming tomorrow.
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For Tricia
Lena came up with this idea to make a souvenir for Tricia: some photos illustrating her work with girls, leading them from the very beginning to the World Skate Games. The first photo is from 2013.
And here she is opening it:
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The New Year’s Eve
Spent the New Year's eve in Michigan with the Gliks and the Glicks. No Borises though, two of them unfortunately had health issues, and the third one stayed at home in Illinois with Stephanie. Eugene also stayed in Illinois, but all the kids who are still more or less kids were there.
Didn't do anything special. Just went for some ice skating, and girls looked really cute trying to do their skating things on ice.
It was good. Nice and warm. Hope this year will also be good for us.
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Yesss!!!
They are done. Girls have just skated their quartet. Their goal was not to get last; mission accomplished, they got 10th place out of 12.
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