Living with no heart

The other day as I went on my email to check my mail, the homepage had some recent news stories and a specific one caught my eye. The heading said "Teen girl lives 4 months with no heart, leaves hospital." As soon and I read that, I knew I would be interested in this article. I clicked on the link and read the article. I was so interested in this topic i decided to search for another article and found one from ABC. This article is about a 14 year old who was living with no heart for 118 days. She had 2 heart transplants and the doctors decided to do something vary unusual and that was to insert artificial heart pumps which made blood flow through her body. This is absolutely amazing to me. What do you think? Is this a Miracle? 

Culver Academy Uniforms

This past weekend, I was in Culver, Indiana for more hockey games. We played two games at Culver Academy. For those that do not know, Culver Academy is a Military Academy for high school aged students from all over the world. Many of them from Spain. Students who attend this academy, must wear their uniforms at all times except for when they are in their dorm rooms. Girls are allowed to change into jeans on Friday and Saturday nights but not until 7pm. The girls wear navy blue and green plaid skirts with black tights on the bottom and on top they wear white button up collard shirts with navy sweaters on top. Since it was pretty cold last night, most of them we wearing black pea coats as well. The guys we wearing blue military pants that had a navy blue stripe down each leg and on the top, they wore blue button up shirts with maroon sweaters over the shirts and had navy jackets on top. A two digit number of the year the boy was going to graduate was sewn on the left shoulder of the jacket. Every time they guys would walk into the ice rink, they would remove their hats as a sign of respect and they would put them back on as the left the building. It is amazing to me that these students wear these uniforms every single day. Has anyone ever seen these Culver students before?

Pre-game Preparation

After trying many things to get our hockey team prepared for a game, this past weekend in Madison a girl on my team stepped up and had a GREAT idea. The previous weekend my coach had confronted my team about our playing habits, and wanted us to come up with a reason why we had been so inconsistent. In this search for an answer, my team and I had decided that we were going to put a new twist in our pre-game preparation. After our warm up and stretch outside in the parking lot, we decided to try something new. Whitney, the girl who came up with this outstanding idea, told everyone to lay down and close there eyes and asked everyone to turn off there iPods. Since I have played with Whitney before in the past, I had already done this pre-game preparation meditation. As we were laying down with our eyes closed, the first thing she told us to do was think of a color and to think only about that particular color. After about a minute, she told us to stop thinking about that color and told us to think of a sound and only that sound. After about another minute, she told us to think about the color and the sound and only those two things. She then told us to think only of the color and to totally forget about the sound. After that, she told us to stop thinking of the color. As I was laying there with my eyes closed, I was thinking about absolutely nothing. You may not think it but you really can thing about nothing at times and this is exactly was this activity was meant to do. Make you clear your mind and think of nothing. In order for it to work, you have to concentrate really hard and think about only the things the leader tells you to think about. For most people, this worked. Our minds were clear. We went out and played an outstanding game and that is exactly what we wanted. We finally found a Pre-game meditation activity that we will continue to do before we play games.

Has anyone else who plays sports done anything like this to get mentally prepared for a game?