My mother can't swim and is afraid of the water, so she had my sister and me in swimming lessons at the Y pretty much the day we were old enough because, she said, "I couldn't save you."

Yeah, same with us. I was one of those tossed in the pool babies. In fact, my mother taught me to swim, in part. She just couldn't do it herself, because she was scared of having her face underwater. But she wasn't going to let that get in the way of us.

She's better with the water now, much, but she'll never love it. She's a floater, not a swimmer.

Because I might have to wash my hair again if Loki doesn't stop mauling my head.

Amarna loves to chew my hair if I either don't shampoo after swimming or have my hair colored. Either one of those drives her bonkers and she must gnaw.

(I've been wearing glasses since I was five, and being rendered unable to see more than six inches in front of my face did not endear the aquatic environment to me).

I'm blind as a bat without my glasses, too, but since I really only swim in pools, not being to see detail doesn't really matter. I use goggles when I'm doing laps just so I can stay in my lane. If I ever went ocean diving/snorking, I'd see if I could afford a prescription mask like the Hugh Grant character in Notting Hill had.

Aveda or chlorine make Lokes crazy. I can tell if I didn't shower long after swimming when he starts nibbling my toes or the (ACK) back of my thighs or shoulders.

ita, is your mother originally from Jamaica?

I'm super comfortable in water, and I'm still a floater more than a swimmer!

Eh, I suspect that the real ideological point to the donation is "supports gigantor corporate interests in Minnesota". It generally is.

And this is why single-issue voting is difficult for people.

We had to learn how to swim to pass 8th grade (barring disability issues). My home town was on Lake Huron and had a river running through the middle of it, as well as several smaller lakes nearby that high schoolers used as party sites, so it was a pretty big safety concern. It may not be seen as such a priority in less water-centric areas.

All the talk of fitballs made me realize I hadn't blown my 85cm Pezzi up enough. Given that I nearly fainted with the effort of blowing it up by mouth even that far, I brought a compressor in the house and blew it up more with that. It's definitely better to sit on now. Though my general situation is really unergonomic due to some realities about my new room. It'll take a while for me to work the kinks out of the new place, post-move.

Where I grew up, unless you belonged to a pool at a local hotel (the HoJos or Rossi Hotel had pools you could join, which we did) or had one in your backyard, or maybe your family belonged to the Braidwood Recreational Area (expensive annual fees, so we didn't join) (but if you had skin darker than a tan, you didn't go there, either--I had a Pakistani friend in high school who had to get smuggled into Braidwood by his friends who were members because he would have gotten stopped at the gate otherwise), you weren't able to swim until high school, and that was only if you went to the public school. They didn't have a YMCA in the west side of Joliet until I was in high school.

We had to pass a swim test to graduate college. They just got rid of the requirement a few years ago.

I had to take swimming in high school, and I don't think there was any way to pass out of it.