Hi Everyone!

Well I am in Phoenix and will be doing a daily blog and hope to give you all a recap of my days here in Phoenix. This year I am playing the Women's Team Qualifying Division and also Mixed Open Doubles. My partner Jackie Paraiso and I are the defending champs in this division, but this year there is a big incentive. The winners this year will be able to go to Ireland in August to the World Championship!! How great is that. What an honor that would be. I am also playing Mixed Open Doubles with Jason Thoerner, he is always very entertaining on the court.

My husband Felix and I got in last night about 7:00 pm or so. We were both completely shocked that our plane departed out of Newark Airport time because if anyone has ever flown out of Newark, you knew that they are never on time, plus with all the bad weather on the east coast we thought for sure that we would be arriving in Phoenix at least a few hours late. So we got in got our luggage, rented the car, checked in at the hotel and then went and picked up Jackie who is rooming with us. We got all situated at the room and probably went to bed around midnight which back home is 2:00 am.

Today (Thursday) we got up at 7:00 am to hit. I don't play either of my divisions till Saturday so you may think that that is nuts, but we really just wanted to get on the courts and hit the ball around and get used to the courts, and really the only time to do it is before the tournament starts. And when we got to the Club by 7:30 some of the courts were already in use by some of our opponents in the ladies qualifying division. So we aren't the only crazy ones.

So anyway, we got to hit for a good hour or so and then hung out at the club for a little bit. We went and had some breakfast and then went back to the hotel to shower. In the afternoon we went back over to the club and got to watch a really good mixed open doubles match. Ben Croft/Cheryl Gudinas-Holmes against CLIFF SWAIN/Lorraine Feeney. I really wanted to watch this match because Jason and I play the winner of this on Saturday. The match was really great with Ben diving all over the place, and Cheryl rolling every down the line off the back wall she hit, but really the main factor was Cliff and his drive serves. The match ended up going to a tiebreaker and Cheryl and Ben went up 5-0 but then Cliff just starting drive serving. to Cheryl's side and he and Lorraine ended up pulling it out with an ace service by Cliff and they won the match 11-8. I am really looking forward to playing them on Saturday. Obviously I have never played Cliff before but am always up to the challenge.

After that, I had enough of the club, and we left to go get Jackie and we ended up going to a really nice mall and walked around and then went out to dinner, and now we are just chillin in the hotel room.

Very exciting for the life of the tournament player isn't it? Well, tomorrow should be just as exciting hahahaha. We'll be getting up pretty early again tomorrow and to go and practice and then in the afternoon are some of the other matches in our division so we really want to watch those matches and scope out our opponents. Our feeder match is playing tomorrow so we'll be sure to watch that and come up with a game plan.

Well that is all. Today was really not an exciting day. I am looking forward to playing on Saturday, but really wish I was playing tomorrow, I really don't like all this sitting around nonsense. I'll type some more tomorrow and will hopefully have something a little more exciting to say.

Later-
Aimee