I am on my way back from a weekend tennis tournament, I finally find (and make) time to write something for my blog again.

Almost two months ago was the last time I wrote for my blog. So I have to dig deep in my memory to write everything down.

New Year's Eve in the USA, New Year was a great night. I hung out with friends at somebody's house and we had a blast. I kind of expected a bigger celebration for New Year's Eve with more fireworks and everything. I then realized that New Year's is maybe even bigger in our small country, which is not bad at throwing parties at all. The New Year does not start at the same time everywhere in the world. Here it was only 4 in the afternoon when it was 12 in Europe already. Just because it is so easy to have contact with friends and family over the Internet, can make it harder to be so far away sometimes. December 31st was a day that I really was a little homesick, but I do not think it is a bad thing.

The first weekend of January I got lucky and had the opportunity to go to Phoenix with two good friends of mine and their families. We went and got to see a real NBA basketball game, the Phoenix Suns played the Miami Heat. It was a huge show with a lot of good basketball, cheerleaders and tricks! We stayed in a hotel where we enjoyed the swimming pool, hot tub and had an awesome time. We went to the Phoenix zoo, and watched a movie at a movie theatre. It was one of the better weekends, we made great memories.

When it is not the weekend, school is just going on. School is just school and is not a big deal. It was still basketball season so the high school basketball games are the highlights of the week.

The weekend of January 15th the basketball team had a tournament in Santa Fe, so me and the other managers got to go too. Santa Fe is a pretty cool place and even though the main thing we saw were basketball gyms, we still had fun. The team did basically just practice and games, during one of the practices me and one of the other managers decided to go ice skating. It was his first time ever, so we were having a good time! The team did decent in this tournament.

January 30th was the night of winter ball. Winter ball is a dance in school, this time I did not have a date, so we just went with some friends. At first we went and had dinner at a restaurant, then we went to the dance which was a lot of fun. After the dance one of our friends invited a lot of people to his house to hang out. His parents made a lot of food for us, and it was a nice way to end a great night.

After a winter with a lot more snow in New Mexico than usual the first couple days of February surprised us with some more snow days. We were not complaining, me and some friends went up into the mountains to go sledding. Unfortunately one day we got one of our friend’s jeep stuck in the snow high up in the mountains. He had to come back 3 days later to dig it out. The day after that I was with different friends and this time we had to help some people get out of the snow.

Finally itwas February, that means the tennis season is about to start. I stopped being a Basketball manager, so I can spend my time at the sport I really like. The second weekend of February we had our first tournament, in El Paso. We left on Friday at 5 in the morning. I just played singles this tournament. On Friday I played 3 matches, I broke my strings in the first set, but won 1 match and lost 2. On Saturday I won both of my matches. It was very hot, but that is a good thing to get used to. We had a good weekend and the coach was pretty satisfied by the results for a first tournament.

(picture with some people from the tennis team)

One week later we traveled down to El Paso again for a tennis tournament. I lost in doubles and singles in the first round against the champion of the tournament. After that I just played some matches which were too easy so we won the rest. The team did pretty good and we are excited for the next tournament.