I forgot to mention, forgot to mention Tuesday, home of a ridiculous upset from Confessions (and the ancient Greeks). The previous week we played against the winless team from Thursday night and were destroyed, losing something like 15-7 and looking pathetic in the process. So when we faced the undefeated Thursday team on Tuesday night, prospects were not good. When Nipar, Hoyt, and Angel didn't show up, our prospects were worse. When Tim and Heart Attack tore hamstrings in the game and we were down to nine players, two of whom had reliable forehands, one of whom was the has-been-playing-for-eight-months-now-Beck... prospects were non-existent.
And yet, somehow, we persevered. We looked terrible; it was fairly windy, and we couldn't complete three passes in a row in our defense-less endzone drill before the game. Our opponents (Town Tricycle, including Nappi, Nicole, Joe, a new stud named Will, Todd, and a see-below-injured Vince) threw a zone that gave us a lot of trouble, and even went zone plus one on us on occasion. It was the usual zone with one player dedicated to covering me. One on one matchups are not a problem normally - it's just like man defense - but when the cup is around our (by definition) inexperienced throwers, it can be hard to get to a place where they can realistically get the disc to me. So all signals pointed to a blowout by the bad guys, even though Vince (oft-mentioned VOTS superstar) was injured in an ATV accident the weekend before.
Fortunately, we figured out our predicament early on re: the inability to complete multiple passes. And anyone can run hard, so... we decided for a broad strategy of huck and play Z. And it worked - we got lots of short field turnovers and converted enough to take the W! Crazy times! Lots of good hard play from everyone on the team, some good catches on long hammers / hucks and/or some good endzone cuts. I had one nutzoid lefty layout grab on a blade for a score, and otherwise threw a whole ton of hammers and hucks (for scores, sure, but a lot of punt-turns, too). It boiled down to a 12-6 win. Incredible. The VOTS universe is still reeling. It hardly means we're now going to march to the championship, but it was good to see us use what we had to steal a win. Yeah VOTS!
The rest of our week was interesting too. One of Beck's friends from high school (whom she hasn't seen in some ten years), Mike, was in town, partially to visit his girlfriend / her family and partially to do some med school interviewing in Tucson. Mike's been working various places in Africa over the past couple of years and decided to take the med school route. He's now living in Brooklyn (I think) up in NYC, has finished his post-bac coursework and is doing the usual 25 applications game. His girlfriend Sharon is from Kenya, and though her mom moved here a few years back, she and her siblings had just come over to the US three weeks ago. Yikes! And to Phoenix of all places! Mike stayed with us out of respect for traditional views concerning premarital apartment-staying, but spent most of his time with his SLF and helping the family get affairs in order - getting Sharon's brother enrolled in high school, getting IDs for everyone, taking Sharon to universities in the area to figure out what she needs to do to enroll, teaching her to drive, etc. Really nice guy and gal in quite a state of flux at this point in their lives; fun to meet them and hope things work out well. We had a fun dinner with them and another Brighton-High acquaintance (Erik?) at a local Mexican dive on Thursday, too.
Played softball on Friday night and split a double header. The only real highlight was when the ump called the batter out for a line drive that hit a players glove and tumbled to the ground. I was on first at the time; I stayed put when the line drive came off the bat, but when it hit the ground, naturally I had to run to second. The guy who dropped the ball picked it up and fired to second for the out - or so I thought, as this was approximately when the ump said "Out!" So I walked to third toward our dugout, even stepping on third on my way. And I was not five feet past the base when the ump called me out again for "leaving the field of play." Double play. Huh? So the ump's defense was that he called the batter out "when the third baseman caught it."
I replied, "But he didn't catch it."
"Well, whether he caught it or it was an intentional drop, either way the batter is out."
"Well, he didn't catch it, and if you thought it was an intentional drop, then it's a dead ball."
"Right."
"So... why didn't you call dead ball?"
"Well, I had already clearly called the batter out, and I didn't call you out on second."
"But that's all beside the point if it's a dead ball..."
This conversation goes exactly nowhere. So dumb. The only funny part is that later on in the second game, we were down by ten runs in the last inning with no real chance of catching up. So i swung for the fences and popped it sky high foul down the 3b line. The third baseman gorped it. I came back to the batter's box and asked, "he touched it, am I out?" in a joking manner. Only the ump didn't get it at all. "No, it's just a foul ball." Either this was an expert-level deadpan counter-joke, or he had completely forgotten about the other call. Whatever.
ASU continues to roll on. I've got a lot of work coming up w/ TAing the Bio 311 course, though this is the second writing run-through, so hopefully things will go more smoothly. We shall see. Other work is subtly piling up. And I've been having trouble getting sleep, sporadic chills and some kind of weird asthma-type issues of late. I feel particularly crummy today. Hmmmm... we'll see how the rest of the semester goes.
Beck and I saw the cute Gervais comedy The Invention of Lying last night. Pretty funny if a bit uneven. I, being a nerd, contest that human history would have included Napoleonic events without lying. I also don't know how the overt Religion = Lying will play in certain circles. Ah, well. It was fun and passed the time.
Anyways, that's enough blogging for today. I am unsure whether I will try to review Dark Side before this coming Saturday; technically it's not a Phish Halloween album (it was covered on 11.02.1998), so I think I've met my quota effectively. Still, I'll give it a shot if other things don't stand in the way. Which they will.
Here's to missing a Phish festival in favor of reading 100 Bio & Sci essays! Have a good week, everybody. Oh, and congrats to Frank for passing his prospectus defense! Keep it up, Geoman.
No comments:
Post a Comment