*Great* pic snapped by fellow VOTSer Quan Nguyen at yesterday's charity hat tournament. And yes, I got the D. Wahoo!
Beck has been hiking in the Grand Canyon since Thursday - she's doing a veterinary relief effort trip for the Havasupai - so I've been all on my lonesome. Most of it has been spent taking a break to regather myself and get ready to reload for the Summer Sessions (and, in case you haven't noticed, catching up on blogging). I've caught some Stanley Cup Playoffs (I'm 0 for 2, as both the Sharks and the Habs look on their ways out), NBA playoffs (1 for 2, as it sadly looks like we're headed for another Lakers-Celtics Finals), MLB (don't even ask), and grabbed a movie in there, too (a re-viewing of the Coens' No Country for Old Men - I managed to find a good account of that ending, iyi). Pretty low key stuff, mixed with workouts and dog walks. Nice to relax for a bit before I plunge back in on Monday.
Beck is, you may have guessed, far more creative of a chef than I, but I've made do in her absence. A burrito bowl* on Thursday, turkey cheeseburger casserole** on Friday, and MoJo*** on Saturday. VICTORY. It's also worth noting that Beck is one hundred percent incommunicado - seems 3G doesn't cover the floor of the Canyon - and Friday was probably the first day that we hadn't communicated in any form since she went on her NOLS trip in what, 1998? I eagerly await her return...
* - Ground turkey w/ adobo, refried beans, cheddar cheese, taco sauce = mmmm. Accompanied by a big serving of broccoli w/ bbq sauce.
** - Ground turkey w/ mixed-in egg whites, chopped provolone cheese, and a mix of bbq sauce and ketchup = mmmm. Also accompanied by a big serving of salt & peppered broccoli.
*** - Ground turkey w/ ... just kidding. I took home a leftover slice of the lunchtime pizza (see below). So technically my dinner was a slice of NY style cheese pizza from Venezia's, but that was at 4 pm. After the nighttime tourney until 10 pm, though (again, see below), I fulfilled my day-long daydream of rushing back home from Avondale to get to MoJo before closing (I made it with 20 minutes to spare) and had a Beck-esque froyo in her honor - plain and vanilla yogurt w/ strawberries, fruity pebbles, a smattering of m & m's, granola, and pralines. And if you thought Mexican food after multiple hours of frisbee was tasty, tasty, let me tell you that concoction was friggin' transcendent. With the added bonus that I hung out at the fru-fru Biltmore Mall in my post Ulty state of disgustingness. Take that, beautiful people!
Yesterday was my first long, brutal day of disc in a while. True enough that we played all day, sorta, at Daweena, but that was w/ 19 people, and I only played O points. Yesterday was two games of SLUG frisbee with maybe 18, 19 people total (only two subs per side, and I really didn't take but one or two points off) for a total of three hours followed by four hours of essentially no-sub Ultimate at Kelly's night time charity hat tourney. The former was a bit of a mess; it was tough to balance teams because people showed up and were leaving early, and my side (and "my side" is randomly determined, mind you) ended up with an advantage, particularly at the end. We won 13-8 / 13-9 or so, but didn't really feel great about it as Dheintime in particular clearly got a little frustrated with the balance of powers. Still, free lunch is free lunch, and I committed only a single stall 9 turnover en route to my 8th SLUG win of 2010 (that's 8-0 for those of you, etc.). I also ran a ton of cup and cut a whole lot, which is worth noting because I still had another tournament in front of me. Anyhoo, my winning streak and the balanced teams issue are enough to inspire me to let someone else pick the teams next week (though in my defense, I did that last week - Ebay picked 'em - and I still won. So maybe I'm just on a good streak of late, so baby baby doesn't need to come back maybe next week).
Grabbed some pizza with les boys and then came home to watch the Habs lose at home. I played with the dogs for a bit, ate a little, then re-donned the armor and drove west to go at it again. Kelly Smith (of Mark of Zorro fame) took some big initiative and hosted a tourney for Arizonans for the Protection of Exploited Children and Adults (APECA) - $10 got you a t-shirt and four hours of night time Ultimate, and it was very worth it (and for a good cause, taboot). For whatever reason, it drew a lot of inexperienced players - there were maybe 15 experienced people out of the 40+ there. So it was set up to be a purely good times, teach new people how to play tourney, and it surely was - a good chance to run around (A LOT) and air it out. For some reason (I suspect there was sandbagging going on in the self-rating process), one of the teams ended up with Ebay, Big Nate, Tricky, and Rob Norbeck, while my team ended up with Ted and me and a lot of two or three pickup games of lifetime experience players. So we were not favorites by any stretch, which gave us all the more reason just to let it fly and try to show people the ropes.
I'll eschew a detailed account of a hat tournament, other than to say that I had two legit greatests for goals: one was a very controlled jump out the back of the endzone, flip it to Ted (and I knew right where he was, so this was something of an anticlimactic greatest), and the other was a high degree of difficulty full speed sprint, layout out of bounds and flip a nice floaty shot to the middle of the endzone for someone to run down. Very nice! I also just ran and ran and ran all three games, up to and including the very last one where I felt about as fresh and fast as I did all day and managed to dominate a little bit. At a hat tourney, but still. So that was a good feeling - I had set out to test the knee, and it not only held up, but propelled me to some layout grabs, skies, and high energy good play (for posterity, that all happened against Seth and Ary et al.). Our game against the aforementioned stacked team was a blast, too, as we managed to give them a good game despite the odds being decidedly not in our favor. And the first game we played was against a bunch of Air Force guys who have been using Ultimate as their cardio training - they didn't entirely know what they were doing, but they caught well and ran really hard and seemed to have a great time.
So yeah, great, athletic day for Saturday, and I am going to take today off to recover - I unsurprisingly feel pretty banged up, though it's more just general soreness from doing that for the first time in a long while than any injury; my knees feel pretty darned good. The worst part is actually my toes - my new, negative fifteen dollar cleats were very comfortable but not quite broken in, so I have a slew of blood blisters. Yeck. I imagine I'll survive.
Alright, it's Cubbies time. Here's hoping Beck's doing well and gets back home soon; the casa de flores is oh So Lonely without her. "Just take a seat / they're always free..."
Oh, and sure, here are some more tourney pics of your narrator for your enjoyment, courtesy of Stephen So and Quan:
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