Month: October 2011

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Craaaaazy is the chaaaaampion, my frieeeeends…

Checkpoint Tracker has been an adventure race points-rated system for… well, I’m not sure how long it’s been around. For each race a team entered, they could win a certain number of points for their final position: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, Lotus, Cat, the Intertwined Hibiscus, etc. (You’d be amazed at how many points you get for that last one.) At the end of the adventure racing season, each team that reaches 500 points gets covered with awesomesauce. (You’d be amazed at how much awesomesauce you get from that last one.)

Last year, though, Checkpoint Tracker added a twist: their own National Championship. Previously, there was USARA (United States Adventure Racing Association). Then there were two, which gave teams two chances to earn bragging rights as national adventure racing champions. Sure, it’s odd, but getting 500 points last year is what allowed WEDALI to compete in the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge, so why knock the system?

Another reason not to knock the system is because WEDALI only finished third in USARA nationals this year (the fact that I’m writing “only” seems really cool and really sad at the same time), but they redeemed themselves valiantly by kicking some major ass in the National Checkpoint Tracker Championship race over the weekend. I could have posted this right away, but I wanted to save the link to the website and the picture that reflects their bad-assery until the very end.

So congrats to my little brother Justin and all of his WEDALI teammates for smoking the competition and… no comments about the awesomesauce this time—it seems inappropriate since they came in first.

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A good way to end the streak

Which isn’t saying much, seeing as how “the streak” is “playing a soccer game on Sunday for four straight weeks.” When I’ll be playing again, I dunno—I’ll be in Chicago next Sunday and going in for surgery the next day. How long that’ll keep me off the field… each injury has varied, so I’m not going to speculate. Suffice it to say that I’m glad that my last game for a while was this one.

It certainly helps that the final score was 4-0, but I felt like I was back to my old self. Sorta. I was panting and wheezing and my chest hurt when I would come off the field, but aside from the lack of endurance, it was good. I was back to playing sweeper—center defender—where I played for years before my knee made it hard to make sharp twists and turns. Today, no such concerns.

I felt comfortable, I felt confident, I enjoyed yelling at my teammates… it was usually about players from the other team who were standing wide open, so one time they were standing around on their own and I started yelling… it was our free kick, so it didn’t matter where they were standing. Oops. (In my defense, when the referee blew the whistle for a hand ball, he pointed toward our end of the field.)

I made some little mistakes here and there, but overall, I’m happy. And now soccer is going to be in the taillights for a little while, but if this was my send-off game or my birthday game or whatever you want to call it… if this was the last one for a few days/weeks/months, I’m okay with that. Which doesn’t change the fact that I’ll keep going to games (even if I’m on crutches) so I can yell at my teammates from the sidelines.

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Purchased due to a midlife crisis?

I was driving to school yesterday and pulled up behind a flashy looking Audi at a stoplight. (I don’t know what style it was, but suffice it to say the car was flashy.) Why do I think it’s a midlife crisis purchase, you ask? After all, most guys I know talk about getting a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Lamborghini, etc. One of those generic “I don’t really know what’s special about it, but it’s expensive and looks cool” cars.

The reason I think the Audi was a midlife crisis purchase was because of the license plate. As I pulled up behind it at the stoplight, I saw its personalized plate: ACT 2.

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Another year closer to the grave

Unless I have myself cremated, in which case I’m closer to… wherever I have my remains dumped. (Preferably not on my parents’ carpet.)

Being 35 doesn’t feel like a very special age, but at the moment, it does feels like the starting line to a very speedy race. I’ve got two online exams to take by 11:55 tonight, class tomorrow night, dinner with friends on Friday, a request/offer from a friend to help behind the scenes on a movie over the weekend, the rest of the week to prepare for and take another two online exams and then the final exam on Thursday the 27th, getting on a bus to Chicago at 12:05am on Friday, having fun at HalloweeM with a bunch of Mensa folks (See how they made that letter switch? Pretty clever, huh?), then coming home on Sunday just in time for arthroscopic knee surgery on Monday morning.

There are a lot of unknowns in there, mostly about whether I’ll be prepared for the exams and what (if anything) the surgeon will find when scoping my knee. I’ve played soccer a couple times since talking to the doc—he said it was one of my three options, so why not?—and I haven’t collapsed screaming in pain, so that’s been nice. I can also tell there’s something in the back that still doesn’t feel right, which is not so nice.

So yeah, that’s the next two weeks summed up in one long run-on sentence and I’m glad I could type it all out. Had I tried to say it instead, I might have run out of oxygen and been a lot less than one year closer to the grave.

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They’re advertising WHAT in the Yellow Pages?!

This came out of Verizon’s “superpages”—an alternative to the Yellow Pages that covers three cities—so maybe that’s why they didn’t bother to think about the potential shock that people might suffer if they started randomly flipping through the book.

It had some general information about each city in the first couple pages, then went through the business listings on white pages with a gray bar on the side. Those names are in alphabetical order, whereas the yellow pages are divided into fields of business that also include some advertisements (e.g., the list of Attorneys from pages 25 through 38). It’s easy to find the categories on each page because the upper corner shows what’s included: page 214 covers “Physicians—Pipe.” If what you’re looking for fits within that spread of the alphabet, that’s the page you need to check out.

So I looked at page 1. The first word at the top ([blank]—[blank]) was “Abortion.” It clarified lower on the page that the category was actually “abortion alternatives” and wasn’t advertising abortion services or abortion referrals, but just looking at the top… wow. Now I’m afraid to look through the book anymore because I might find something like a listing on page 214 for a physician who specializes in “abortion alternative alternatives.”

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I’m bad at being bad

I went bowling with a group of 10 other people last night and we had fun. As most people should know, an essential element of having fun bowling is mocking and taunting the other players and there were plenty of opportunities. Unfortunately… well, I’ll get to that.

We went for four rounds (some people bowed out for a round or two when their hands and wrists started getting tired—the rest of us didn’t ask for any details). The first three were like normal bowling: try and get the highest score possible. We ended up doing a ranking system according to those scores so the people who did the best moved to the leftmost lane and the crappiest players ended up on the right.

The first round established the initial rankings, which was awesome. Not because I did exceptionally well, but because I had a massive comeback in the last few frames. One guy thought I’d be stuck in the middle until I pointed at the scoreboard and he realized that I had a pair of strikes in the 8th and 9th frames. I then picked up the turkey (three strikes in a row), got nine pins and cleaned up the spare in the 10th frame. Yeah, definitely a massive comeback.

So I moved over to the left lane for a game, then proceeded to do crappy enough to move back to the middle for the third (thankfully, not crappy enough to slide all the way down, but still…). That might not have been so bad considering it was the “Groundhog Day” lane—if the ball went into the gutter, it wouldn’t always register the roll. There was at least one time when someone got four rolls in a frame because he put two balls in the gutter and later got another chance to pick up a spare the same way.

But after those first three games were done, we opted to try something different: put up the bumpers and get the lowest score possible. I sucked at it. And by “sucked”, I mean I rolled a 133. If I remember right, that was my highest score of the night. But aside from that debacle, at least I had the consolation of screwing up someone else’s game.

Michael Amiri (and I’m using his name because he had it coming) was in reach of a sub-50 game in the last two frames, but I owed him. Two days earlier, we were both working on a shoot for The WaZoo! Show that involved Nerf guns with “lasers” for aiming. The lasers were part of the sketch; the Nerf darts inside the gun were not. Nor was the fact that while we were standing around between scenes, he shot me in the jaw. So I owed him.

Consequently, in the 9th frame, he was about to roll the ball down the lane when I made a comment about him being used to not scoring. I didn’t hear him laugh, but I saw seven pins fall down as well as his middle finger multiple times during the rest of the night. Remember what I said about mocking and taunting? Hell yeah…