Ultimate frisbee=the best sport ever.
WE PLAYED A REAL GAME! ON A REAL FIELD! WITH GRASS!
It was awesome. I have not played a legitimate game since August. I am SO out of shape, and SO looking forward to this season.
My father is taking tomorrow off of school, so I am going in late. Sleeping until nine. WAHOO!
Tonight was Purim, a rather exciting Jewish holiday, which features strange costumes and pastries. Also, we won our first playoff trial today, advancing us to the next round on Monday.
I have been doing homework since returning home from synagogue. Tomorrow, my Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class will complete its trial of Napoleon Bonaparte for Crimes Against Humanity. I am playing Napoleon. I have prepared a ridiculous French accent, and hopefully will be acquitted. It is always interesting to see how these historical mock trials will play out. On the one hand, I somewhat believe that Napoleon is guilty of the charges, so I am playing devil’s advocate in that sense, something I often do and enjoy greatly. However, I am also speaking in line with what happened historically; Napoleon was not in fact ever tried, much less convicted. So regardless of which side one is on in such a trial (I had similar thoughts in our 10th grade trial of President Harry Truman for War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity concerning the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), one is arguing against some sort of establishment.
Frisbee practice tomorrow! Hopefully the field will be clear enough that we can play an actual game.
Today was an odd day. My sister is fifteen. This is a rather advanced age. I am still grappling with its implications.
The day did not begin well, however. My sister (yes, the same one whose birthday it is) was very sick, and was up early in the morning. I was woken at about four, and was able to fall back asleep, but other members of my family were not so lucky. My sister did not go to school today. Then, when my youngest sister went out to let the chickens out of their coop this morning, she discovered that one had been locked out last night, and had been killed by a predator. This is the first time we have had a chicken killed in the almost two years we’ve been raising them, and it was rather shocking. My sister was rather traumatized, having just been presented face-to-face with the mangled carcass of a bird she thought she was letting out, and she came back inside sobbing. My father and I had to clean up, and as the poor thing had been out all night, it was frozen solid. It was quite a job, and I thus had a very sad start to the day.
School went well after that, except that I did not have enough food, and was thus rather headache-ish and grumpy all day. We had a rather cold ultimate practice outside, and I managed to go the entire day without eating the four cupcakes I was entrusted with by a classmate of my sister’s who had baked them for her birthday and asked me to transmit them to her. This was no mean, feat, but I got one after dinner, so I am happy.
Our plans for Watchmen are solidified. A few members of our extended group have been their since a bit before five PM, and I will be meeting them there within a few hours, along with some other friends arriving from elsewhere. I will be picking up one other on the way. The movie is two hours and forty-three minutes long, so it’s going to be a late night. But it will be worth it.
We won our trial today, and will thus be moving on to the first round of the playoffs on Monday. We will be playing the winner of Region #16, the Berkshires, which will be either Lennox or Longmeadow; they have a tiebreaker trial.
My plans for tomorrow night are almost completely formed. I am getting PUMPED! I am going to go to Ultimate practice before returning home, having dinner with my family, and going back out to the movie.
I am pretty tired from practice today. We are postponing tryouts until all of this DAMN SNOW has melted and we can actually get to the field. Until then, we are running outside, and doing workouts inside. Speaking of workouts, I came up with the most AWESOME workout today. To begin, I must explain my school’s building. There are three floors, and there are three staircases, one at each end, and one about 2/5 of the way down the hall. The workout is that you run up and down a single staircase about ten times to warm up, and then, when you reach the bottom, you open the door, and sprint down the hall to the next stairway. You run up and down that one, and then sprint to the next one. Then you run up and down that one, and work your way back and forth again. It is great because it combines light jogging (down stairs), heavy jogging (up stairs), and sprinting, which are all important in ultimate. Better still, it gets you used to changing which one you are doing and then going back to another; endurance and explosiveness. It is FABULOUSLY tiring. After, we joined up with the people who had been running outside, and had an excellent workout inside.
We have a trial tomorrow afternoon; a tiebreaker in our region. We are playing Tantasqua. We have never faced this school before, so we don’t know what to expect. Also, since we are up to the tiebreaker level now, this trial and all after it are coin flips. That is, we arrive, and the two teams flip a coin. The winner of the coin flip determines which side their team will present. We know which side we will call if we win, but we have to be ready to do either one. Thus, I will run my closing through a couple times tonight, and then get a lot of sleep.
Having trials on Wednesdays is great for me because it means I have no classes. Thus, I do not need to do any homework.
I am solidifying plans for Watchmen. We have an extra ticket because one friend backed out on us, so I will try to sell it to someone beforehand, or at the show, which I imagine will be pretty easy. The question I am dealing with now relates to the fact that I have discovered that another group of my friends is going to the theater right after school to get on line. I would go with them, but it is my sister’s birthday, so I will need to be at home. I am therefore debating the morality of having them save us spots on line. It would only be four people, so it is not as if we will be doing a huge disservice to the people behind them, but it could result in some pretty serious anger from the rest of the people on line. I have to consult with my friends tomorrow before making a decision.
