Ten More Thoughts

Here's some more thoughts and musings, maybe not so random.

31. CLX Worlds update! We received our schedule finally! We will be playing the Thundering Herd of the UK, Gert Johnny's Band of Italy, and The Bombing Madd Fatties of Canada, the 36, 25, and 16 seeds of the tournament. CLX is the 5 seed. But...there is bad news on the homefront. A key player on CLX world's team may have injured himself beyond repair at nationals this year. I'm a little worried.

32. Nationals is over. My predictions were fairly accurate with the exceptions of Bad Larry and Deliverance. If I switch those two teams in my final standings, I would have done exceptional. As it is, I predicted the Brass Monkey loss, albeit to the wrong team, but I had a hunch they'd lose in semis. I also predicted 3 of the 4 semis teams, both finals teams, and the finals winner. Not so hard you say? Well, I didn't see you predict anything...

33. Once again, the central region had a poor showing across all divisions. Were there any teams in the top 8? I can't remember any. Well, after the success of SubZero and CLX last year, it appears that the central region is bottom feeding again.

34. I was really bummed that CLX didn't play this year's nationals. I wouldn't have wanted to pull a Bad Larry, but it is disappointing to not know how we would have performed. Bil Elsinger had high praise for us, nearly locking us in for a semis berth and commenting that he was pretty sure we could have beaten two or three of the semifinalists, without even ever seeing us play! Well, thanks Bil. Where's this newfound respect coming from? I feel like some people were cheated out of a nationals appearance this year, especially those who joined the team this year, but have never been to nationals before. All I can do now is ponder what could have been.

35. Off of ultimate now. My favorite candy bar is 3 Musketeers. Once in awhile, I think Mars will be better because it's a 3 Musketeers with caramel, but after eating the occassional Mars bar, I always wish I would have opted for the 3 Musketeers. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are excellent, too. Those two are certainly in a class of their own.

36. I think on the 100+ hours I'll be in the air and in airports over the next 3.5 weeks, I'll try to study the Psalms very closely. They represent my least studied area of the Bible. I've never read all the way through them, and never taken any notes while reading them. I have a journal/notebook I got from my brother last Christmas that is small and has about 100 sheets of paper in it. Perfect for such a task as writing down notes from each individual Psalm. I'm excited to finally get through them.

37. Here's a list of things I don't own. A cell phone, a regular phone, a working computer, an IPod, a working CD player unless you count my car which only works 1/4 of the time, or a DVD player, unless you count the one I gave to Lana, which was a Playstation Two. Well, I'm not a technology hater and I do certainly count on the generosity of friends to use phones and computers every once in awhile or more!, but I don't feel the need to own those things. Well, it would be nice to have my own computer and I'm sure my parents (and Lana) would like it if I got my own cell phone. Then I could have the record on Race 21!

38. I recently read The Godfather and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts here and there that I didn't care for and I'm not sure how they advanced the story or how they were relevant or necessary, but for the most part, the book was excellent. I am looking forward to seeing the movie, which is usually not as good as the book, because you can't as good of a feel for the characters in a movie using just spoken dialogue. Hey, that word has all 5 vowels and it's only 8 letters long. Do you know a word shorter than that that uses all five vowels? I do.

39. One time in church when I was younger, one of my brothers spilled a cup of hot coffee into my lap. It stung. The water was near boiling; I still don't understand how people can drink liquids that are that hot, I enjoy my tastebuds too much for that. I jumped around like crazy, pushing the table back and knocking over my chair, drawing attention from everybody around. My dad took me into the bathroom and when I took my pants off, my skin was extremely burnt and some of the flesh was all wrinkled and falling off. I don't remember much about the recovery time from that, but just so you all know, hot coffee in the groin is not pleasant.

40. You know what else isn't pleasant to have hit your groin? Baseballs. As a kid I really sucked at baseball, which was disappointing to me because my dad invested a lot of time trying to make me and my brothers better. I was always afraid of getting hit by the ball whether I was up to bat or trying to field a grounder. My best positions were centerfield (where I only had to field slow rollers or pop flies) and first base (where there weren't too many grounders and I mostly just had to make sure I caught the ball from the other infielders). One year I was allowed to pitch. I just threw the ball as hard as I could, which sometimes was fast and sometimes was not. I had little control, though, and frequently threw at the batters on accident. No, there was no Pedro Martinez stuff going on. Once I remember involuntarily yelling "Lookout" on a particularly bad pitch headed right for the helmet of an unlucky kid. It just popped out when my brain must have realized that it was going to be a bad pitch. I turned fairly red after that one.

Well, that's all for today.

I'll be leaving for Australia on Friday, just two more days. Maybe I'll post here about the tournament as it progresses, but I'm not sure what kind of computer access I'll have. We'll see. Thanks for reading.