Fun Memorial Day Weekend

You’ll notice I was pretty radio silent last week.  That’s because not too much happened.  It was a very quiet weekend at home, and a pretty standard week of work/reading/reviewing.  I did get out and do more this last weekend.  It was a long weekend, after all.

In fact, the weekend started a little early since I got to leave work early on that Friday.  I used the extra time to go see Alice Through the Looking Glass.  I wasn’t holding out much hope for this movie, but I wound up liking it.  Really no connection to the books other than character names, but it was enjoyable.

Saturday, my church had a picnic at a park here in town I didn’t even know existed.  Apparently, it isn’t usually open to the public, but we got to go in and enjoy the grounds.  It was a great day.

Sunday was the usual, church, ultimate Frisbee, and then some TV time with some friends.  Since Once Upon a Time has ended for the season, we are watching Big Bang Theory at the moment.  Ultimate Frisbee turned out to have numbers too low to really play, which was disappointing, but the weather outside was absolutely gorgeous.  I wish we’d had more because it was a great day to play.

Monday, I got a good dose of disc sports, but disc golf instead of ultimate Frisbee.  I met up with some of my ultimate Frisbee friends, and we wound up playing a couple of rounds at the course in Sylmar.  My lack of distance throwing continued to be a problem for me, but the company was fun.  The down side is that I got very sunburned.  I thought I’d be okay in the shade when I remembered it.  Of course, I also was only counting on playing one round, not two.  Being out in the sun for 5 hours will leave you sun burned for sure.

In between all of that, I started on my annual season of Smallville.  I’m up to season 9, and I think I’m going to go ahead and watch season 10 this summer as well.  Usually, I have the season I’m watching mostly finished between the end of the regular TV season and the start of the summer TV season.  Not this year.  There really was no break.  Heck, Royal Pains started their final season before everything was even over.  But I will get through it as best I can while trying to get some extra reading in.  I did that this weekend.  I finished one book Saturday morning and read another one over the next few days.  I read most of it on Monday, finishing it before I went to bed.

Given all that, there was still so much I wanted to get in that I didn’t.  I need another couple of days off!

Word Association for May 26th

Time to get in this week's word association.

1. Disdain :: Hatred
2. Ridiculous :: Situation
3. Staple :: Office supplies
4. Junk :: Too much stuff
5. Sally :: Nightmare Before Christmas
6. Satire :: Funny
7. Calculate :: Add
8. Remove :: Block
9. Swollen :: River
10. Helpful :: Advice

Word Association for May 19th

I'm going to slip in this week's word association before I go to bed.

1. Relevant :: to the Discussion
2. Fester :: Wound
3. Moving :: Van
4. Bubble :: Blowing
5. Skyline :: City
6. Purchase :: Books
7. Strange :: Behavior
8. Sticky :: Situation
9. Haircut :: Clippers
10. Package :: Delivered

Men’s Beach Tournament

So Saturday was the Men’s Beach League Tournament.  It pretty much went as expected.  Translation: We lost both of our games.

We had the lowest turnout of any of the teams, at least as far as I saw.  We had four subs the first game and three the second.  When I’m one of those subs (since I’m a slow runner) and the other team has a full field of subs plus some, you are in trouble.

But both games were hard fought.  We never just gave up but played each game as hard as we could.  Want proof?  I was having trouble staying awake to read at 6 PM that night.  Yes, I was that exhausted.

And we had fun.  I mean, seriously, we were playing ultimate on the beach in beautiful weather.  What’s not to love?

I got a very light burn that I’m hoping will turn into a tan.  However, it will turn into a very fun tan line since it clearly shows I was wearing a tank top.

I really would like to be on a team that wins occasionally.  Heck, would it be that much to ask for to be on a team that wins half their games?  But I wouldn’t have skipped this season had I known how it would turn out.

Now, to find reasons to get to the beach other times.  I really need to go to the beach more often.

Savage Beach

This last Saturday was the last regular week of men’s beach league for the year.  And my team only had five guys show up.  We play five on the field at a time, so that meant we were playing savage.  In fact, I showed up late, so we were playing down a man and savage when I showed up.

The first game started our relatively close.  In fact, we took half, and then we went up 7-5.  But that’s when we ran out of gas.  We didn’t score another point for the rest of the game.

The second game was against another savage team.  Unfortunately, they’d had a while to rest up before we played them, so we were more tired than they were.  We got 3 points before they got to 11.

But I will say what I’ve been saying all season – I was on the beach.  The weather was nice.  It was partly cloudy and a very slight breeze.  In fact, it was so nice I headed down toward the water and sat there reading until I finished my book.  I figured, I wanted to finish it that day one place or another, and the beach was a nicer place to do that than my living room.

This coming weekend is the tournament.  Fortunately, we could still win the entire thing.  We’d have to play very differently if that were to happen, but it is a distinct possibility.

Malice Domestic

The rest of my trip, I was at Malice Domestic, a mystery convention dedicated to cozy mysteries, which is the kind of mystery I like to read.  I just posted a long post about it on my review blog, so I’m going to direct you over there if you want to read about it.

Instead, I’ll talk here about some of the down points, like my hotel room.  I wasn’t staying at the conference hotel, but instead stayed half a mile away.  It wasn’t a bad walk at all, and I didn’t mind.  However, they have one of those heating options that is either hot or cold, and they’d switched it to AC before I arrived.  My room was cold that first night.  They didn’t turn on the heat again until late in the second day I was there, but it had warmed up significantly before I went to bed, which was fantastic.

The flight home was an adventure as well.  I had two carry-ons coming home, my normal backpack and the bag I’d gotten at registration.  I was trying to avoid having to ship books home.  They plane home was packed, and they didn’t have room for all the carry-ons.  Guess who was stopped when he was boarding the plane for having two carry-ons.  Yep.  So I checked the bag full of books.

That would have been a brilliant plan, expect we hit a huge thunderstorm in Chicago, where I had a transfer.  It delayed us from leaving for an hour, and when I arrived in LA, I discovered that a few of my books were wet.  I had to talk to them to make a claim in that case, which delayed me so much that I missed a shuttle back to where I’d parked my car.  All told, I didn’t get home until 2:30AM Monday morning and had to be at work that day.  Yes, I was a bit slow and fuzzy, but I made it through the day.  And, in even better news, I think my books will dry out without any real damage, so that’s good as well.  They weren’t wet enough to be ruined, but they certainly aren’t in perfect shape any more.

Yes, this is a complaining post.  But really, go see the other post and you’ll see that I did have a fantastic time.  I had some complications along the way, but overall it was a great trip.

Word Association for May 4th

Here's this week's word association.

1. Destroy :: Villain
2. Recipe :: Dessert
3. Condemn :: No Condemnation (song by Lisa Bevill I'm listening to right now)
4. Hallucinate :: Mushroom
5. Blurry :: Glasses
6. Notification :: Facebook
7. Version 2.0 :: Upgrade
8. Moist :: Toilette
9. Stagnate :: Water
10. Disaster :: Movie

Day in DC

I was out of town for much of last week.  I started out by flying across the country on Wednesday, so I could spend a day in Washington DC.  Yeah, there is so much more to see than you can possibly see in one day, but that was all the time I really could spare.

I was also spending that time with Trixie friends.  Wednesday night, I had dinner with Jenn and Mary.  Then Thursday, Jenn was my tour guide for the day in the city.  Annette joined us for the morning, which included a tour of the Capital and then some time in the Library of Congress.  Next, we met up with Aleta for lunch at the American Indian Museum before Jenn and I went to the American History Museum.

Yeah, we managed to crowd in quite a bit, didn’t we?

The downside of the day was that it was raining, and I thought I was getting sick.  Fortunately, I bounced back so I wasn’t feeling sick the rest of my trip, but it did put a damper on the day.

The down side of all this was that they were working on much of what we saw.  There was scaffolding around the outside and the inside of the Capital.  They were relocating exhibits in the American History Museum.

Still, it was a lot of fun and good to spend the day there.