Vball , weekend

I woke up without the alarm on Saturday morning. I didn’t feel any better than the day before but I didn’t feel any worse either so I guess that was all I could ask for. I pulled out of my place solo (we decided ALi would stay home to watch the dog) at about 5:45 am. The tourney website said you had to be there by 8 or risk paying a 10 dollar late fee. Well of course I didn’t want to pay more. I got there way early, about 7:25 am. I checked in, waited for my partner to show, applied sunblock, went to the bathroom a few times and waited and waited. Our pool play did not begin till 10 am which sucked. They said it was due to a “computer glitch” F that, if the computers don’t work do the pools by hand.

This was the first time I ever played with a “blind” partner, I never even met him before. He is a funny guy and a good player. We started out the day well, we jumped to an 8-0 lead in the first game and then stuck. We were playing a team that just was not good and somehow we let them get back into it and I think we were actually down to them 8-9 at one point. We came back and won the game but it was way closer than it should have been. In doubles it is crucial to know what your partner will and won’t get because if you both go for a ball usually it ends up badly. We had a bunch of that going on.

Game 2 was against some young asian kids. They warmed up forever and then just before the match they dropped and did some pushups and handstands, a new experience for me. These kids weren’t awesome hitters but they were good with placement shots and they were fast as hell. Balls I thought they had no shot of getting to they would get up with relative ease. We had a bunch of long rallies with both teams making good saves, however in most of them they wound up winning. The game went on for close to an hour. With temps pushing the upper 80’s with high humidity it was pretty tiring. In the end they won by 3 points.

After that long battle we had to immediately play our 3rd and final game of pool play. I didn’t think about it before the match but this game would determine if we did or didn’t make it to the playoffs. If I had thought about that I may have played with more desperation. It was a team that we should have beaten pretty easily. Like all the other games we shot out to an early lead and then faltered. A lot of sloppy plays and unforced errors on our side did us in. That last loss hurt the worst.

Even with the setbacks I think we generally had a good time playing with each other and I think many of the problems we had could be rectified with more regular play. We are going to play another tournament in 3 weeks.

The best part of the tournament was that I came out of it virtually unscathed. No significant limps, no shoulders that felt like I should be in a sling, just 2 brushburns on either knee. That is great and gives me some confidence that I may be able to play some significant hours this season without having to deal with severe week after trauma.

The rest of the weekend was low key. Alison did the majority of the weekend chores while I played which I appreciated. On Sunday we took Nicki back to the dog beach only to find that again we hit it at high tide, even worse than last time, there was no dry beach to be found at all. So we put our gear back in the car and just let her run and play in the water for awhile. She had fun. Later in the day Ali asked me if there was more I wanted to get done and I think she was surprised when I calmly said “Nope”. Even though there were a lot of things I could do, I had some inner discussions where I came to realize that the only one that really cares about all this stuff I do is me. There is no pressure to get all that stuff done every weekend except from myself. I am seriously going to try to ratchet it back as best I can in order to make things less stressful for myself and Ali.

Got to watch the first Kill Bill movie, I enjoyed it, looking forward to seeing the second one.