EBWL!

My team for East Bay Winter League is a lot of fun this year.  It is a hat league, so you sign up as an individual and then get drafted onto a team.  I played on EBWL for the first time last year and I had a lot of fun, so I was really looking forward to meeting my team this year.  We started back in December I believe, right around the holidays.  The first game didn't go very well.  We weren't used to each other's playing styles but one thing I did notice was that we had a lot of good handlers, which is something a lot of teams that I play on are lacking.  Well, we lost the next game, and the next, and the next, and it seemed like we were just going to have a losing streak through the entire season.  However, then we won a game!  And we got revved up and bonded more and we won another!  Then we started to have a flow, and good team strategies, and then last night, we had an upset where we beat a team in playoffs ranked much higher than us (and who beat us in the actual season) and now we're headed to quarter finals!

As fun as the game was, I have to admit that the weather last night was pretty miserable.  I played for years in Rochester, which has trained me to be able to play in most miserable weather conditions without a second thought, but this was by far the worst non-snow weather I've ever played in.  Snow might even have been less miserable.  It was just pouring, and the wind was so strong it was pouring sideways.  The wind was so strong it made the big raindrops feel like hail or sleet.  It was cold, too.  I was already soaked through from having played 2 hours of soccer at a clinic in the south sunset, so I was getting close to my limit of rain for the day.  Anyway, when the lights went out, we had won the game, and I beelined to my apartment and spent the next 20 minutes trying to warm up and feel human again in a hot shower.  I was so cold I couldn't even figure out what temperature water was!  

I'm really excited for the quarterfinals game on Tuesday now!  :)

Valentines Day Invention!

When I lived in Rochester right before Tim and I left on our bike trip, we were living with a couple named Enrica and George.  When Tim went to his visit day at MIT, I remember Enrica and George made me this delicious dinner.  It was an italian dish, and it was a lemon cream sauce with bacon in it.  I could never really find a recipe to guide me in making that dish online, so for Valentines day, I thought I'd have fun and try to invent it myself!  I cooked up some bacon, then removed it from the pan and poured out the grease.  I sauted shallots in the bacon grits, and then I added some heavy cream, salt, pepper, the bacon bits, and lemon zest.  I reduced the sauce, then I added freshly squeezed lemon juice and fresh parsley.  I ate it over some lemon pasta that I had gotten from Berkeley Bowl (and now am determined to figure out how to make it myself!).  It was really good!  I've been eating the leftovers ever since, and they are great! 

I was really proud of these two valentines day cards that I made this year:

Women's Hat Tournament!

A few teams in the area set up a one day women's hat tournament from 1:30 to 6 pm on the Gilman fields.  I signed up a few weeks ago because I had really enjoyed the women's draft league I played in for four weeks in the fall.  Cree sent me an email telling me about the tournament, and I couldn't resist.  The tournament was today, and it was a lot more fun than I expected.  I met a lot of different women, and I saw a few that I had met in the draft league earlier this year.  It was nice to catch up and meet new people.  

Right when I had arrived at the tournament, I receieved a text from an unknown number about going sailing at Emeryville.  It was signed "Ryan" and I felt like I knew who it was, but I wasn't sure.  I verified, and I found out that my friend Ryan who I met playing ultimate has a 30 foot sailboat and he sails about once a month.  I told him I couldn't go with him because of the tournament, but that I'd definitely be interested in going sometime.  It sounds like a lot of fun.  

The tournament was pretty simple.  There were four teams, and it was played round robin style.  My team didn't win any games, but we did show a lot of progress and improvement during the three games, which is all that really matters.  One girl had never even played ultimate before.  She plays a lot of basketball, so she had a few really bad habits as a result, but she tried hard and was actually a good contribution to the game.  There were women on our team from Fury and Zeitgeist and Polar Bears, which are all very good teams in the bay area.  They told me about a mixer the team have in March for tryouts, so I might go try out for one of the teams.

The last game ended, and Kristen E came up to me and said, Ryan just called, and wanted us to go to dinner with him and his girlfriend.  I asked where they planned to go, and then I turned around and Ryan was there.  He introduced me to his girlfriend, who is very nice and whose name I forgot because I am terrible with names.  It turns out that Kristen lives in Sacramento, so whenever she's in the bay area, she and Ryan make sure to get together for dinner.  He knew when the tournament ended and decided to meet us there.  Ryan is starting his own ultimate team this summer, and wants me to join.  The people he's recruiting are all people I really enjoy playing with, so I am definitely interested.  I guess I have a few options for teams to play with this upcoming summer - I'll have to keep networking and find a team I have fun on but also has a good amount of skill and a somewhat steady roster.  We ate dinner at Picante, which was very tasty, and I ended up really enjoying myself.  Sometimes I avoid social settings like this because it's a noisy restaurant, I can't speak loud enough, I can't keep up with the group, but these guys were really deaf friendly.  They asked me to repeat myself if I hadn't been heard (compared to most people just giving me a blank stare and being too "polite" to ask myself to speak louder), they made sure I could keep up with the conversation, and they really included me.  I really enjoyed myself, and would go out with them in a heartbeat.  Good day!

Dinner!

Today was a lot of fun.  Pam and I went to the ballet class again, and then we had tennis after.  When I got home, Tim and Andrew showed up, and we made mulligatawny and salad for dinner together!  We haven't had one of our dinners in a long time, so it was nice to get back together and have one.  The mulligatawny really hit the spot, and Andrew loved my new apartment.  We played some gran turismo on the playstation 3 together after dinner, and we just generally hung out for the night.  I can't wait to do it again; maybe I'll make a pork tenderloin!

Tennis Endurance!

Pam, Debbie, and I all discovered that the cardio tennis class that we loved so much had ceased, probably due to low numbers.  Debbie searched around for a similar class that wasn't too expensive, and she found that Cal had started an endurance tennis class that seemed really similar.  We all signed up, and tonight was the first class.  We have class from 7 to 8 pm now on Mondays and Wednesdays for the next 5 or 6 weeks or so.  Debbie couldn't go to the first few classes because she was traveling in Utah, but Pam and I met up and went swimming at the nearby pool for 30 minutes or so, then headed over to the tennis class.  I was really nervous at first because I wasn't sure if my skill level was high enough for the class, but it ended up being perfectly fine.  It's pretty fun, too.  All of the people are really nice, the coach is really friendly yet focused, and he keeps you moving the entire hour.  There was another tennis class being conducted that wasn't an edurance style, and they were all standing around waiting in lines.  Our class was so much more fun!  It is a little less skill focused, though, so if I really get into tennis I should probably take some classes to focus a little more on the different types of swings.

Heart Dissection!

The San Francisco Exploratorium had a Valentines Day special where they offered a class for members to take where you dissect a heart.  My friend Jay's friend Judy is a member, and she signed up for the class.  It is supposed to be for "families" so she brought Jay and I along.  I met Jay at Mission Pie in the city, and Judy picked us up from there and we drove over.  It was my first time meeting Judy, and she seems like a lot of fun.  We got to the class a little late, but we didn't miss anything.  About 10 minutes after we arrived, they gave each family a calf heart, and told us to poke our fingers into all the "holes" (like the aorta, the vena cava, the pulminary artery, etc) and feel for the valves.  It took us a while, but once we figured out where the valves were, we were all really surprised.  Then we had to string a piece of string through the left atrium, the left ventricle, and then out and through the right atrium and the right ventricle.  Once we got that, which was hard might I add, we cut the heart in half and opened it up!  We were absolutely amazed.  It was not what we were expecting at all.  I can't really do an explaination justice without being able to use some charades and hand motions, so I'm not really going to bother here.  It was a really cool experience, though, and I'll never really forget it.  What a cool Valentines day special for the Exploratorium to have!  After the class ended, we spent another hour or so exploring the exploratorium itself, which is always a blast.  We had a lot of fun playing with several exhibits and we left on a giddy high.

Ballet and Avalanche Class!!

There is a dance studio called Beat that is a few blocks away from my new apartment.  Pam and I had walked by it a few times, and one night she looked it up online and was really excited by the classes offered.  I wasn't interested in the majority of the classes, but the ballet class they have for adults looked fun because it had a more pilates focus using ballet, and had things like skipping and leaping around.  It looked like it would be ballet for fun rather than a really stiff, formal ballet class.  I really like to skip and leap and twirl, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.  So tonight, Pam and I went for the first time!  It was a lot of fun.  The instructor is a little odd and I really wish he'd wear some baggier clothes, but after I got over that I really enjoyed myself.  I think the class will be incredibly beneficial to me, so I am going to keep going when I can.  I've had terrible, terrible balance my whole life when standing still and it is really annoying.  I can't stand on one leg.  I can't do stretches that require you to balance on one leg.  I can't even plant my feet and move around (bending over, etc) without losing balance.  I can keep my balance fine when I'm running around or sprinting or walking around playing soccer or ultimate, but any sort of balance that is conducted at slow speeds or zero speed is beyond me.  This ballet class really focuses on your balance, so it might help me a lot in that regard.  You have to be really aware of your "seat bones" and where they are, and the relationship between that and your center of gravity really helps you balance.  Once I figure it out, I think I will be able to do a lot of the things that gave me problems before.  So I'm going to keep that up when I can!

After ballet, I headed over to REI to meet up with Tim, Andrew, and ..some other guy whose name I can't remember for a free class they were holding on avalanche awareness.  We figured it would be a good brush up on our winter skills.  The instructor ended up being the same guy, Aaron, that we'd taken a three day course with for avalanche safety in bear valley, so he recognized us and was happy we were continuing our avalanche education.  Tim interpreted for me, which was really nice, and it was a nice review.