Weekend Fun

Whew...a nice, quiet weekend at home....yeah, right!

I had my semi-regular poker game last night. It's the damnedest thing--it seems like whenever I play poker, I end up with a hangover the next morning. They should research that in one of those medical journals.

Eventually, I recovered enough to go in to work--I had to replace the monitoring card in an IBM eServer. Those are really cool machines--we've got ours configured so that any of us can plug our laptops in and view the system logs no matter what condition the server itself is in. When I was finished, I walked over from my office to the Chapel Street Playhouse to see one of my coworkers play the lead role in a play called Taking Leave. It's about an English professor forced into retirement by the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. There are plenty of funny moments, but I was particularly touched by it given that the disease runs in my mother's side of my family. It will run one last time this coming weekend, so if you live anywhere near Newark, Delaware, I highly recommend you go see it.

Sunday morning, it was time to get up early (at least for me on a Sunday morning) and brave the drizzly weather to head up to On Target Paintball for some games with my friend Squidly. He was trying to get a new marker set up for tournament play, and I was trying to solve a problem with ball breakage inside the gun. My problem was easily solved after I shot through a pod of the Squidmeister's paint--the stuff I started out with was left over from last season. It went against every frugal bone in my body, but once I dumped out a quarter case of 2004's leftovers and opened a fresh box I bought on my way to work on Saturday, they miraculously stopped breaking in the barrel. I'm still having some difficulty with undershooting right now--I'm not shooting the gun fast enough, and two and three balls are dropping into the chamber. That's one of my areas to work on next time--firing shorter, faster bursts so they don't back up in the barrel. Mentally, I still need to work on my timing for moving up and staying back, and also to get better at staying low and wrapping around the bunkers instead of coming over the top to shoot.

It was a great time, though--really, the first time I was able to effectively use my BKO (my first outing was marred by the aforementioned barrel breaks). It makes a huge difference in accuracy, moving from a semi-auto CO2 powered gun to an electronic compressed air model. I got more kills yesterday than in any previous outing--maybe even more than all of last season. I was able to shoot exposed heads, feet, and hoppers with something resembling consistency, something I would only be able to do through blind luck with my old Spyder. One game in particular, a group of five young kids needed a sixth to get a three-on-three match going, so I took the field--and proceeded to shoot all three opponents out in about two minutes. The kids were all smiling when they came off the field, though, so I didn't feel too bad about it. We played from about 10:30 in the morning until about 3:00 in the afternoon--due a shortage of refs and a surprisingly high turnout, we only got about three games in before lunch, but the sun came out a little before noon, and we played almost nonstop for the rest of the day. Then it was back to Casa de Squid for the traditional postgame beer/chat--it's amazing how much his daughter's grown in the past year. It's also amazing how much better shape I'm in than I was at the start of last season--last year, my legs were fixing to fall off by the time I went home, and all I could do was sack out on the couch with McDonald's or a pizza. Last night, I had enough energy to cook myself a decent dinner (orange roughy in a tomato, white wine, and cream sauce and spinach sauteed with butter and garlic), and even stayed awake long enough to watch Law and Order: Criminal Intent on Tivo before going to bed a little after 11:00.

Maybe this weekend will be one to relax at home....but I hope not.