Ultimate at Last!

It was a useful discussion. I like my boss.

I finally finished reading Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night earlier this week. It's her longest mystery, I believe - 500 pages in length, and not a dead body to be found in it. It stars Lord Peter Wimsey's beloved, Harriet Vane, who returns to her (fictional) college at Oxford for an alumni dinner, and returns yet again to investigate nasty letters being sent to faculty and students, and vandalism being committed at night. Who's doing it, and why? Additionally, a big chunk of the book concerns the attraction between Harriet and Peter, which Peter is (characteristically) quite forthright about, but Harriet is uncertain of, and she often teeters on the edge of just telling him she has no intention of getting involved with him.

The writing is quite dense at times - it often made me think of Umberto Eco, although it has more of an eye towards setting and character than esoteric facts and theories. It's not a fast read, and I found it difficult to keep track of all the characters, much less the pieces of the mystery. But Vane is an intelligent and introspective character, while Wimsey is sometimes brilliant and sometimes putting on the front of being a foppish loon, and between them (though Peter is off-stage for most of the book) they keep you interested. Which is more-or-less the same feeling I had towards Murder Must Advertise. At Ceej's suggestion, I'm going to go back to the first book, Whose Body?, and read a few starting from there. I understand they're written in a very different style, which may or may not be more accessible. We'll see.

I'm trying to decide what I think of these little iconic links to Amazon.com pages for stuff I mention here. Supposedly if readers were to click on them and buy something that way, I'd get some sort of credit with them for it. A little voice in my head is telling me (very persistently) that this is perhaps more commercialism than I feel comfortable with. But I figure I'll give it a try for a little while. Most likely I'll get tired of doing the research to find the pages while writing journal entries and will eventually restrict the use of these things to stuff like my book reviews page.

Tonight, at last, Subrata and I headed out to play Ultimate Frisbee for a couple of hours (scheduled matches for the South Bay Ultimate League, which runs for the next four months). I did finally find some cleats (oh, yeah, that's what I did last Sunday): Nike Air Sharks, which are high-tops, recommended to me to help stave off ankle injuries. This is the first time (that I remember) that I've ever used cleats, and they certainly did work well. I'm glad I bought them. Although I need to get some thicker socks, because I rubbed some places on my feet raw after three hours in those things.

I did pretty well in the first game: I was able to keep up with nearly anyone on the opposing team, and was surprised at how quickly I seemed able to move. That jogging and weight training seems to be paying off! I had the pleasant feeling of noting that at least two people I guarded (a small, fast guy, and a taller fellow) seemed dismayed that I was not only able to keep up with them, but could even stop and turn when they tried to dodge out of the way. It was a good feeling: For a while, whoever I was guarding was pretty much out of the game.

Offense was another matter, as it took me a while to get back in the rhythm of cutting towards the guy with the disc, and even then I had trouble with cutting to the wrong side, so the defender was right between me and the disc. Well, I will do better next time.

The second team we played was much better than the first (with whom we had been pretty evenly matched), and were uniformly taller than most of us. This was where my historically crummy endurance caught up with me. I was usually guarding one or two tall guys who were able to take good advantage of their long legs, and were in better shape. As they say on ESPN SportsCenter, "You can't stop him, you can only hope to contain him." And sometimes I did, but several times the guy took off sprinting down the field one time too many in a short span of time and I just couldn't push myself hard enough to keep up.

Well, there will be many, many games between now and the end of March, and I'll have plenty of time to work on both my endurance and my technique. The league is quite varied in skill level, which is part of the point: People who just love to play ultimate are alongside pure beginners, the goal being just to have fun. We didn't even keep score at tonight's games. It's been a while since I've played Ultimate regularly; I'm looking forward to it.

Afterwards, Subrata and I went to Frankie, Johnny and Luigi's. I was weak and had a cannoli.

It was yummy.