The Weekend My Body Let Me Down

It's been a busy week. For instance, Thursday was our normal Ultimate night, after which Subrata and I pigged out at Frankie, Johnny and Luigi's. (Okay, to be truthful, I'm trying to ration my food when I eat out, and I took nearly half my meal home, finishing it tonight. Good Michael! I definitely eat out too much.)

Well, then, Saturday we had an Ultimate tournament, which started at 9:30 am and lasted about seven hours, with six teams playing four round-robin games against each other. I knew I wouldn't get up there by 9:30, but I did get there by 10:30. Despite forecasts of rain and chill, it was actually quite pleasant, until about an hour before the end when the wind started kicking up.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to play a whole lot in the tournament. After playing about three points - barely contributing to the game - my shins and calves were really hurting. I've had recurring problems with shin splints (or something I think are shin splints) for about seven years, which is part of why I mostly stick to low-impact cardiovascular workouts at the gym. I've been lucky the last few years not to have had them rear their ugly heads (ugly feet?), but Saturday they sure did.

I rested them for several points, then tried going out again. I could get up to what I call "cruising speed", but couldn't put myself in "overdrive" if I needed to. After a couple more points, Subrata said, "you look really shaky running around out there", and I decided to sit down for a good long while to let them rest up and see if they got any better.

After about an hour they felt pretty good, so I gave it another try. Well, they still hurt and I couldn't fly at top speed, but I could at least get around without being in real pain. So I played in a couple of games and managed some good catches and throws (and a rare - for me - defensive block) and had a good time. But I just couldn't keep it up, and I mostly sat out the final game, and called it quite altogether halfway through. What a bummer!

Everyone had a really good time, though. Our team won all four games, two of the come-from-behind-late wins, and the final one a pull-it-out-in-sudden-death-overtime win. Cool.

Tomorrow is this week's regular game for us. Subrata won't be there, but I'm going to see if my legs have sufficiently recovered. I hope so.

I'm falling behind on my Christmas shopping, sad to say. Where has December gone? I need to place some mail orders tomorrow, then hunt for a couple of items around here, package some things up, and mail them. All this and I'm taking my car in for its 15,000 mile maintenance on Thursday.

Well, yesterday I went out Christmas shopping in the afternoon (and also - ahem - hitting a couple of comic book stores that were having sales). Alas, I got the full experience of the lame customer service at Fry's Electronics: I wanted to buy an item, asked the service guy for help, and he couldn't find it. He claimed the computer says they have 40 of them in stock. Couldn't find it. Second guy couldn't find it either. Third guy couldn't find it, and went off to do god-knows-what. Finally I decided I'd wasted enough time standing around not being serviced, and decided to split. Sheesh.

It turns out I had a really good reason to split, to wit, my head was splitting, in the "headache" sense. Ow, ow, ow. And then my stomach started to feel upset. Why, I wonder? Possibly a bad hamburger at the restaurant Subrata and I went to for lunch? I dunno; food poisoning in the past has made me feel nauseous but not made my head spin. Eeyow! Anyway, I came home and lay on my couch for a while with the football game on. I fell asleep for an hour and woke up with Jefferson lying between my legs at the other end of the couch, and Newton curled up on my back. Awww!

I still felt kind of crummy, but not quite as bad. I decided to get ambitious and do some laundry. Bad idea: I started feeling much crummier and couldn't go to bed until the laundry was done. Finally it was all finished, and I happily collapsed into bed.

Woke up this morning feeling fine, only a bit shaky which suggests that I really was fighting something off and that it wasn't just my body collapsing on me. Thank goodness.

Still, it sucked all around. I was thinking today that 40 years from now I'll probably feel like this a lot. Maybe not this exactly, but I'll have aches and pains that my almost-32-year-old adult self would find ridiculous to have to put up with even once or twice a year. It's bizarre. Having crowns in my teeth is bizarre, too; I realized this morning that my teeth no longer feel entirely my own because I'm more afraid that I'm going to break something.

I shouldn't whine, though. There are people my own age with far worse physical problems than I'm likely to ever experience, even if I live to be 100.

Lessee: I also went to dinner with Lucy on Friday and picked up my plane tickets for my holiday vacation. Lucy seems pretty happy lately; happy to be on the edge of passing algebra, happy about the holiday season (even if she grouses a little about the volume of power consumption the lights on her street achieve), happy about her marriage, etc. etc. Darn her! (Just kidding, Lucy.)

(This dinner also cemented my opinion that Su Hong in Menlo Park is the best Chinese restaurant I've been to in the Bay Area. Good Kung Pao Chicken, excellent Pine Nut Chicken, and surprisingly yummy Orange Peel Beef. All recommended if you're in the area.)

And Saturday after the tournament Subrata and I lounged around at his place all evening. We watched the top 40 of VH1's top 100 artists of hard rock, and I convinced him to finally watch the two West Wing episodes I'd loaned him, which he seemed to enjoy to the appropriate degree, and I think he might start watching the series.

I also finished this weekend reading the last Peter Wimsey novel in the series, the posthumously-finished Thrones, Dominations, which is actually a pretty good addition to the series, reading more like one of the earlier novels than the often-overlong later ones. I do wish Sayers had continued to write the series to chronicle Peter and Harriet's later lives. Oh, well.

What else did I do this past week? Ghod only knows. Certainly I can't remember at this point.