Weekend Re-Cap: The Little Frisbee Team That Could

August 7, 2006

I've officially fallen off the coffee wagon. That's right, I drank a nice 16-oz cup full of some sweet French Roast this morning. I had pretty much cut out coffee from my daily routine a few months ago, instead relying on water, some chai lattes and the occasional green tea. But this morning as I drove to work, still exhausted from a weekend full of sun, frisbee, hotel beds and plane rides, I realized that the toothpicks holding up my eyelids would not be enough.

I was in Portland, OR this past weekend with my frisbee team, Brass Monkey, for the 2nd out of 3 tournaments in a row, namely, Kleinman Eruption. And, for the second weekend in a row, we had a fairly small squad to do battle on the fields. This time, there were 7 women and 6 men (with one potential male addition on Sunday)...yikes!

I flew out of SFO on Friday night and arrived in Portland around 9:30 pm. Our hotel was conveniently located only 15 minutes from the airport, and even more conveniently, a 2-minute walk to the fields. With a deli mart/liquor store on the way. Sweet!

Saturday was a blur of 4 games in a row. One of our guys, Chuck, went down with a bad ankle injury in the first game of the day, which didn't bode well for the rest of the guys. We didn't have our shade tent, but Nate's uncle, a Portland local, was sweet enough to go find us one, which saved us in the scathing heat. We managed to finish the day with an undefeated record.

Our hotel was also host to a gaggle of folks who were in town for a nearby "car show", as there were lots of hard-core car dudes, suped-up vehicles, and hootchie mamas strutting their stuff.

The classic line in the elevator: "You here for the car show?", when I clearly wasn't.

Most of our team (which didn't amount to very many people) went for dinner at the nearby Shari's chain restaurant, a Denny's-Marie Callendar's mixbag of food. Kerry Soo couldn't stop raving about their peanut-butter pie. I just liked the fact that it was a 2-minute walk from the hotel.

After dinner, we resigned to some raucous dominos, and some bad TV watching. The arrival of some Seattle dudes (one of which was going to help us on Sunday, Ben Wiggins) inserted a little life into the night and I soon found myself heading off to the tournament party with Kelli, Josh, Ben, Idaho and Skip.

The party was in downtown Portland near the heart of the Broadway strip of action at the Imago Theatre. The tournament directors had rented out the theatre, provided kegs and a sweet DJ. Kelli and I did some dancing to loosen up our sore muscles, and by 11 pm, we decided to pull the chute and be wise and go get some rest. Before we could leave however, Ben suckered me into participating in a boat race. Turns out that if you pour a little bit of beer into a cup of water, it looks like bad beer and it's much easier to chug. I managed to spill most of it on myself, but anchored my team to a win. And that was the clincher for my night.

Sunday morning games weren't starting until 10 am, so we were able to go back to Shari's for a good brekkie, instead of "continental breakfast" at the hotel. Our quarters and semis games were good and efficient, as we won both in good time.

The finals match-up pitted us against Whore$hack, the Portland team that we defeated last year in Florida to win nationals. They had an impressive army of 30 or so people against our piddly squad. However, we gave them a really good game and by the end, the locals were even cheering for us. We lost the tight game 14-12, but it was a great game, much better than our finals game the previous weekend. I'm pretty psyched to see what we can do with bigger squads, as we will be seeing both Mischief and Whore$hack at Chico this upcoming weekend, and at Labor Day weekend.

I flew home to SFO on Sunday night around 9 pm and happily crawled into the luscious king bed for whatever zzz's I could get.


SUPER CUTE BABY UPDATE:
On another note, baby Simon is coming home from the NICU today!