Monday, March 29, 2004

That Freaky Math

As another work week starts, another weekend comes to a close. Again, it seems that the happenings of 3 days (the weekend) are so much more interesting than the other 4 (the work week). I suppose that having to use 40+ hours of the week for work and work related activities can do that. I keep hoping for the day where I’ll be able to reverse those statistics and have only 3 days of work and 4 of “my time”, but then I let reality cloud my view and I realize I won’t have anything that good until either retirement or death, and in either case it skips using the ratio altogether and puts me right in the work 0 days, have 7 to myself…although the being dead option isn’t one that I would like to explore anytime soon. Early retirement, though? The sooner the better, if you ask me!

Anyhow, Friday was a fun evening. After slogging through rush hour traffic in the cities once again, I made it to Kristin’s place, just in time to hang out for a little bit and then head over to my old apartment for some much needed losing of money…err, I mean gambling. Berg had organized a night of Texas hold-em poker. I managed to walk out of there losing a solid $10. The worst part about losing the money, which I’m sure you’ll all get a good laugh at, is that I lost it to a horribly intoxicated Mehle and a pair of girls. If that doesn’t kill your ego, I’d have a hard time thinking of something that could.

Saturday morning Vu, Nate, myself, and one of Vu’s friends, Aaron, participated in the annual Johnnie/Tommie 3-on-3 basketball tournament. Just being there dribbling a ball again after such a long time off made me realize how much I really missed playing. Thank goodness the winter is finally drawing to a close and I can get back outside and do some shooting around. The next thing I’ll have to wait for is for Randy to come home for the summer so we can play some one-on-one ball again.

Anyhow, the tournament was a lot of fun, even though I wish we could have played a few more games. We finished the day at 2-2. We should have won our last one and kept going in the tourney, but because of the creative score keeping of our opponents, we lost. The games at the tourney were played to 21. First team to get there won (no win by 2 rule either, which I found quite odd). We had managed to take the lead 19-17. I got hammered shooting a five foot shot which could have won it. Situations like that had been a problem at the tourney in years past so they implemented free throws to take away the option of continually fouling the other team if they were shooting a potentially winning shot. Since this was one of those potential shots, I had a chance to win the game. Making free throws, for some reason unknown to myself, has always been a horrible downfall in my bball game. I can rattle off three pointers and jump shots like nothing if I get on a roll, but putting in a free throw is something I find hard to do.

So I step up to the line. I make the first. We’re now up 20-17. I shoot the second. It rattles out. They take a three point shot and make it. It’s now a tie game at 20-20……or so we thought. Apparently, according to some abstract math that the other team was using, their three pointer was worth four points. I don’t know how they figured it, but they somehow managed to do it. With that, they walked off the court and reported their win. We would have disputed this atrocious miscounting of our score, but the team we were playing against was the group of students who were in charge of the tourney. Pretty freakin’ cute, huh? We were bummed, but as it was I still had a good time. It was nice seeing Vu and Nate again, and the rest of the tourney went pretty well, except for our first game.

After we had warmed up and tried to work the rust out of our systems, we played our first game of the tournament. A short while later, the game was done with us on the losing end 21-2. Apparently we were still pretty darn rusty. We managed to work it out, however, and won our next two games 21-12 and 21-5. One of those games was almost surreal—not because we played so good or anything, but because I could have sworn that two of the members of the other team were hobbits. One of them resembled Frodo and the other looked like a generic hobbit. I kept waiting for the Frodo look alike to start bugging out and grasping for a necklace under his jersey. I guess I never knew that hobbits were any good at basketball.

After the tournament, I spent the rest of the day with Kristin. We had one very memorable moment while we were at Media Play that bears repeating. It was raining all day on Saturday so we were just tooling around St. Cloud before going to her place to watch tv. As were leaving Media Play in the rain, we briskly walked to where we thought our car was. I walked up beside what I thought was my car, unlocked it, and got ready to sit down. That’s when I saw that the interior of my car had suddenly and mysteriously transformed itself. There was a Simpsons foot mat and a briefcase in the front seat. What the crap? That’s when Kristin and I noticed that my car was parked behind this one. My key worked on another Saturn. That was amazing and scary at the same time. Amazing because I could get into another, similar Saturn. Scary because other similar Saturn owners could get into my car if they wanted to.

After we had a good laugh and started for her place we realized what a great pranking opportunity we had missed out on. We could have taken the other Saturn and parked it somewhere completely different and watched as its owner wandered aimlessly trying to find it. Imagine how hilarious that would be. What would you do if your car suddenly disappeared? Missed opportunities……*sigh*

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