New Week, New Year

The week started off with a New Years Eve hat tournament in Grand Rapids.  Ultimate Frisbee can be great or awful, depending on the team.  It's not necessarily dependent on the skill of the players either. Sometimes a group of good players just struggles to deal with each other.  Well our team had a lot of skill, but we had trouble with some of the dynamics.

It's pretty common at a hat tournament to have people stay in the game for too many points, get tired, then get burned.  Then the next step is to get guys that are kind of role players, but they think they should play 4 points, sit one, then play 5.  Messes up the teams dynamics.  Need a good distribution of players, so some are getting rest while others are scoring.

All that to say that we got smoked with 4 losses.  It was still a ton of fun.  Anytime you hook up with some good players and score some points it's fun.  In fact, some of my favorite players were on our team.

After the tournament I headed for Perry to celebrate the New Year with some friends.  Brad, Hannah, and I met up at Emily Calhoun's house where we played nerf darts, Wii, and watched some movies.  I get beat up after frisbee, so I'm usually ready to die to the world.  We celebrated at 9pm so that the young kids could go to bed, then again at midnight, with a quick run around the house.

You might wonder how I got around during all of that.  Well the answer is Caleb Wygant.  My Youth Pastor's son was kind enough to let me borrow his Mustang and drive it around the state.  On the 2nd I decided to have my car worked on, instead of trying it myself.  It was a bit of a chore to get it towed because the front left side can't bear any weight, but I got it to Tuffy Auto.  I've worked with them before and they've taken good care of me for a fair price.  They told me the shock spindle, and axle were broken.  Hopefully they are all patched up even now along with some new tires to prevent this from happening in the future.

In the meantime I already had plans to join Rob and Elizabeth in their trip to Camp Barakel.  They were volunteering but I was planning to be a camper.  We drove up on Thursday though, so I was able to clean some of Heritage, help on the ice rink, and shovel snow before checking in Friday evening.

Mike Baker has this ice thing down.

It was a blast to camp for a weekend.  I wondered if I'd be hyper critical, or if I'd sink back into working or just hanging out with staff.  Wasn't a problem though.  I spent almost all of my time with other campers, and I used a lot of the activity areas.  My team won at broomball, I cross country skiied, along with some fun tubing on some really fast lanes.

Everything looked great in camp.  Lots of fresh snow.

Our speaker was Phil Owen, brother-in-law to Mike Baker.  I've met him several times, but never heard him speak.  I enjoyed his topics, including the simple idea of exploring who God is, and then realizing that we are to identify with him, and that is shown in how we act.

Rob and Kristin playing some music.

I've always loved chapels and feel of the room.  My favorite spot is about halfway back, sitting over one of the heater vents.  It was a good weekend.  I plan to join them up north several more times, but hopefully using my car at least some of the times.