Later we went to watch Candice, Brown, Sam & Lush One play in their league, I think we wore them out at the Y, cuz they clearly outclassed the opposing team, but, yet somehow managed to drop one of the 3 games.
The ride home was eventful, it started *POURING*, ah yes, Halloween is the same weather everywhere !! was bipping along at a good clip (70 or so) and realized that my windows were fogging up, strange, it's been so long I forgot what to do about it (hot? cold? helps if you turn on the defrost setting ;) Anyway, saw a couple of cars off on the side of the freeway, but that was a few lanes over, was about to pass when I hit a lake (ok, maybe it was only 8" of water over the freeway) scary, but at least my car didn't stall out (like I think the others did) it rained all the way home, kinda reminded me of my trip down in Jan, gee and it's almost been a year already -- time really flies.
I spent a couple of evenings putting my Sparc 10 together, surprisingly I managed to build Solaris 2.5 and get everything to run ok -- well, almost, some internal scsi errors to check out, but most of the hardware seems to be ok -- I really need to get the Linux distribution so that I can build my DSL firewall. Then, I get to go pick up the Sparc 20 that Kent is giving me, and I'll be a real development environment (as soon as DSL shows up). After that I'll do some real work on this site...
There is also a 6' and under championships (and 5'9" and under for women) that is being held, am trying to put a team together, might be interesting, I think Daryl will be here that weekend, so it'll fun even if we just watch Candice's team play.
Tomorrow is the company halloween competition, should be fun, this weekend it's the Castro party which won't be the same without Bosqueasha around but should be fun kicking around with Candice's friends.
Yes it does look like Candice is becoming the center of the volleyball universe, but other than Miki she's the only one I know that has friends (that are willing to play with me) at A or above. Oh and that rec/coed team that I was sub'ing for with Kent, mentioned that they thought my attitude was too negative w.r.t. to the skill/competition level (or lack thereof) so I think I'll be finding other things to do on that night, too bad dinner with Kent was always fun.
Finally (and if you've read this far you've read a novella I'm sure ;) there are "interesting" emails from ScotT -- apparently he is lauching a pre-emptive strike against all of his friends who might want to celebrate his 40th Birthday (Nov 11th folks !!) by throwing a bday party for someone else, who might not even be in town ... I think we'll have to make sure that he's the center of attention for a good week or so, even if I have to arrange it from down here ;)
Saturday was a veg day, watched my back log of timeshifted tapes, played heater for the kittys and managed to wash my car. Was pretty jazzed until I noticed all of the bug doo on the car under the grime, now I'll have to have it detailed just to get it all off.
Sunday was outdoor volleyball at the Stanford oval, there was a pretty good tournout, Candice, Sam, Quin (Candice's friend) John (Julie's on a internship in Portland) Daren & Tina. Miki was out of town, and Herman came by to watch. Oh and there was a special guest appearance by my co-worker Brian (and his wife Sid, & daughter Lily) I think we totally confused Brian since he'd never played reverse before, and he's been partially retired (from A) since he moved to this coast. Anyway I hope we weren't too hard on him (played some doubles and some 4's) cuz he didn't show up for work today.
We were playing at the Oval since one of Candice's teammates from Wed said she'd come down there to play (and in fact the Oval was her location idea). However, after about an hour of play I got a page, and it was the Lush One, claiming physical disability for the day -- turns out that dispite being a wine sales person, and drinking for business purposes she couldn't handle the 2 bottles of champagne and 4 cosmos that she had the night before -- guess her age is getting to her. I think we know who'll be the rag-target on wed.
I managed to score another computer table (for $20 less than the sale price, due to a computer snafu ;) and put that together, next it'll be building my Sparc 10 as a Linux box (whenever they get around to releasing the latest version) then I'll be all set. PacBell is supposed to be coming by on the 9th to install my DSL line. After that's up, I'll probably do some really significant rework on this page (and maybe the YeeFungToy home page too). With the 10, my G3/300 Mac & the Sparc 20 that Kent is giving me, I'll be setup for some highspeed web development -- or at least networked Quake ;)
Daryl is in town, so yesterday we went to play at the Y with Candice, (who went to her league match first) anyway when she came back she brought a couple of friends, Brown (yes like the color) and Caroline (LINE, not lin). Brown was pretty amazing, blink and he'll knock you on your butt (both with the right and left hands) tremendous power, and, oh, at about 5'10" or so, he can "armpit block" at will, but that was nothing...Caroline is Candice's size (around 5'4" or so) she clearly hits harder than me (yeah, not hard to do, but still kinda impressive), not only that, but she managed to run a '1' on a mens net ('oooh ahhh') I'm thinking A/AA womens here...But they were also really, really fun to play with. Lots of laughing and hard play, we probably ticked off a few of the folks cuz Daryl and I were ragging on each other and laughing that I don't think we were serious enough for them. It probably made it worse that with Brown, Caroline & Candice we were a very short (but highly skilled ;) team and we still continued to win.
We're going to try and do it again next week, and play outdoors this Sunday too -- should be a blast.
Spent all of sunday at the beach with Lori, Eric & Alison, they really wore me out -- haven't had to play that hard in a long time, and it was on the sand to boot. We even had time to teach Sean how to play a bit, I think, with a little practice he'll be pretty good, he managed to play a game of doubles with Eric and actually set pretty well.
As we were winding down, a women came up to ask if she could have the court to train on after we were done -- Lori and I stuck around to watch her practice. Turns out that she is on one of the Canadian FIVB beach doubles teams. Her name was Christine Lussier and her team is rated #48 in the FIVB, and her individual rating is 76th (above some of the better known americans) and they most recently took a 4th in the Pan Am games. She (and her coach Curt (Stein ??) Metzger) were very nice, and they even let us help out with her drills -- Lori had a blast, and I tried not getting wacked by anything Christine hit. Unfortunately her partner is still in Canada so she was training alone for the upcoming Brazil tourny.
That evening it was dinner and dessert at The Cheesecake Factory, good food (and large portions) as always, and even yummier desserts.
Almost forgot to mention that all of the news in LA was about the Hector Quake -- 7.0 about 100 miles east of LA -- Kathy & Charlie (and the hounds) didn't feel a thing, but my grandfather said his room (on the 6th floor of the hospital) shook pretty bad, Lori was spooked and woke up but I guess Sean thought he was on a boat and rolled back over to sleep when Lori tried to wake him ;)
This weekend it's down to LA to visit my granddad, and play a little sand volleyball with Lori, should be fun, but it'll be a quick trip -- hopefully Kathy (my cousin) will have recovered from her Med School finals so she'll be up and around instead of crashed out with the dogs.
Also, it's my dad's birthday tomorrow, and since he's always
reading this:
And finally, work has provide free flu shots, so now I've a sore left shoulder, and a psychosomatic headache ;)
Daryl and I stayed with his college buddy Edmound, and his girlfriend Erin, they were fun, and they had quite an entertaining dog named 'Blue' a neutered she, I kept calling it a he and irritating the proud parents ;). That weekend also happened to be the annual TU/OU rivalry, since the downstairs neighbors were all Texas University Alums, there was a party, with lots of food, and an amazing amount of beer, the hosts (Mike & Debbie) were really nice and it was pretty fun, even though the mosquitoes were viscious (I think they knew we didn't have that thick Texas skin).
Learned alot of interesting things this weekend, Daryl (and Edmond) are rather accomplished jugglers, though I never got to see the flaming sticks. Dispite this, if they ask you to stand between them while juggling I would think twice about it ;). Turns out Erin does the same kind of work as Kat, we chatted about it since they may be looking into opening and staffing some west coast offices.
So the 2nd place team (from Santa Fe) had 2 women players, a setter and a hammer of an outside hitter, the setter was really good, even had a effective jumpserve, but she sure looked familiar, so I chatted with her for awhile, turns out she played for the Univ of New Mexico (her name is Reta) and her friend (Christine) played for either Georgia or Georgia Tech. But neither of them had played the Huskies -- turns out they were both on the same AA Womens team that won the USAV Nationals in San Jose, they played (and beat) the team that took Debra's team out of the tourny, kinda small world, and she's planning in doing some travelling to Denver to play so Daryl might actually see her again.
The trip home was interesting, I was a bit late to the airport (car wreck on the freeway) but when I got there they were asking for volunteers to be bumped. So for a $300 voucher, I flew to SF at the same time and they bussed me to my car in San Jose -- pretty odd since they had cancelled one SJ flight, and mine was packed, but the SF flight was only half full -- I did, however had to do an OJ between Terminal B & Terminal C to make the flight -- I need rollers on my gym bag ;) I have never seen such a large airport, the rental car bus driver told me that there were 500,000 employees at the airport alone, each terminal is a mile long, and it's anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 mile between terminals -- oh yeah and they're going from 4 runways to 14 in the next year or so (take that SeaTac!) and the airport was designed to allow for expansion to 10 terminals (they already have 6) thats 10 miles of walking ugh.
Rumor has it that DianeO is on her way through the area on a vacation to LA, hopefully she'll call and stop by.