MLK jr. day

I'd like to say I appreciate your comments, Erin and Jessica. I know that I have two people that read my blog. So I thought I'd let you know that I played racquetball again with Lauren a few days ago, on Saturday. As I was beating her in the first game she said, "how about we play to 21, not 15?" I ended up beating her 21-9, 21-6, and 21-18. She said, "You shouldn't be this good." I guess I looked confused or said something because then she said, "if you've only played 3 or 4 times in your life, you shouldn't be this good!" I apologized, but I don't think it changed anything. But she wasn't too mad because afterwards she invited me over for dinner and made this breaded chicken that was just amazing.

I decided to post some videos from my mission up here that relate to my most recent letter to Stephen. My memory card had problems so it would skip around a lot. I have 4 videos, so I'll post all of them.

Raquetball

I'll start off with a quote from Calvin and Hobbes,

"if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life"

I played raquetball yesterday and this quote reminds me of it. Though I obviously wasn't playing on grass I did play hard enough to come away with green knees if it had been possible. I have scraped elbows and bruised hips. I haven't played since before my mission, a little over 5 years. As you all know, if my opponent wants me to give the game my best, I will. I was playing a friend, Lauren, who plays consistently. She told me that she would go easy on me because she didn't want me to be too tired afterward. She told me that she's had guys say before that they would be fine, and then they're sweat is dripping all over the floor. Well, she gave me the first serve, which was kind of her, and I proceeded to take a 3-1 lead. She then said to watch out because she plays on a different level when she's behind, and she wasn't going to take it easy anymore. A few minutes later I had a 6-1 lead. The game got a little bit more tough and the game was tied at 9, I believe. I told her at that point that I didn't know if I could win, I was slipping all over the sweat on the floor. Her response, "whatever. You're not even sweating." I got a good laugh out of that before I served it and scored a point. I went up 12-9 before she got on a run and won 15-12. It was a really fun game. I've only played racquetball maybe 4 or 5 times in my life, but I can't think of a time I haven't enjoyed it.

On another note, Condoleezza Rice is coming to speak tomorrow in the Marriott center and I'm very excited to hear it.

This week not too much happened. My classes started for a new semester as well as my training program. I'm in a furniture design class that I'm pretty excited for. I'm not sure what I'll build yet, I'll let you all know once I decide. Another consideration is how much money am I willing to spend on this thing? If I went with nice thick pieces of lots of rare wood it could add up pretty quickly. One piece of that stuff isn't too bad, but if the entire piece had rare wood, it could end up around 2K pretty quick. I'm hoping to keep it under $500, and however much lower than that I'm able to keep it, so much the better.

As for the training program, this week I began training in earnest for the triathlon I'd like to do this year. I'll be swimming on Monday and Wednesday, running and lifting on Tuesday and Thursday, biking on Friday, and Saturday will be my combo day. Like I said, I started training in earnest this week, and it was enjoyable. Exercising really does make you feel great. On a side note that I'm sure is completely unrelated, I ate like a horse this week. I was just so hungry, I ate 4 or 5 meals every day. Okay, since I know how interesting that is, I'll try to shift gears and tell a better story.

On Wednesday night we played UNLV in basketball, at UNLV. Our basketball team is ranked 14th in the nation and UNLV is ranked 25th, so they have a good team. Another point of interest is that our basketball team hasn't won a game against UNLV at their court since before Dave Rose's time as BYU bball coach. That translates into something like 5 years. The game was a kinda big deal but not too huge, so ESPN didn't pick it up, but CBS college sports did, which we don't have on our TV. So what we all did, we went to legends grill, and they have an upstairs room where they set up a big TV and probably 100 chairs or more. Bryan and I were there, and it the game started out with us having a slim lead (This was wednesday yet I just heard Bryan mention the game on the phone to Analisa in the other room). So we were up 15-12. Then they went up 24-15 or so. It was really nerve racking. As the buzzer for the first half went off they took a last shot which missed, so we went into the break 38-35 with us in the lead. Bryan promptly got up out of his seat and tried to make his way out of the room without a word to anyone. As he tried to get past a fold up chair that was in his way he grabbed the back of the chair, and threw it, it landed on the ground with a bang. Everyone in that area kind of looked over and he just hustled through the rest of the crowd looking like he had just been notified that he had been kicked out of school. He was white in the face, walking as fast as he possibly could, knocking into people's shoulders, etc. When he came back, we asked him what was wrong, and he said that the game was too tense for him. I made mention to the chair, and he said that his hands weren't working well, they were too shaky, so it was the only thing he could do to get it out of his way. I thought it was a little humorous.