vacaville tourney

I returned from the weekend tournament medaled and tattooed. Well, when I get bored of the tat, I’ll scrape it off and stick on a new one. We won our first game and lost the second two, but we played a whole lotta hockey and I’m not even particularly sore. I guess when you’re on the ice four times a week your body gives up and adapts. The Vacaville Valentines were a tough team to play on Sunday. Aside from the hot pink jerseys blinding us everywhere we went, they had a couple of women clearly out of their level who could have been the entire team and still won. Still, I was pleased with my playing the second two games and even got to play center once. It’s still difficult getting to know my teammates and what exactly they’re going to do or want me to do. I sometimes get conflicting instructions which makes me thankful for the detailed positioning drills we did back in Pittsburgh. Saturday we played the ladies from Lake Tahoe and the Squirrels, who are a team of friends out of the bay area. The Polars have started a tradition whereby everyone puts a dollar in the “pot,” and the first person to score a goal wins the entire pot (or, if the goalie gets a shutout, the scoring player splits the pot with the goalie). I think it would have been a lot more motivational if they had put a coupon in the pot for “an evening with a hot male hockey player,” but then, just because it motivates me doesn’t mean it has the same appeal for everyone else. I’m working on getting this tradition updated. In the meantime, during an ice cream break between games, I was forced to “tell everyone something they don’t know about me,” apparently in the hope of discovering some fact about me that they could make fun of for the rest of the season. I guess I didn’t give them very good ammunition, so they proceeded to taunt me for wearing my hockey socks like a figure skater the entire weekend. Hey, that’s fine with me as long as it keeps them at bay for a while. If they find out why I really can’t run for public office, I’ll never hear the end of it.