I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

it's fun. and it has one huge advantage over volleyball: my knees aren't even aware i went to training tonight. i didn't realise until i had to walk up the steps at the station on the way home, but my knees feel completely fine and that is not normal for wednesday nights...

i didn't get much of a sweat going though, as there wasn't much any training, it was all playing. and because i wasn't particularly confident, i didn't chase every ball that might have been mine but let the more experienced players take it, so i didn't move as much as some of the others. but in time that should change. :-)

my left arm got rather cold though as the hall wasn't heated and the weather is back to being a bit chilly. i was going easy on my left wrist (i'd have used it less anyway, as the normal, right-handed person that i am *g*) cause i overdid it last weekend practising for playing in church. i wasn't supposed to be playing, but the guy who was backed out very late. so i started practising friday night, i didn't even know half the songs, and of the ones i did know i'd only ever had a go at one of them once for fun...

i told myself no-one could complain if i didn't play them as well as possible, given the short notice. and no-one would care. i knew this. except that there was one single person who would have cared if i hadn't given my all: me. so i ended up getting one of those infection thingies in my wrist (sorry, i only know the german name: sehnenscheidenentzündung) from going from playing the piano for an hour or two a month or an hour per day if i'm playing in church on sunday to four and a half hours of serious band practise one saturday morning... bad, bad idea. (and if i'd realised it would be that long, i'd have had breakfast first...)

anyway, after putting cream on it and bandaging it up to keep myself from using it too much, my wrist feels mostly better. mostly. and now my right hand hurts too from the fistball. my little finger feels seriously bruised and i can't work out how that could have happened. i hope it's not broken...

and i'm playing again this sunday. and the week after. hmmm...

ah well, same old same old, my hands hurt and my shoulders hurt (but that's just from habit and cause they've needed a serious massage for years now, but i'm too ticklish to let anyone near them). but my knees don't! hurrah! success :-)

Labels: fistball, i'm special, music, volleyball

where to start?

volleyball first. i've quit both teams, although with the one ('my other swiss volleyball team') it's not definite. i am planning to take a break from volleyball now. it's not really a happy thought, i've been playing it for fifteen years now, i can hardly imagine life without it :-S but for the last few months, being on that court has been a nightmare for me. i haven't actually enjoyed a single match. sure, there have been some cool points where i couldn't help but be pleased, but overall, the main feeling on court has been 'please let me off this damn court', with the added though of 'what underwear am i wearing, can i just quit, strip off the kit and leave with my head held high?' mostly the answer was 'yes, but are you sure you want to do that? apart from anything else it would be seriously burning your bridges...' i managed to hold it together (just) and quit more civilly after the season ended ;-)

so hurray, what a relief! :-D

and i might even have found a replacement: fistball :-)

spent the afternoon at michi's (guy from church) flat with some friends. most of the time the topic was the music in church and the good old days when andi m. ruled the band with an iron fist. at some point i mentioned that my thursday evenings are now free cause i quit both my volleyball teams (hurrah!). it seemed a bit random when michi said 'so you trained on wednesdays?' huh, how does he know and why should he care...

he plays fistball on wednesdays and is recruiting... it sounds like it could be fun. quite like volleyball in many ways, but different. and his team doesn't actually play in a league, it's just training and random tournaments sometimes. but they train hard anyway. hurray, definitely trying that! and i've already got the knee pads ;-)

so that was the good result of the afternoon.

the bad one. hmm...

i played the piano again in church this morning. on the whole it was fun. some minor screw-ups (which resulted in me having to force myself not to thump at the keys during some soft songs *g*, but mostly fun. and most people complemented us on how wonderful it sounded. lots of praise for my playing. i now believe i play well enough not to be an impostor up there ;-)

but there are some who like to criticise any imperfection, not matter how minuscule. each and every one of them is someone who themselves plays or has at one time played in church. my dad's one of them. to my great shame i'm one of these people too. however, i always manage to praise the musicians rather than criticise them, because i recognise that the problem has nothing to do with their musical ability and performance, i couldn't do it better. the problem lies in my need to take every pianist apart and convince myself that i probably would have done it better this time. it's because i'm jealous they're up there and i'm not. i'm ashamed of myself and trying to work on it... as we played today 'i'm sorry Lord for the thing i've made it, when it's all about You'...

seriously though it was a total criticism-fest! i'll admit i agreed with some of the stuff cause some stuff seriously bugs me and makes it impossible for me to play properly. but they were going on about how great it was when andi m. was in charge and the days when they had auditions for places in the band. yes, auditions! can you imagine? it's church ffs!!! if you can't let everyone have a whack at it in church, where else?!!! and apart from that, was that a dig at me?! after i've just started believing i'm good enough? screw you... he claims it wasn't aimed at me, and a male friend told me a while ago, when a guy says something that could be an insult or it could just be missing filter between mouth and brain, it's generally the latter. but i'm a girl. i'm not convinced...

there was good stuff and bad stuff. michi thinks you should have band practice every week, build up a repertoire of songs you can do pretty much perfectly and work from there. i think that's a great idea and would totally commit an evening a week to it, if we did something like that. thursday is good now that volleyball's out ;-)

but somehow i don't think it's likely to happen. and seriously, this barrage of criticism has kind of depressed me. right now i don't want to play at all anymore if
that's the reaction... how horribly annoying! next time i play i'll be obsessing over it, i can see it coming already :-( buggrit.

it wasn't even that close to perfect as they think when andi did it anyway! they're just remembering the good, not the bad...

and anyway, professional isn't that attractive. this is church, ffs! it's not supposed to be smooth and slick, it's supposed to be from the heart! man i hate this!

Labels: churchy stuff, fistball, guys, music, volleyball

i've found it again. the will to live and finish this stupid master thesis, i mean. so, no i didn't quit :-)

in fact i had quite a successful day today. it only took me about three hours to fix everything that got screwed up yesterday... ;-) what a horrendous day! and to top it off i had a match in the evening.

i left uni practically in tears (every now and again a couple managed to escape, so i'm not sure it counts as 'practically', more 'actually'). i was on the train to the match when i realised i was an hour early! thank God (seriously, it was definitely him!) it was the match in erlenbach, which is the next town from where i live. so i was able to just go home for an hour and recover (i live 5 minutes from the station and the trains run on time every fifteen minutes, this is switzerland *g*)

the recovering started with spending a minute or two lying face down on the bed howling into the pillow. sometimes you just have to. once i was bored of that i read a couple of chapters in the bible.

i don't know what would have happened if i hadn't had that hour of grace, but it wouldn't have been pretty! the thought of getting on court was one of the reasons i was leaking. seriously, at the best of times i'm pretty much out of patience with this team, but in the middle of a nervous breakdown? there's no way i'd have made it without storming off in the middle of the match and i knew it.

the coach thought i was kidding when he asked whether i was up to playing middle hitter for the whole match and i said 'well, physically i am...' peter, that was a heck of a close thing ;-)

Labels: uni, volleyball

i took the bike to volleyball training last night. this has resulted in two things:

1. my arse hurts! those saddles are awful. you'd think with a backside as well padded as mine, i wouldn't notice the discomfort... stupid bike!

2. i showered when i got home, so i washed my hair last night and went to bed with wet hair, planning to get up nice and early in the morning and sort it out. but when i (finally) got up i couldn't be bothered to do more than run the straightening iron through it quickly. the one side of my head looks ok, but the other side... it looks like this guy:



sorry, i couldn't be bothered to put together a picture of 'half a bad hair day'. but i'm sure you can imagine it.

now i'm just trying to avoid mirrors and glass surfaces. and standing with my back to the sun, my shadow looks freaky today...

Labels: i'm special, random, volleyball

the club president just sent me another email (see my last post). this time she says 'i tried to adapt the introductory text to suit me, but then the problem is that the rest of the website is only about your team. but i'm sure you'll find a solution'... ??? that's the whole reason i never added the info about the seniors in the first place! does she think i am now going to spend ages changing the whole website, now that the club's suddenly taken an interest in it?! she can go jump off a bloody cliff!

it seems she tried to send me the text as she wants it, but she managed to send me some random word temporary file or something. it won't open anyway. what a shame...

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

just got a very annoying mail from the president of the feldmeilen volleyball club about how i haven't added the stuff about the seniors to the website and also that i should say that it's a club and they're always short of gymnasts and not just volleyball players. so it's fair enough that she's wondering why the website still doesn't say anything about the seniors' team, i 've been meaning to do it for ages. but i designed the website around the one team. it took me ages to work out the concept and how to organise all the information. no one else was in the least interested, so eventually i just did it the way it made most sense to me. now i'm supposed to add information that has nothing to do with the team i designed the whole thing around, so to me it called for adding an extra page and thinking about how to do it, so that the whole site is still user-friendly (or at least no less so than at the moment). it's just been to much for me, i couldn't face it. and now i've lost the information.

but now she wants to add stuff that's not even about volleyball?! fine. whatever. i've asked her to send me all the information she wants added in the format she wants it to go in and i'll just stick it in where-ever. i've completely lost the will to care. i hate volleyball right now. and that email's just killed my motivation stone dead (and i was doing so well!) so i'm going to post about last night (with the meilen team), i meant to anyway.

it looks like i'll be looking for a new team end of this season. or maybe even a new sport. i don't want to continue in either of the teams i'm in now. but i guess i'm looking for something that doesn't exist: a team full of people who want to win and are willing to put in the effort, but at the same time don't freak out and start verbally attacking each other when they have a loosing streak. we lost again last night. crud. but not particularly surprising. what was surprising (and rather horrifying) was the way that after the match some of our players accused the rest of us of not trying hard enough, of going on court with the attitude 'we're going to lose anyway' and not bothering to play our best. obviously, that's not such a horrifying thing to accuse someone of, it was their tone. just vicious. i don't deal well with vicious tones. it makes me either want to attack back or sulk. especially when i'm being told off for something i didn't do! i can't go on court and not try my hardest even when i've got a broken finger! i want to punch something (or someone). how dare they. i'm not sure i want to go out on that court again with people like that. i don't mind losing (obviously i mind a bit), as long as i know we tried our hardest to win and i always do (try my hardest to win, not lose)! but i do mind when...

it was suggested that somehow, team spirit was what we were missing. well, my spirit for that team just left. i quit. as soon as possible. damn! i hate looking for new teams!

there goes one of my reasons for looking for a job in switzerland. stupid volleyball. what other sports are there? football - i'll kick myself as soon as the ball; basketball - i only hit the basket when i'm aiming for something completely different (for instance if i'm trying to play volleyball); hockey - similar problam as in football except more dangerous to other people with the stick... i'd only be any use in either of them as goalie and i need more exercise, not less; handball - lack of aiming ability again a problem... crud. i like volleyball really. there's just something wrong with my teams. oh dear, it's probably wrong with me, not them. double-crud!

the other team (feldmeilen) have decided to try and pull themselves together and actually make an effort in training. peter (the coach) read my blog and they discussed it are trying to fix the problem. what a horrible moment when he told me he'd read it! and told them about it! but i went back over everything i've written and it turns out i was very... restrained ;-) thank goodness for that :-)

so hopefully things will be getting better there. but i can't imagine i'll change my mind about quitting once the season's finished. although i can imagine being to cowardly to actually do it. aw crap. i hope not!

it's typical: last time the matches clashed, i'd promised to play for feldmeilen even though i'd much rather have played with meilen. in a couple of weeks there are two matches on the same night again and this time i've promised to play with meilen. but after last night, i'd rather break a leg than have to go on court with them again... seriously.

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

i'm just getting miserabler and miserabler (yes i know that's not a word. eff off). i'm in one team where they won't listen to me, just carry on doing the most ridiculous things quite happily. aggravates the heck out of me. and in the other team i'm one of the worst players. now this would be fine, in fact for me it should be the ideal setup, cause this way i can learn the most from them. the problem i've got is that they're insisting on playing me, no matter what utter crud i play. and the coach won't bench me until we're 22-something down in the final set, even though the middle hitter on the bench is wayyyyy better than me! thank god we've officially completed phase one of building up the team with this match today (3-0 defeat). now, the aim is no longer to let everyone get some court time in to build up the team, but to actually start winning stuff so that we don't get demoted... if that doesn't mean more bench time for me, i'm gonna have to fake an injury. oh no, wait, no need to fake one, i can pick: the bust elbow, bust fingers, chronically screwy right (i.e. main) shoulder... stupid sport.

and apart from the not being benched, he keeps giving me the same instructions over and over again. fuck, that drives me mad! if i'm playing so badly, that he has to give me the same basic simple instructions in single syllable words 10 times, surely anyone can see that either i'm the biggest moron ever to stumble onto a volleyball court (in which case i should be benched in case i start trying to score goals) or I CAN'T DO IT, I'M FUCKING TRYING AREN'T I!!! and again, SHOULD BE BENCHED, telling me the same thing ten times makes things WORSE not better. fuckit.

Labels: arrgghh, rant, volleyball

had a match tonight with the meilen team (my other swiss volleyball team) and of course we lost again. at the moment we're just practicing playing together, since only about half of us have played for this team before this season (i hadn't, i used to play for the mixed team, but we ran out of guys and gave up). and we almost won the third set (lost 27:29 in the end), which was quite cool.

but once again i managed to hit the floor and have the floor hit me back :( my elbow is killing me and i've got a driving lesson first thing tomorrow morning! with the exam coming up!!! buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp! and i didn't even get the ball (as usual...) crivens! i shoulda kicked meself in ma ain heid!

Labels: arrgghh, pratchetty, volleyball

i just went online to update the volleyball website after which i was going to go and read the compiler design books i got from the library. but now i've been sat here for mare that an hour browsing studivz.net... (updating the website took me 3 minutes). i've found friends i hadn't heard from in ages :-) good fun :-) and a good way to waste loads of time... ah well

volleyball was fun last night :-) yang from english lit came along. she's a complete beginner, but we're desperate ;-) peter's really good, he's very patient and helpful. she did quite well and she enjoyed herself. in fact she enjoyed herself so much she asked 'how do i sign up? where do i pay?' at the end :-D so she'll be back :-) what a shame it's the school holidays now, so the hall is closed for two weeks...

i've got training again today. hurray, lots and lots of volleyball :-D i'd have brought yang along today, but i think this team'd be slightly less tolerant of beginners. i always feel completely useless... but they've promised to let me play middle :-D cause they're desperate, they currently seem to have about 6 outside players, 1 setter (and they don't play 5-1, but there's no way i'd be a setter, i'm absolutely crap at it) and (apart from me) two players who will play middle if they absolutely have to. so of course they were over the moon when i begged to be allowed to play middle :-) i just hope they don't change their mind and decide i'm too crap to be put in such a key position... i desperately need to get better at blocking, fast! luckily i have been getting better at it :-) playing in bristol was really good for me, it improved my blocking, my jumping, and pretty much my whole game :-) so now, every now and again i actually manage to block a ball :-D

Labels: volleyball

for four years now i've been trying to recruit girls for my volleyball teams and failed miserably cause there're so few of us in my course that the couple we have got who would be interested live the other end of switzerland. admittedly that's not very far, as countries go switzerland isn't the largest, but still, who wants to travel two hours to volleyball training and back...

turns out i should have studied something else, it'd have been much more useful ;-) this english lit malarky is definitely growing on me. i managed to recruit two new girls in the break time. just randomly asked them and they were really chuffed with the idea :-) one of them might even come along tonight. i'll have to make sure we do actually train next week, otherwise they might forget all about it or join some other team... only problem is that we are quite away down the lake and i think they both live on the hönggerberg... ah well, we'll see.

cool :-D

Labels: uni, volleyball

we had out final two matches on saturday. won both of them although we scared ourselves by loosing the first set to a really bad team with me flunking the serve at 24-21 or so. but then we beat them easily in the following two sets so that was alright ;-) we ended up third in the league with the same number of wins as the first and second teams but we'd lost more sets. ah well. at least it means we don't have to worry about the playoffs. our lot never want to get promoted (one year we almost won the playoffs, we'd decided we had to lose the last game no matter what, but then they wiped the floor with us anyway...) and this year we haven't got enough players anyway: there are 8 of us including junior (not my idea to call her that) who tends to go green if she has to play a whole set, one is away somewhere, not sure she'll be back in two weeks time and two others can't make it that day cause they're kids are being confirmed (is it called that in english? no idea. you know, churchy stuff)

Labels: volleyball

this is annoying: my volleyball team here has got the link to my blog, so they might actually read this, so i have to thinkl twice about the way i put things so as not to insult them too much... ;-)

we lost last night. the atmosphere on court was just not right. honestly, you can't say it was great just because when it was going well and we were winning everyone was upbeat and making a noise. that's natural! but the moment anyone made a mistake they'd start beating themselves up and it really made a difference. i couldn't believe the timeouts: everyone was going on about how they were doing really badly, they couldn't do this, that wasn't working and how we were playing really badly. BOLLOCKS! we didn't play really badly. yes, we could've done quite a bit better and yes, we did play badly some of the time, but the game was not such that we should be utterly ashamed of ourselves as some people proclaimed we should... and the whole thing where they go on and on (and on...) about certain people who decided not to turn up cause there were six of us which is theoretically enough, but if we could only have made substitutions it would have gone so much better... also, they said 'if only we had had a substitute we could have taken christine off in the first set, it wasn't fair to her, she was so unlucky (read 'she wasn't playing very well'), it would have been much less traumatic for her if she could have gone off...' again: CRAP! she played fine. so what if some things went wrong, no-one gets it right everytime and the rest of us didn't play any better than she did anyway... it was her first full game. i think she did great :-)

oops, i guess i've ranted a bit. hope i don't get kicked out for criticising ;-) aw crap, it's annoying knowing they might read this, i can't write half the stuff i want to... meh

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

i'm reading the architecture manual for intel's IA-32 processors :-) i love reading architecture manuals (no, seriously, i do!) they're really interesting :-) so i can read that for a few hours, then i've got to go home and get my stuff for volleyball.

we've got a match tonight :-) it seems we're quite short of people so i have to play, i.e. i can't be benched for the whole thing :-D as far as i can tell there are only six of us so we all have to play the whole lot. i hope peter (the boss man. oh dear i didn't find a baseball cap for him, he wanted one saying 'the boss' or 'the man' or something to wear while he's yelling at us from the sidelines) is there and that he'll referee, i'm completely out of practise. i'll second-ref

Labels: uni, volleyball

went out for a curry with a group from infineon on thursday night. somehow we ended up going to three different pubs before we even got to the restaurant :-S once again my coke kept getting spiked with vodka. it's quite scary, i don't want the vodka, but once it's sitting in front of me it's mine, and beware anybody who wants to take it away from me... ah well.

paul has now renamed stuart to studart (from student-stuart to student-art to studart). of course then we wondered about a certain stupart... i wonder how we can shorten security-guard-stuart

in the third pub the guys found an interesting dispenser in the loos. of course i didn't notice whether there was one in the ladies'. i was too busy trying to work the cubicle door: it opened both ways so you had to aim it very carefully to get the bolt to slide home. managed it eventually and then the toilet seat kept trying to throw me off! no i wasn't pissed!!! i really wasn't!!! bah! anyway, the guys decided that's what they're going to do as a leaving present for me: a blow-up male sheep. i.e. a female sheep with a £5 vibrator attached... and then the question was who'd present it... i think i might just not appear on my last day ;-) or i'll do a richard p but just stay in the loo :-D

the curry was very nice, although i wish it had been either a tiny bit less hot or a tiny bit hotter: i spent the whole time feeling like i was about to sneeze but never actually sneezing...

after dinner dia and paul were quite tipsy. when paul put his coat on he knocked a pepper shaker onto the floor. it was quite funny to see him try to work out where it had come from. dia declared loudly 'don't sneeze, it's the pepper!' :-D

we did mean to go clubbing after dinner, but first we went to zero degrees. yuck, mango beer is not nice! (ok, not really surprising...) dia and paul danced, not paul's usual dance, more of a ballet kind of dance. very entertaining, i filmed it :-D lee wants me to put it on youTube (don't worry i wouldn't). leaving zero degrees we couldn't agree on where to go next and split up. we were supposed to be heading for oceana (not a clue how it's spelt), but it was taking us such a long time and then suddenly we were taking a detour to another pub that i gave up hope and went home (dave made sure i got into a taxi, very kind of him (although i wasn't actually drunk at all...)). as it turned out stuart and james did eventually make it to a club. ah well...

friday night was the (volleyball) team night in at claire's. cause she lives in bradley stoke, just round the corner from work i walked. was originally a bit worried about trying to find it after a couple of pints at the beaufort but as it turned out no-one went to the pub (a lot of hangovers from thursday...). so i went straight from work and i found it fine thanks to all the lunchtime wanders. was a bit worried for a while that i was the only one, but eventually anna and then mahile turned up.

it was a really good evening, we just chatted until midnight :-) nothing more to say about it really since i don't want to post any of the conversation online...

so, saturday. we went out for another curry. this one was for paul's (the polyp paul) birthday. he invited a group of people from church, good fun. one guy (won't mention names ;-)) was still quite giggly from friday night. he'd been on a two-for-one-cocktail crawl of whiteladies road trying to use up all the vouchers in this stack of voucher booklets. sounds like it was good fun :-D

i was tempted to go for the vindaloo but i was too cowardly. so i had some dish that was marked as 'quite hot' (rather than 'very hot'). when i got it i was surprised to see that it was full of green beans. i decided to eat them first, so i speared two of them and started chewing... another example of my utter morondom... the moment i swallowed them the hiccups started. the others nearly wet themselves laughing at me. on closer inspection the beans looked nothing like beans of course. how could i have confused chilis for beans? the curry was called chili garlic something come to think of it... oopsy!

afterwards the polyp came back with us and we watched the first episode of the sopranos. we couldn't watch battlestar galactica or smallville cause marion's in london on some doctory course. it was quite funny. but i'd still rather have seen battlestar galactica. i hope marion gets home at a sensible time tonight and i hope she'll have recovered from last night (don't ask) so we can watch an episode or two :-)

Labels: beer, drinking, i'm special, volleyball

somehow i feel i should blog again, since my last post was friday (i.e. before the weekend) and it was a rather rubbish one (i really hate dog owners who just leave dog poo lying all over the place!!!) but i can't be bothered to actually write anything. i've got all this stuff in my head that i'd like to say, i just can't be bothered to type it...

had a very volleyball filled weekend. was good. lost one game saturday, the other team didn't turn up so we won forfait :-) lost to yeovil on sunday (didn't really have to lose that one) but wiped the floor with plymouth 2 (except that we let them win the one set). hurt my shoulder on saturday, didn't realise till i suddenly couldn't serve overarm on sunday. the first time in years and years that i've served underarm for a whole set let alone a whole game! i really need to practice that a bit more, just in case. it was fine to start with, but then i got cocky and my serves started going out the sides... ah well, at least i managed to miss the bar that was a couple of meters below the ceiling right over the net. yeovil kept hitting it (they should be used to it!) and jenny got it once as well ;-) (this was me not bothering to write everything i wanted to say. i talk too much...)

my left index finger has got what seems to be a permanent indentation in the tip from all this guitar practice (last night i played the guitar for almost two hours. that's including the lesson of course). it's made me grin every time i looked at it today. being easily entertained is a good thing! you wouldn't want to be too discerning :-)

paul (h) has lent me his linkin park cds. hurrah!!! i stupidly left mine in switzerland and in spite of all this great new music i've been introduced to (james, muse, kaiser chiefs, franz ferdinand, my chemical romance, and many more (and yes, i know they're not actually new, they're just new to me)) i've been missing linkin park like mad. for some reason their music really de-stresses me :-D and now i've got it on my ipod :-D that's what i've been doing right now, it's taken a while which is why this 'i can't be bothered, it'll be a short one' post has turned into another of my epics...

Labels: volleyball

you'd think i'd learn my lesson. but no, obviously i am less intelligent than a rat!

chris booked the old park hill tavern for jenny's birthday and we played skittles. it was lots of fun. i'd never played it before so my aim was, not to miss the alley and hurt someone with the wooden ball (repeat: i was hoping no one would get hurt). so i was quite surprised when i was suddenly one of the last three left. so i exceeded expectations: no one got hurt (hurray!) and i came third! but then we played it again and i missed completely both times. beginner's luck... (the first time round, of course)

at twelve that place closed so we went to morph's again, which was also good fun. for some reason, around 2am one guy decided he wanted to have a barbeque at his place. so we all went there and he started barbequeing a load of beef in the rain. very random. i did ask why, but i think the answer was something like 'because we can'... odd french person ;-)

i'm not sure what time it was when the others decided it was time to go home. i'd guess somewhere between four and five in the morning. they said one of the guys lived near me, so i went with him. problem: he wanted to walk. so we walked for quite a while, with me assuming he knew where he was going. i didn't have a clue of course. i think they said we started off on gloucester road, but i wouldn't recognize that, i've only ever caught a taxi from there when i accidentally ended up there after wandering around drunk for an hour or two.

eventually our ways parted with alex wandering off one way and me staring blankly the other way. it wasn't his fault, i absolutely insisted i'd find home no problem, not to worry, and 'don't you dare walk me home, i'll be fine!' cause i didn't want him to have to go out of his way (and i did think i would be fine...)

i got sooooo lost! and this time i couldn't find a taxi and i didn't have a phone number for a taxi service. i wandered past the golden hill tesco's (twice, i think), all round horfield, past the memorial stadium, up and down wellington hill, up and down kellaway avenue and loads more...

i tried to get into a house that i thought was ours, it just looked slightly different. thank goodness the key didn't work and i didn't wake anyone!!! i've got a big scratch on my leg from where i took a shortcut across a football field and had to climb through a rather large patch of brambles to get onto it. they tried to stop me but i won! there was a really high fence the other side which i was very tempted to (try to) climb, but luckily there was i tiny bit of common sense that hadn't been drowned by the beer, so i walked along to the gate which was much lower and i was able to vault that. i did fall over trying to get to the gate and got completely covered in mud. my jeans had were covered in a layer of mud almost an inch thick...

at one point i got so tired that i decided i must be home by now and that if i just waited a bit i'd wake up and i'd be home... but again the (admittedly minute amount of) common sense vetoed that and made me carry on walking.

at 7am the alarm on my phone went off while i was wandering through horfield. i think i broke into a run at that point... of course it didn't last. if i wasn't supposed to be somewhere i'd probably have carried on wandering all day, or randomly caught a bus somewhere (at about half past 7 a bus went past me, but there wasn't really time to wait for the next one and hope it went towards westbury). so around 7.45 i gave in and phoned jill, a) to tell her that i probably wouldn't make it to her house by 8.30 and b) to get her to work out where i was and how to get home from there... imagine her surprise 'i don't know where i am, there's this big round thing.' she thought it was a water tower, so i was on the downs 'i'm not on the downs. at least i don't think so. there are houses.' :-S gill looked the place up in the a-z (the thing turned out to be a gas container or something) and told me to walk towards gloucester road (just up the road from where i was) and she'd pick me up as soon as shed' sorted her kids out, tidied the house for the people coming to view it, got dressed... obviously it wasn't a good time for her. luckily her husband had a very clever idea so she phoned me up and gave me the number of a taxi company on gloucester road. i'd meant to ask her for a phone number for a taxi when i phoned, but i completely forgot (was still quite drunk).

so i made it home, came in the door to find tom standing there glaring at me 'where on earth have you been?!' i'd told the kids to come and wake me when they got up so that i wouldn't be late for volleyball, but of course i wasn't there...

i was soooo glad i'd packed my bag before i went out. i was able to just change out of the muddy stuff and scoff some cereal before gill picked me up. we weren't even late: we got there at nine o'clock exactly, and we were the first of our team to turn up!

i was very surprised, i actually played quite well, given that i was drunk and i'd been wandering around bristol for the previous three hours. cause there were only six of us i had to play the whole time. thank goodness the b&d league only plays best of 3 not 5 sets. but we actually managed to win one set and only just lost the third set, i think it was 13-15... so that was really good. it was probably because niall was playing for us. katrin'd twisted her ankle in training on wednesday and on friday night she managed to convince niall to stand in for her. he went home after the skittles though, so he was in a slightly better state than me or hannah who went home after morph's. i should have done that too, i've managed to find my way home from morph's before ;-)

driving back from the match was quite funny cause i kept saying 'ooh, i wandered along this road.' and 'i remember that petrol station/fish'n'chip shop/xxx' and gill and hannah would say 'oh no, what were you doing here, you must have walked along this road'. yep i walked up and down this road, that road and the other road...

the worst thing was walking to the church from gill's house afterwards (i couldn't find my key and marion and dave were there having joshy's birthday party). on the road that church is on, so five minutes from church, 20 minutes from home, i came across a bus stop that looked scarily familiar: i was there! i'd looked at the timetable on the other side of the road and not been able to make sense of it and wandered off in the wrong direction!!! noooooooooo!!!

so quite clearly i must in future remember the one big important rule for vicky's survival: never ever walk home!!! if i add any qualifications to the rule (such as 'alone' or 'when drunk') it won't work, cause i'll just go 'i'm not drunk, it's fine!' or 'i'm only alone for the last bit, i'll manage that'. so from now on it's no more wandering the streets of bristol for me!

dave says from the sounds of it i was never more than half 3 miles or so from home. i just kept going the wrong way... how awful :-\

oh no, i've just remembered: my brand new shoes are covered in mud!!! wahhhh!!!

Labels: drinking, getting lost, i'm special, volleyball

tonight's jenny's (volleyball captain) birthday party. we'll be out until goodness knows when having lots and lots of fun (i hope).

this is a good thing (duh!). however, we happen to have two matches tomorrow. warm up starts at 9am... uh-oh...
well i guess since it's only the b&d league it doesn't really matter. it's not like we'd win if we didn't get plastered tonight ;-) it'll be funny to see how the others play with hangovers. or if the party's really good they'll still be drunk :-D

Labels: drinking, volleyball

hurray!!! somehow i've escaped the predicted agony that should have been making it impossible for me to move without like an 80 year old cripple. weird. not that i'm complaining. was just expecting not to be able to laugh at all without howling by now. the torture was two days ago so surely the aftermath should have struck by now. perhaps extreme training is the way to go to avoid sore stomach muscles and everything else. not sure whether i'd want to test that theory though cause it's never worked that way before :-S

maybe it's just a little christmas miracle. whatever it is, i'm very grateful :-D

Labels: beer, volleyball

on sunday i realised something. (hurray, enlightenment!)

in our (volleyball) league in switzerland everyone complains that at our level it's ridiculous that the refs are so strict with regard to lifting and doubles. in the referee course we are actually taught to be a whole lot stricter than anyone ever is. but we're all in agreement that it's a joke and the people in charge of the refs should be ashamed of themselves.

however, i have now seen what happens when the refs don't come down hard on that stuff. the league here has a very similar level to the one i play in in switzerland. overall it might even be slightly better. but the volleying is absolutely crap. everyone is constantly lifting the ball or doing doubles. we've got a setter who does one clean volley out of every ten... it's kind of distracting cause i wince every time and expect the ref to call it when i should be going to hit the ball... on sunday the ref called her on a couple of her sets. it was fair enough, they were absolutely horrible. but during the time-out the others told her just to carry on, her sets were fine! what planet are they living on?! it was true that the ref was a biased ****, but he was right to call them. of course he should also have called a lot of the others' ones as well. that kind of proved that he did hear chris slagging him off when we got there, chris hadn't realised that jenny had her window open... ;-)

anyway, i will never complain about the ref being too strict with regard to lifting and doubles again. it's horrible when everything counts!

the other lot that refereed were quite ridiculous, too. they insisted we go round the court on the correct side when we swapped sides. but they didn't call any lifts or doubles. and the one girl came so far over our side that she trod on my foot (!!!) and they completely missed it!!! wtf do they think the second referee is for??? oh wait, they had the second referee who thought it was her job to contradict the line judge and the first ref and insist she was right no matter what... ah well.

Labels: volleyball

it's incredible what i can do as long as it's dressed up and called volleyball. tonight we were supposed to be merging the women's and the men's training (cause we didn't expect there to be many people turning up this close to christmas) and having one three hour long session. but no men turned up... (apart from chris, but he was coaching, he can't play, his shoulder's completely screwed up, he's having an operation in january). luckily there were 6 of us, so it still worked out more or less ok, though chris wasn't too pleased, he'd planned stuff you needed more people for).

anyway, chris sent an email out on monday saying he was going to do an hour of fitness training, an hour of drills and an hour of game situations and actual playing. that's probably why no guys turned up (except the two who hadn't got the emails and turned up at eight thirty expecting the usual men's team training. the italian guy ran off the moment he realised that he was the only guy, the second one came later).

chris tried to follow through on his email, but there weren't enough of us for most of the drills he wanted to do. we started off running laps as usual. except today we didn't stop after five or six laps, we carried on. i was most alarmed. we ran for a quarter of an hour! i'm sure there's a post round here somewhere about the last time i tried running and managed a whole seven and a half minutes. that's half the time!!! and i collapsed afterwards, i didn't carry on training for two hours!!! ah, here it is and i was wrong, it was actually only seven minutes...
anyway, i managed to make myself run for 15 minutes (it boggles the mind, well my mind anyway). then we did some streches which felt lovely (except i could barely stand which wasn't so good for some which required a little bit of balancing and anybody who's ever seen me in training can attest to the fact that i'm bad at balancing at the best of times...). and then we did more laps! another 5 minutes at the beginning of which i was protesting loudly but i shut up right away as breathing required my full attention. then we did horrible stuff, i'm going to be in agony tomorrow, and then another two laps (which is probably about 200 meters or so). and then we had a break, chris gave us a quality street each for energy, i thought he was being nice. but then he tortured us more... lots of horrible running and jumping with the loosing pair having to do sit-ups. since mandy cheated and i could barely stand let alone run and jump we lost (we wouldn't have if mandy hadn't cheated and mahile hadn't got confused and not done half of the stuff (technically also cheating) so that pair shaved quite a lot off their time). had to do quite a few sit-ups. and we'd done tons of them earlier (in between the 'horrible stuff').

oop, i think the stella's just kicked in. my head feels slightly wobbly... hurray, it's worked though: my elbow just feels sore in the same way as the rest of me will tomorrow. it's stopped trying to make me howl in agony :-) turns out stella is really good for pain-killing. young's winter warmer is crap. i had a pint of the stuff (we went to the pub) and i drank it quite quickly (hoping for it to numb the pain, plus the others were in a hurry). but it had no effect whatsoever. so i had a bottle of stella when i got home. and now it's my thumb that's most painful again. that's alright, i can deal with that. but last night i only had the one small bottle of stella and the agony in my elbow went. instead my head didn't go floppy. stupid winter warmer!

it's a good thing it's christmas, gives my poor limbs a chance to recuperate. my amkle's not happy, my right elbow is agony (not right now, but that's the beer), my right thumb's agony (not compared to the elbow, but still), the middle finger of my right hand is fine unless i use it(!) (fine for playing the piano though)... i think that's it, but it's quite a list for someone who's usually not got anything specific wrong with them (apart from being fat of course). i'm beginning to sound like a right hypochondriac! ah well...

back to training. when we finally got round to playing (after a coule of torturous drills) we played two against three. jenny and i played mahile, hannah and the guy who turned up just in time to play (mandy had to go home). i prefer to play in a team of two than three. two and six are the ideal numbers. when there are six people on court you know what's your responsibility cause you've practised it over and over. when there's just two of you you know any ball is yours unless it's clearly your one team mate's. when there are 3 to 5 of you it's just confusing. nobody knows exactly which area they're supposed to be covering cause it's not something you practise and discuss... which is why any time someone asks 'who's gonna be on the two-side' i'll yell 'me me me me!!!'. it's good fun and good exercise.

chris said each member of the loosing team would have to do two push-ups for each point they lost by. i took great exception to that, in the end he relented, so anyone for whom push-ups were too much (well you try pushing almost a hundred kilos up and down in that position!!!) was allowed to do sit-ups. we won anyway though :-)

just realised: the wobbly head is probably due in part to the fact that my dinner consisted of a packet of quavers and two small cookies... now the question is: to eat or not to eat? hmm, sounds too much like a descision to me, will ignore the question and see what happens.

Labels: beer, i'm special, volleyball