Time Passage

Another month goes by and no updates from me. It's currently my last night back East with my in-laws and some realizations have come to me. I like to work with my hands and I look forward to the new year, getting home, and working on some personal projects around the house. Cat and I got some money to Home Depot this Christmas and we are looking forward to maybe finishing up the house. Get some rugs, hang some art work, get some things planned out for the future.
I am interested to see how the new year taxes turn out with the portion of self employment I did. Hopefully most of the money we have put away will not go towards taxes and we can finally have a true honeymoon. The new year also brings up the need to begin running and getting into shape. Also, Vegas is coming up soon and I'm going to try and play every point of the tournament. I kinda have to go all out as we are running with a short-handed squad.
My meds dried up about a week ago and my body just doesn't feel right. I'm shaking way more than normal but I cannot tell if it's my lack of meds or a change in eating habits based upon being back East. We'll find out once I get back home and get back on my meds.
I am running into a mental block right now, maybe I'll update a bit later.

Hectic Life

So it's been over two weeks since I last posted and a lot has happened in that time. Cat's mother and father came into town for four days. They had a great time or so it seems. They went to the museum of flight and the Tacoma Glass Art Museum. I've never been to the Tacoma Glass Art Museum before so I joined them for the day. I was very cool, I've always been a fan of glass art, especially Chihuly. It's great when we are with them as they are so generous even when visiting us they pay for everything. We also had dinner with my folks and went and saw Body of Lies. I don't care for Leonardo DiCaprio don't think I ever will. His vote just grates on me.

Ultimate has been going well. My shoulder is still on the mend but it will get there. We just wrapped up winter league for both my hat team and Tsunami. Both teams had some success this year. It's fun to play with Margo, Rob, and Dylan and I look forward to Vegas in January. Tsunami might make a come back next year, we still need a couple more women and some more confidence but the wins we got this season were definite steps in the right directions. I don't have any more Ultimate scheduled till January so I am hoping to go run some track twice a week starting Thursday.

This Friday will mark my first day back as an Aquarium Volunteer. I haven't volunteered there in at least 6 years and I am looking forward to it. The backend operations have changed a bit since I was last there but I am sure I will get back into the groove easily enough. I made some new friends at training but unfortunately they don't work the same days/times as me. I hope to go visit them on occassion as now I get in free.

The DC holla crew was in town last week. I was crazy at times with video releases and lunch, not to mention the home game on friday. I walked away up but like with most of the moe game of Rob's it was purely a coin flip situation. Work is going really well. I was given a raise to start November off and we are running well with our final season of the year before we launch DCv2. Everyone is looking forward to the new release. I've had some major projects come my way that keep me busy, I was even working 9 hours the other night due to some technical issues beyond my control. I like the company and I think I am a good fit for them, once again just lucky and in the right place at the right time.

My own poker playing is not going so well. I am down 14 buy-ins at 25NL as I attempt to learn how to play NL. I was a decent winner at limit micro-stakes but I am attempting to learn NL as that is where most of the fish are nowadays. I'm watching videos and attempting to make my play better, but it is always a slow grind.

Home life is good. I realize that I don't get as much accomplished in my own personal life as I do in work or other things that take me outside the house. I really should have finished putting the office together by now, but I haven't even cleaned my desk once yet or got caught up on balancing the books. I've set the short term goal to clean my desk tonight when I am up. Little battles, little battles.

Goal 1 Accompished

In life it's often the small battles that decide bigger outcomes. Today I won my first small battle. I told myself when I sat down to play poker this afternoon I would play until my Sports Talk shows were over (Jim Rome is Burning, Around the Horn, and PTI) then I would go for a run. Now I hate running like a lot of folks I know, but it is kinda crucial to the sport of Ultimate so I try to go do it from time to time. Some of my friends here in Seattle (Rob, Chuck, and Jay) are doing 28 day challenges to hit the gym and I thought to myself if I wanna play on a top team come May I gotta start training now. So goal 1 for the day, go run, and I did. Here was my route:

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I tend to wander when running as it's not about the destination so much as what you get to see. So when I get to a street corner I just choose a direction and go with it. Unfortunately I started with a 1000ft run up a 30% incline that kinda killed my legs. Now I won't lie and say I ran the full 2 miles here, in fact I probably ran only half of that total distance but that wasn't the point. The point was to get out and do something so i am not stuck indoors.

Fitness, Poker, and Fish

This is a little bit of everything. I am sitting here playing 25NL poker and I am not doing terribly well. I make some bad choices on the all-ins but I am still learning. I love the game of poker, wish I had some more approval from my folks, but my Dad is one of those who firmly believes that you cannot be a winner at poker over your lifetime. I finished the last couple episodes of the WSOP coverage before the final table airs next week. I still hope to buy-in to the WSOP main event by age 30 which means i have 4 more years. I don't want to win, I just want to compete. I watch and see people bust out with 500k in winnings and I would be estatic to win just that small amount which I think is more than I have made total in my life.

Ultimate Championships are coming up this Thursday through Sunday and I have tons of friends who are playing in the various devisions. Now I am delighted at all of their success but it makes me look back on my playing career and wonder what I could have done if I had trained harder. I wonder what I can possibly do from here on out as I am 26 and perhaps have a couple years where I can be in true prime condition, but I look at people like Britt Atack and he is in rediculous shape and definitely not in his early 20's anymore. I hope I can change my path and come May I want to be playing for a better team. I love the guys on Downpour but I want to acheive something greater in the world of frisbee. I want to go to the big dance in Florida.

Two weeks ago I began a training program at the Seattle Aquarium to be a volunteer. I am using it mainly to get my foot in the door as I want to be a biologist there but as of yet i cannot even get a job interview. Whenver a position opens up they have close to 1000 applicants and it's just so hard to stick out on resume' andd job experience alone. It's going well and it's something I have been through before but I go through it with trepidation sometimes. I like the people and the facility is great, I just don't know that I want to put in 100 hours in touch tanks before I am allowed to do anything else. I did get to see an old friend (Becky) who runs special events so it's nice to still see the same old faces around. We'll see how it goes.

A brief history of Ultimate Frisbee

Today was the DiscNW Youth Summit and I will talk more on that later but now I think there needs to be a breif history of the sport as it pertains to me. I began playing Ultimate when I was 15 at Garfield High School here in Seattle. I have played every year since and continue to play still. I went to the University of Washington and played for 5 years there including playing in College Nationals my final year. Now let's not get to thinking I'm any better than I am. I've wasted a lot of time not being in shape and letting great training oppurtunities pass me by, but I am hoping to make a change. I want to make a change and I think that is where it should begin, but will I change?

Anyhow, I played in youth leagues and Adult leagues here in Seattle since High School. Now I play coed frisbee most of the year on Tsunami (a team comprised mainly of aquaintences and college friends) as well as run a club men's team called Downpour. I'm starting to play Microsoft pickup once a week with my friend Dylan and attempting to rehab a shoulder injury I suffered this past summer.

I do a lot of Youth organization work, hence the Youth Summit. I serve as the State Youth Coordinator to the UPA (Ultimate Players Association) and I work on the Youth Committee for DiscNW. I use to coach for the Northwest School as a boys ultimate coach but I was recently asked to resign my position. I won't sugar coat things I was dissappointed but I can see my ideals and training beliefs differing from the school as a whole and I am ok with that. I've been encouraged to go start running my own program and I've flirted with the idea of returning to Garfield to work there as a coach but we shall see where my "feelers" will land me.

The Youth Summit was the first time a large body of people came together to discuss the future of youth ultimate in our region and where it should go. Ok so we just blew a breaker in the house and the computer reset. Hooray for auto-saving. Anyhow, the summit was a good thing I think. It gave some structure to where Youth should go and how the Director of Youth Operations, a job I applied for but did not get, can see it getting there.

Anyways I think that is enough on the topic of Ultimate for now and perhaps enough blogging for tonight but we shall see.

Everything you wanted to know and even more you didn't.

So I have been playing with the idea for a long time of starting a blog. It's the in thing, it's an opinionated world, it's fun to share. All of these are good ideas and I read friends and coworkers blogs but honestly the only reason I am doing this is to make better sense of the world around me. Things within this blog with pertain to life, feelings, ultimate, poker, marine biology, and anything else that I need to speak about in order to better make sense of it and make sense of my life. I've decided that I will tag things as they fall into major groups, so those more inclined to read about a single topic can do so and they need not bog themselves down in the other topics if they don't want. Here I embark on a sort of journey to see where I emerge you'll just have to read along.

Beginning on the Road

So I have opted to begin blogging to discuss interesting topics I find in various aspects of my life. I don't think I will go into too much detail this evening but I will be discussing my two passions right now which are Ultimate Frisbee and Poker, hence the title of Flying Plastic and Cards. We'll see how well this goes and I make no promises. Also, I am not sure who all will follow this but we shall see.