The Month In Review

Hello again...another month has absolutely flown by. What might have been happening you might ask? Quite a lot. Let's get started.

First off has been soccer on the weekends. Our team ended up second in the league I think, after getting wins for the past 4 or 5 weeks in a row. Mandi had quite possibly her best game ever this past weekend with some stellar defense. She even set a pick on someone on the opposite team. Quite impressive. On a much grander scale, the Euro 2008 tournament has been going on, with quite a few excellent games (Turkey vs. Czech Republic being one). There is one more team in the semis to be decided with Spain playing Italy tomorrow afternoon (ABC 2:45 ET). There have been a number of surprises so far (France's no-show, Turkey's continued escapes, 0 free-kick goals) and it has been exciting, so I'm looking forward to seeing who makes it on past tomorrow. It should be a good game.

A major event that Mandi and I participated in late last month was a week-long kayaking clinic. Over the course of the week, we worked on all things kayaking, and got to the point where both of us could flip up from an upside-down position while underwater. The end of the week trip was going down the Hiawassee river on about a 6-hour trip filled with rapids and playtime. It was a good week, although it definitely had it's rough moments, but all in all turned out well. Given my dreams of drowning and death prior to it starting, it worked out alright I guess.

I have been drafted in to play softball for our Oak Ridge church league team over the past couple games. This has been interesting given the fact that the last time that I played softball was about 3 years ago. Suffice it to say that I figured I wouldn't be doing all that much, but then I got stuck at 2nd base. Apparently I've got more softball skill than I gave myself credit for, as I've managed to get a number of nice plays in each game on defense. The same cannot be said of my hitting ability though. Basically, my hitting strategy is to make contact, and then out-run the play to first base. Since it's not an overly competitive league, this generally works out all right since you can count on at least 1 bobble of the ball before they can get the throw off. Just don't get me up to bat with 2 outs since...well, I'm by no means a guaranteed man on base.

My brother has also been golfing a lot recently, so today Mandi, Dustin and myself hit the driving range since there was no ultimate being played like they thought it would be. It was quite humorous to start with, although by the end of our buckets I would say that we were all hitting them fairly well. At least for once a decade golfers. I bet anyone that actually plays would have been watching us and wanting to kill us for our lack of technique and whatever else, but we had a good time killing an hour hitting.


We also went camping with our church group near a friends house that has some property by part of a lake. It was a fun couple of days with swimming, grilling, badminton, some diving for frisbees off of docks, fishing, and general fun just hanging around outside. The pic is just a little panorama shot I was playing around with on my camera. The function would probably work a little better if I had a tripod to keep it steady on, but oh well. Here's also a picture of some fire, since you really can't go camping without a fire. Although, I guess when it's 85 degrees outside you probably don't need a fire, but it's still good for making s'mores. Or for recalling funny stories about fires not being lit by fireworks for big camp presentations.

These pictures were taken with my b-day present, which was a new camera. It's a Canon PowerShot S5IS. I had been wanting to get a digital camera for a while, but had never really seriously looked around for anything about one. However, when my b-day rolled around I figured that it was what I was going to get. I've been quite pleased with it, as it's got a quick shutter, so there isn't a lot of blurred pictures, even during action shots, it has a 12x optical zoom so you can get far objects large in the frame fairly well, it's got some cool features that have to do with accenting or even eliminating colors, the cool panorama feature, and it even takes video with stereo audio included. All in all, it's been a lot of fun playing around with it and taking pictures and videos just to see how it holds up. The only thing that I really have yet to do is to use the cables included and hook it up to a big-screen tv and see how the picture and video transfers when seen on a large set.

So...I think that's just about all the high points from the past month of action. I'm thinking my next post will be on what Luke questioned about regarding US soccer players, especially with the more engaging World Cup 2010 qualifiers coming up (after the exercise tomorrow against Barbados).