Monday, May 3, 2010

Weekend Advance, Because Real Men Don't Retreat

This weekend my church held a men's retreat in the mountains.  It was a bit cold (apparently the women are the only ones smart enough to hold their retreat in the summer) but was still a great time of rest and refreshment.  I got to shoot a bow and some arrows at an indoor archery range.  Now I know what Robin Hood would have felt like if the sheriff of Nottingham's men had been short, square, and made of foam.  It's good to know that if I ever find myself lost in the woods with just a bow and a quiver of arrows that I will be able to provide for myself, if I can find any animals who will stand 20 feet away from me while I repeatedly shoot at it them, and whose critical organs compose 80% of their body.  The worker at the archery range was really nice.   He only laughed for the first 10 minutes.  He was from Champaign, Illinois, where I went to college.  Small world.

I got a good view of the stars at night, without all the artificial light of the city to drown them out. I found the Big Dipper, which I refer to as the Big Shopping Cart, and would have enjoyed the view more had I not been shivering so much. Sometimes it would be nice to have some body fat. Or as mom would say, I "need to get some junk in that trunk".

I also got to play some ultimate Frisbee in one half of a gymnasium.  A Tae Kwan Do clinic was taking up the other half of the gym.  Before we were kicked out so some kids could use our heavily worn wooden floor for rollerskating, I had a pretty good time.  Although outmanned by one, my team of three was beating the other team of four 6-3 at one point, before they came back to tie the game after we got a fourth player on our team.  Apparently we played better when we were the underdogs.  I blame the new guy.  I knew we shouldn't have let someone join our team with no thumbs.

Technically we had 4 for a while before that, but the fourth player was a kid who was at the gym for the Tae Kwan Do clinic and he really didn't do much playing, probably because he was half the size of everyone else.  Ok, so he was 3/4 the size of me, but half the size of everybody else.  Needless to say it's hard to pass to someone you can't see.  The black ninja suit didn't help any.  At least he left his sword on the sidelines.  That was a good call.  His playing time came to an abrupt and painful end when I led one of my team mates with a beautiful pass, the frisbee floating lazily over his shoulder as he sprinted down the court towards the end zone, with neither of us seeing the kid until my receiver ran into him, knocked him down, and rode him like a boogie board for 6 feet. Luckily the tyke wasn't seriously hurt, and once he regained his strength his team mates walked him to the other side of the gym, back to the safety of martial arts.