Nail polish

So, sitting under the tent today, waiting for my teammates to gather for our team shout-outs, I grabbed Linda's nail polish bottle. Becky loves shout-outs, and I'm, admittedly, becoming a fan also. Basically, a shout-out is a vocalization of a highlight moment of another teammate, in front of the whole team. Each shout-out is typically accompanied with a hearty swig of an alcoholic beverage that's being passed around in the group, and followed with the person receiving the shout-out giving the next shout-out.

To my surprise today, I received five shout-outs. I usually manage two, but this time managed five, one actually for a spectacular play (a thunk catch about 6" off the ground, for which, according to Kris and Brynne, I'm famous). Two of the shout-outs were from teammates who I was going to shout-out for the exact same event, just the opposite way. At one point, I actually received a standing ovation from the whole team. I nearly cried.

Before all of this, however, I sat waiting for the team. Waiting next to Linda's nail polish, and bored with nothing in particular to do. So, I did what most any other person would do: I started painting my nails.

This painting took a little more effort than normal, as the brush didn't stay attached to the lid when I unscrewed the top. As Linda says, "Cheap crap." She's allowed to say that, it was her polish.

I managed to paint one nail, the thumb nail of my left hand, before the team showed up. When they started filtering into the tent, I stopped painting, in order to help organize all of us around the table. I didn't think much of the polish after that, except when Linda also had trouble with the bottle's brush and top.

Later in the evening, after dinner and the dancing and the ice luge drinking by Kris and Alice, I drove to the Honolulu airport to drop a very drunk Lori off for her midnight flight home. She managed half the drive awake and talking a million miles an hour about life and love and drinking and ultimate. The other half was spent in silence, as she dozed, in and out of consciousness with the starts, stops and turns of my driving.

On my drive, I was annoyed with my fingers, and kept picking at them with an surprisingly uncharacteristic intensity. I thought I had finally broken myself of the habit of picking at my nails and the skin around them, certainly within the last six months.

It wasn't until the drive home, under some street light at a stop sign, when I looked down at my fingers, that I realized the nail polish on my thumb nail was the cause of my finger focus. The feeling of polish on my nails is so foreign, that I managed to pick off half the polish on the way to the airport.

Good thing it was the cheap stuff.