Kate sent me a note a couple weeks ago, a forward from an RSD post from a local student seeking a coach for a local university's women's ultimate team. She asked if I was interested in joint coaching the team.

After several fits, starts and miscommunications, we finally connected with the team, and signed up. We were to be Coach Kitt and Coach Kate. Exciting! I think it'll work out well, since one or the other of us can cover practice, what with Kate travelling for work and my heading out for my UCPC talk, or ultimate tournaments, or just plain exhaustion from too much overplanning.

Practice is from 9-11 PM, which is just painfully late for an athletic endeavour to me. I can't figure out how the university managed to secure the late night lights schedule with the surrounding town. But they did, and that's when the fields are open, and last Thursday is when I went to my first practice with the team.

There were eleven players at practice. When I showed up, the team was doing a square drill. They were running it slowly, but started running harder as, one by one, they realized "Coach" was there.

I think I did okay, for my first run at coaching. They played better than I was led to believe they could play. All of them could catch, and all of them had the basic fundamentals of throwing. If the players stick with the sport, they can become very good.

I often feel uncomfortable with telling people what to do. There's a certain state of mind I can get into where I don't mind it, and can be very good at the leader role, but it's not a typical state for me and I have to work at it.

In this case, I did okay. I tried to encourage with everything I did, learn as many names as I could and be as positive as possible. In the end, however, I was still essentially bossing them around.

The next practice is tomorrow. Kate should be there, which should be very good: having a coach who can play will be very advantageous.

Kris has started calling me "Coach Kitt." Cracks me up.

For the first time since we started working out at Velocity Sports, I went to class without Kris. Kris has been several times without me, because of illness and injuries on my part, but I hadn't gone without him yet (mostly because our routine includes his driving us home instead of my taking the train back home). Tonight was double train: an easy way to use up that 10 ride ticket.

I'm definitely not comfortable with my hamstring yet. There's a fine line between strengthening my hamstring and reinjuring it: I want to be as close to that line as possible, I'd much rather not cross it.

So, imagine my consternation upon realizing today's workout was all about legs and, in particular, hamstrings.

I had to skip the running parts, instead biking for a small part of the aerobic exercise I'd prefer to be doing.

After the workout, Derek handed me a bag of ice to put on my hamstring on the "drive" home. Instead, I stood at the front desk and spent a couple minutes shoving the bag down my pants.

I'm sure that was good for business.

I walked to the train station, with the bag in my pants. Since I arrived early, I sat to wait for the train, not quite realizing the bag was open. When the train arrived fifteen minutes later, I stood up to discover my pants were sopping wet, in the exact pattern that screamed to everyone looking at me, "Look! I peed my pants!"

A lovely ride home, that was.

How many bones have you broken? Yours or someone else's?

Six ribs, one collar bone and one toe, not necessarily in that order, and only 2 of those breaks weren't from ultimate frisbee.

The last breaking was two years ago. I was smooshed by Ben at a practice, a few weeks before Sectionals. My account of the day:

[In my vox post, I copied the content from my smooshing back in 2004.]

Turns out, I was mistaken about the ribs. I had four broken ribs that took around four weeks to heal.

Kris often asks random questions. They're quite entertaining and I've been meaning to write about them for the longest time (the majority of his questions are in the growing stack of yellow index cards - somewhere).

Well, tonight he pulled out a doozy. I was flipping through logos on the website of a company I've contracted to do my personal branding. It's all part of Project Decloak, which has taken a back burner to grouphug conversions, the Master Gardeners website, two client websites, my UCPC talk, volunteering with the OSCMS summit, and quite possibly another Post-Nuke to Drupal conversion that I'm debating taking up pending the other projects' completions.

One of the example logos was for some company with a name on the variation of "Soldiers for Christ." I wasn't looking at the company names, I was just looking at the logos, trying to find ones I liked so that the logo making company had some ideas (nevermind the fact that I send them seven logos of styles I like, as well as a description of what I want (simple, geometric, recognizable as a favicon.ico)), and so didn't really notice the company names.

Kris, however, did see the company names and expressed surprise, "Why would Jesus need soldiers?"

Without really thinking about it, I responded. "Um, to keep up the killings in his name?"

"Why not just call the company something like 'Overly Dogmatic Zealots for Christ?' I mean, if you're going to kill in someone's name, you better really believe in that person."

"Uh, I don't know," I answered, distracted, looking at more logos.

"So, what would you do if Jesus Christ appeared in our living room?"

Ah, one of those questions. He suddenly had my full attention. "Probably ask him about how he felt about the hundreds of thousands of people killed in his name."

"..." Kris waited.

"Or maybe tell him, that first time you died for our sins, that was a piece of cake. You're in for a world of hurting this time around."

Kris didn't believe me. "Come on, what would you really say. I mean, if a man materialized in our living room and started talking to you, well, maybe not a man, some spirit, but it started talking to you, what would you do?"

"Assume it was the devil."

Apparently this was the perfect answer to induce side-spliting laughter. He couldn't do much more than laugh, as I continued, "What? Come on, think about it. Something materialized right in front of your eyes, why would you believe it's anything other than a migraine, insanity or a daemon?"

"You wouldn't believe it was God or Jesus?"

"The thought that Jesus would materialize in my living room is as absurd as the concept of his dying for our sins and being the son of God and ascension into heaven and all the other stuff that goes with him. No, I'd assume it was something far more sinister."

"Really? So, I'd be passed out, and you'd like, are you the devil?"

"Yep. Pretty much."

Our third Master Gardener's class was today, the second one where we had reading to do. Once again, in preparing for the class, I'm hit with the amount of reading we need to do, and how procrastination with the reading is just not going to cut it.

Janis, Karen and I showed up at 9:15, about 10 minutes earlier than normal. I suspect the difference was because I wasn't late getting out the door, so Janis and I weren't late arriving at the carpool meeting place, and Karen wasn't late driving us over. It was my turn to drive, and I drove like the wind.

We've been heading over early to set up the A/V equipment for the class, sneaking in our volunteer hours half and hour at a time. This time, the equipment was in a strange state of disarray, causing the three of us to run around madly to organize in time. I also wanted to make sure Karen was up to speed on the setup, so I told her what to do, but let her do all the work.

The presentation went okay, with only minor issues with the audio. The biggest issue of the day with equipment was, thankfully, not our responsibilty: the video camera broke sometime this past week, so no video of the class was taken. Which is a real shame, given that the presenter was, as a Master Gardener stated, "an expert in the field and the best presenter for this information we've ever had."

The most pleasant point of the entire class was seeing Tish Fagin at the class, though she had a different last name on her name tag. Tish is Mischief teammate Adam Fagin's mom, so the moment was a nice life-folding-in-on-itself, serendipity moment. I had found out last Sunday that my mom is also a Master Gardener, though not in California, so seeing Tish and knowing that another person I know is also in the program is quite comforting.

Our class was about soil: composition, quality and management. Good class.