Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Patience is a virtue

Teaching my mom how to use the computer makes me want to bang my head against the wall. I just spent 25 minutes trying to teach my mom how to attach a file to an e-mail (in IE, so no easy drag-and-drop function. I installed Chrome for her but she doesn't use it.). It started out pretty promising because she said she already scanned the paper, which I taught her how to do a few months ago. But then she didn't know what she named it. And she couldn't find the file. And then she found it, renamed it and removed the jpg extension. And then she didn't know how to to click and drag. And then she couldn't find the desktop. ...

Me: "The desktop is the blue screen right when you start up the computer, that has like the recycle bin and my computer on it..."

Mom: "There's no blue screen! There is only My Documents."

Me: "But the file "My Documents" is on a blue screen, right?"

Mom: "No, there is only My Documents"

Me: ...

And then after a few more minutes she FINALLY got it!! By this time I was pacing and gesturing like a lunatic in the student center. I must've sounded like an idiot, "The DESK-TOP... is the BLUE... SCREEN right when you turn on the COM-PU-TER... It's just blank! With a few icons on it!" Anyway, I was super excited when she finally did it (I made her email me too), even though she had removed the jpg extension on the document.

And THEN she was like, "I need to do this so many more times!"

Me: "That's okay, you know how to do it now! I taught you how to fish!"

Mom: "Fish?"

Me: "Nevermind. You just did it, you can do it again now!"

Mom: "It's too complicated. I will just send them all to you and you can send them to Uncle, ok?"

Me: "MOOOOMMMMM if you can send them to me you can send them to Uncle!!!!"

Mom: "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh yeah."

Me: *smack* *smack* *smack* *face-palm*

Mom: "I don't know how to do any of this. You also need to teach me how to upload pictures from my camera to the computer."

Me: "Another time, Mommy, another time, please."

I know I really should be more patient with my mom, especially because she's my only parent left, and my dad used to take care of all this stuff. But I really am proud of her; she's learned a lot in the last few months, learning how to pay bills herself, getting a credit card for the first time in her life, taking care of the rental house, finding new tenants, etc. Just sometimes, no, a lot of times... I need to be more patient. Sigh...

Sunday, September 18, 2011

We're going to Regionals!

Which means Bryan is coming back to Boston again! Haha, I think if we didn't make Regionals, he just wouldn't come back. :P

Scores: http://scores.usaultimate.org/scores/#mixed/tournament/9648

Our first game in our six-round pool play was against Odyssey. We were down the entire game (we let them get one break on us early on) and didn't end up tying it up until 10-10, and then came back to win 13-10. Our second game was against Rorschach which we won relatively easily with a final score of 13-5. The Slow White game was a lot of fun to watch, and we did pretty well and we probably could've made it more competitive if we tighten lines, but we didn't; final score 12-9 them. We played Detroit Lions last on Sat, and got burned deep one too many times, final score 13-10 them.

On Sunday, we played Apocalypse Meow first game, won 13-8. Then we won the last pool play game against Sucker Punch (which I just learned is a movie), coming back from 7-8 to win 10-8. That was a really fun game because everyone was super pumped up!!

Some highlights that we talked about afterwards:
  • Bill's 85-yard huck to Doris for the score
  • Pretty zone O
  • Jenny cutting and catching aggressively
  • Matty catching a D and then dropping it on purpose (no one really noticed, right? :P)
  • Wu's double-D in one point (point-block) and then D'ed someone in the endzone, but they were both caught and they scored. But they were still nice Ds... haha :)
  • Nolan's pretty flick huck to Wu in the endzone
  • Kes and NG got a couple nice layout Ds, sometimes making up a looot of ground to get there.
  • Dillon and Yang's awesome talk from the sidelines
  • Sluts made some pretty key cuts/dishes this weekend. It was really awesome to watch :)
  • Miriam open everywheerrree
  • I laid out twice both for scores (both catching with my left hand, my uninjured side).
  • While standing 5 yards from the endzone line, trapped on a sideline, pump up a huge high throw to someone in the endzone, and MattyB caught it above 3 people, one of them NG, to score the winning point against Apoc Meow.
Now a digression about line-calling:

I called lines for three games on Saturday. Calling lines is really hard! I've never done it before, let alone for games/tournaments that matter. I felt so mentally exhausted after every game, like I had just taken a final or something. Actually, I read an article a few days ago about "Decision Fatigue" which describes the phenomenon that making many decisions makes a person tired so that he/she are more likely to make the "default" or lazy decisions. They studied parole board's decisions depending on the time of day and found that prisoners were more likely to be given parole during the morning or the hour right after lunch, basically times when the parole board was more awake and had the mental energy to make difficult decisions. And towards the end of the day, they tended to make the default decision not to grant parole. "The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways."

I definitely felt mentally fatigued after line-calling. And I wonder if my line-calling got worse throughout the day because my mental energy level for putting together good/fair lines was depleting.

There are a lot of factors that I considered during lines calling. There's men/women, handlers/cutters, primary/secondary cutters, O/D, zone positions (although that didn't really come up on Saturday) and people who play well together, I call that the gel factor. And then there's the flow of the game: Are we down? Do we need to tighten lines? And then during the Slow White game I was told that I need to always put a tall person on (Matty/Entz/Nolan). And sometimes it makes sense to keep the same line on two points in a row because things have been working well for them.

And all these factors need to be taken into consideration the moment immediately after the previous point ends. Ideally the line is called within 5-10 seconds after the previous point ends. If I was too involved in a point, cheering from the sidelines, it took me more time to get a line together. And if I was thinking about the next line I was going to call (which is usually two lines, one O and one D because you don't know which one is needed yet), I felt myself not really paying attention to what was happening on the field. Or maybe I was taking all of this too seriously :/

One thing that I definitely struggled with (and I think a lot of other women who call lines too) is the "unfairness" of playing time. If we're down a lot, we're going to play our O line more and the D line won't be getting much playing time. Plus, during the Odyssey game, we played 4 women for a lot of the O points because our women were our strong point, and when our roster only has 8 women and 16 men, a lot of the men won't be getting much playing time. There were definitely some games when some people played only 0-3 points per game. I'm sorry :(

I think I started to get a hang of calling lines maybe after a game and a half. Many times it was, "Yay! We won the point! CRAP I need to call the next line NOW... um um um, crap." After a while it got easier, but it was still tiring and mentally exhausting. Anyway it was definitely an experience and I have a newfound appreciation for people who call lines (like Hatch Michelle and Jin!)

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Hot or not

K: "how would you rate yourself in attractiveness, scale from 1-10"

B: "20"

K: "and me?"

B: "one billion"

K: "and W?"

B: "1"

K: "and X?"

B: "1"

K: "and Y?"

B: "1"

K: "and Z?"

B: "1"

K: "and Arnold?" (Schwarzenegger)

B: "10 billion!
... but only when he was younger"

K: "oh ok"

...

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

In anticipation...

I'm super pumped for Club Sectionals this weekend!! :D And Bryan is coming back on Thursday night! Now only if my shoulder will cooperate, everything will be fine.

I made a horrendous layout on Sunday during practice, hit my head pretty hard, scraped up both my elbows and both my knees, and sprained my right shoulder. I took an injury that point but played for the rest of practice and didn't feel my shoulder until a few hours after practice. By Sunday night I couldn't lift my arm beyond 45 degrees from my body in any direction.

I got my ice pack from Keith's (it had been living there since we moved out of Antrim because I don't have a fridge/freezer at Ashdown, I use my roommate's mini-fridge), cranked down the temperature (sorry for the frozen milk...), and am icing and resting a lot, per our in-house medic Jin's recommendations. I got a shoulder brace from Amazon that's supposed to hold things together and provide additional support. I saw someone at MIT Medical today but he was pretty unhelpful. Hopefully by Sat I'll have enough range of motion to throw mid-distance throws. If you have any other suggestions to make me healthy faster, let me know.

In other news, yay NU football! :)

Oh hey we're about to score :D

And the team sang the fight song with us afterwards!!

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Dumping

I'm so bad at dumping, especially to guys, especially to Wu. Three things I'm working on and going to remember to do:

1. Put it to space

2. If my dump is being face-guarded, put it to space, not over the dump.

3. If my dump is face-guarding me, fake one way and throw the other.

I guess with that, I need to pay attention to what the dump D is doing. Sadly, I confess that I don't know whether the dump D is face-guarding me or the dump.

But other than that, practice was a lot of fun this morning :)