finals week

This week has been the week of finals.

I finally finished my Hindi class after almost two years of studying and attending weekly classes with a co-worker who taught the class using Rupert Snell's book called "Teach Yourself Hindi". Now I can read and write the Devanagari script used for Hindi. This next year I want to practice my talking skills, which means I need to start working on extending my vocabulary also.

I finally completed the season in the competitive volleyball league at work during lunch time. We lost the very last game in the finals to come in second place. It was fun playing with such great volleyball players and I learned a lot and am now a better player because of it. That is true in most sports, in that if you play with people better than you then you will improve over time. Every time I enjoyed watching my teammates set the ball perfectly and then watch as one of the other players would spike it with so much power. It is just fun to watch good people play.

This is my final week of work for 2008. The company I work for closes their office the last week of December, which really means every one gets an extra week of vacation every year, which is very nice! I plan on finishing the first section of my new book and hopefully finish all of the sections up until I went to India. I need to find the journals that I kept during that time and review them to figure out what I need to say. That was the most important time of my life so it may be hard to condense it down to something reasonable - it may be a book in itself!

wallyball

Yesterday during lunch I ventured into the exciting world of wallyball. That sounds very close to volleyball when you speak it in public conversation. I had heard about it for several years and finally found someone who would let me play. We played two-on-two inside a racquetball court with the next tied to the walls at the half way point within the court. At first I had no idea what to expect after I had the rules explained to me. Besides the fact that a racquetball court echoes like crazy, I was not sure I heard the rules correctly. Once we started playing it was pretty obvious how I should be playing, but it was another thing all together on how to actually do it. The ball has a rubber outside and is slightly smaller than a volleyball and bounces like a huge racquetball. I quickly learned that I should not try to block shots at the net as that left the court wide open for my teammate, which was too large an area to cover for one person. It was hard hitting the ball just right so it bounced off our opponent's side walls but not our opponent's back wall. This was especially true of serving. The surprising thing to me was how quickly I was sweating and I got a great work out. This is an interesting video that shows how the best people play wallyball.

sports day

Yesterday was one of the most athletic days of my life. I played volleyball on my company team during lunch and since we lost the match and I did not do very good, I decided to go for a 3 mile run to "cool" off. When I got home my youngest son wanted to play tennis so we took off for the courts and played for over an hour. On arriving at the tennis court, he noticed the Indian cricket equipment I had in my trunk, so I had to show him how to play after we finished playing tennis. I decided to take off today and not do any exercise as my old body needed a break.