Good weekend

Well I’m glad I took the initiative to get out of town on Saturday. It was a ton of fun.
Because I didn’t trust my alarm clock to wake me up at the right time in the morning, borrowing a tactic Cam described, I set up my computer to play a tune at a certain time. And it’s a good thing too, because my alarm clock was definitely insufficient at waking me at 6:10am on a Saturday morning. Anand’s “I’m loving it” — a satire of a McDonald’s commercial — on the otherhand, worked brilliantly.
Darren picked me up and we met Jahn and Gustafson at the old Arthur Anderson building.
We drove through the typical Florida rainstorm on the way up to Gainesville; huge drops lasting 20 minutes. Thankfully when we arrived (about ten minutes before scheduled gametime), we weren’t late — games wouldn’t start for another hour or so, at 11. Since we’d committed to being there the whole day already it wasn’t a big deal. Plus it gave us some time to warm up and say hello to some old friends.
About halfway through the day the thunderclouds rolled in and we had to leave the field early. This ended up stopping one of our games, but it wouldn’t have made a difference to the final outcome. The tournament had cooked the food early, which was great — we all ended up swarming the food table (under the trees) when the rain hit. This was very convenient, as everyone only needed to pick out a bun, get their burger/wiener and put on the condiments. Very fast. They also had Boca veggie-burgers for those who wanted them. Props for that. Unprops for putting them in the same cooler that held the cooked meatburgers and brats! Thankfully I’m not a vegetarian.
Otherwise a very smoothly run tournament. About 100 people showed up, eight teams in total. One aspect that helped things go smoothly was that the games were not played to a point total. Instead, all games were capped to 50 minutes apiece. This helped keep things on track in a big way. It also modified how people played — instead of working towards a goal of X points, strategy shifted toward getting and maintaining “comfort points” — more of a constant pressure to continue scoring. I guess we understood that pretty well, because at the time cap during our first two games, my team — the red team — beat our opponents by more than 6 points. Yeah baby! Unfortunately we’d end up losing our third by two points, and our fourth and final game by a single point, knocking us out of continuing on to the semi-finals.
But watching was good fun, and Rex, Gustafson and Jahn and I had a good time heckling Darren in the finals. This was made easy by the ample supply of beer Jahn brought along in the Sarasota team cooler (we ran the tournament-supplied keg dry, so we were some of the few with anything left to drink by the final game). Unfortunately Darren’s team (Orange) lost in the finals, but it was a close game and I hope to have a couple video clips up for you to peruse soon. 🙂 Anyhow enough of me blabbing — enjoy the pics 🙂