See? He looks tough.
And yet, as of this week, he may be known on our block as the worst athlete in the world. Tangent: Ha! When you saw the title of this post, you thought it was going to be me, didn't you? :) (That, or maybe Livan Hernandez.)
On Tuesday, the Awesome NeighborsTM were a little short-handed for their weekly kickball game (they play in a local kickball league every year, sometimes for a couple of "seasons" during the year), so Tim asked M whether he'd be interested in participating. Sure, why not? After all, it's kickball, right? You know, the game we all played when we were little. How hard can it be? Of course, it was the first game of the playoffs, therefore determining whether Tim and Seza's season would end that night or continue on for another month, but still.
Tuesday night after the game, M comes home and I ask how it went. "Let me set this up for you: Ninth inning." (Oo, I thought -- Tim had told me that kickball usually only goes to seven innings, so this must have been quite the game.) "Two outs. Bases loaded. And who gets called up?"
"Not you, right?" I asked (i.e., "Why on earth would they do that?"). But no, it was indeed him.
"So what happened?!?"
"Uh, pop fly right to one of the outfielders. Game over."
"No!" I said. "You ended the kickball season? With the bases loaded?"
"Yep. I was like, 'Um, sorry, everyone who I never met before tonight that I ruined your playoffs!'"
Oy. The following morning (yesterday), he reminded me that he'd signed up for an SJU alumni bike ride of some kind for that day. He'd forwarded me an e-mail about it at some point last week; I vaguely remembered something about an eight- or ten-mile ride starting in one of the southern-most suburbs around 1 p.m.
Around 7:00 last night, the phone rings: it's Mason, on his way home from the event and sounding miserable. "I biked forty miles today."
"What?!?"
"It was awful. And my tires were kinda flat so it was really difficult to pedal. I got my a$$ handed to me. Oh! And a dog chased me for part of the time."
"OK, let's come back to the dog in a minute," I said. "What happened to a nice, eight-mile ride through the country?"
"Well," he explained, "there were three groups: an eight-mile, a twenty-four-mile, and a forty-mile group. I got there five minutes late and the eight-mile group had already left."
"So you went for the forty? Did you fall on your head or something?"
"No! I went for the twenty-four. But that group started with the forty group, which was supposed to split off at some point and do forty while the twenty-four group took a shortcut, or something -- but it didn't work out that way. And it was through these really hilly cornfields, so it was up and down all the time, and there was no shade [blogger's note: it was 90 degrees here yesterday afternoon].
"Then at one point when I was really struggling, a big dog jumped out of a ditch and started chasing me! I'd already done, like, thirty miles and I was exhausted. Normally, I would have laughed about it because there was no way this dog was going to catch me on a bike, but today… He chased me for so long. And a couple of times he almost caught me and bit my leg. I was just, 'Are you kidding me?'
"I finally get to the end of the thing, and the problem with being last is that everyone else is already done and rested, so the organizer said, 'OK, let's all head out!' And all I wanted to do was sit for a minute!"
Thirty minutes later, he walked (well, limped) in the door and I could tell that he hadn't even realized how badly he was sunburned. I asked, "What do you need?"
"Um, some Advil and a big cocktail, I think. And some time on the couch."
It's a good thing we don't have big plans for tonight. I think M might end up on bed rest.
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