casual ultimate » east coast

There’s been a lot of communication back and forth with Chicago this week, particularly about the headless horseman scavenger hunt & bi-cycle race in two weeks, which is going to be fantastic. word on the street is that the peach pit is sponsoring with beer- and pizza-related prizes and rodan is hosting the afterparty. let’s spend some time on this blog talking about how fantastic their mojitos are. but for real: all my peeps in chicago need to congregate and have the happy hour to end all happy hours tonight.

back in eastern standard time, ms. ulty is excited about the prospect of getting back on her iron horse like the chicks n’ drinks ladies in chicity….eventually. the bruises from my battle with a biology professor’s hood are pretty much gone, but my right knee still has this weird swelling on it, it’s a little hurty, etc. now you know. i can’t help but think that if i’d gone to berkeley i would have had doctor welsh’s expert consultation. maybe grandma’s right, maybe i do need to start hanging out with the medical school.

since this accident kept me away from regionals last weekend (so frustrating), i picked up a new pastime to cheer myself up: stump. this game is what it sounds and looks like: you put a bunch of nails into a tree stump in a circle, with one in the middle. everybody playing picks a nail and the object of the game is to be the last nail standing. you achieve this by flipping a forester-sized hammer end over end, cactching it on the fly and immediately striking your opponents’ nails/the stump/miss catching it and permanently maim a bystander. i got pretty into it, and finally won a round by the end of happy hour. needless to say every aspect of the competition improved over time since it was part of our weekly outdoor happy hour.

speaking of which, miss casual, i seem to remember us making a graph of crunkedness over time at one point. last friday, at the as-close-as-new-haven-gets-to-a-bicycle-bar bar, we were doing something similar and my friend esteban came up with a complex version involving four axes. general consensus at the table was that he’s a shoe-in for the nobel prize. turns out that went to al gore instead, but maybe next year we’ll get his submission in on time.

but back to ultimate. congratuf’inglations to machine, and my heart goes out to everyone else. while no one wanted their seasons to end in the sooner state, the good news is that, while machine is having two-a-days in 50 degree drizzle, you’ll be inside watching football, eating steak and drinking beer. same goes for happy hour: do it up chicago, make some happy hour magic so miss casual has something to post about on monday. rally the troops - i want shenanigans, hijinx and pictures. remember that time bp and miss casual got into a fight at that crappy indoor beergarden? remember when that kids got headbutted by the crazy bartender at the hole-in-the-wall on armitage? avoid those places, and instead go to lemming’s, order a kind midwestern brew and catch up with your friends. do it or else i’ll come at you with my hammer.

i don’t know what to say about this weekend other than (a) puppet regime is an awesome team to play with and (b) we won our section. i am so psyched to be able to play this fall - i realized at around 10 am on saturday morning, as i was changing my pants on a sideline filled with strangers, that i would have gone nuts without playing some sort of organized ultimate. plus, it was great to play with justin again (same attitude, different glasses) - no carrie this weekend but i’m looking forward to seeing that lady again. i also ran into tucker of 30-year-old spring break fame, although apparently i’m blacklisted because i couldn’t score her a sandwich. sorry.

enough mushy stuff, onto the weekend. thankfully we had a first-round bye saturday, because it was raining cats and dogs and quite cold. we pulled up to the fields just as the sun was coming out. after a round of introduction, running, stretching, tossing etc. we played mako (15-4 - they seemed to do better in other games later that day), then levitation holmes (15-6), then a long delay followed by sandwiches and then AMOB out of brooklyn (12-3) and harpoon, the new haven team (12-6). it was windy as hell, every point was upwind-downwind. puppet’s offense did very well against the wind, aided by a number of h.o.t. lady and gent handlers.

a bunch of us went for dinner at el bandito, a killer local mexican joint in middletown, ny that serves tequila shots with the check. luckily we didn’t have to pick up that check, because the TD was with us and bought us dinner in exchange for garbage and cone pickup on sunday. we drank the tequila shots anyways, then watched men in black II and went to bed.

the best thing about going into the finals game on sunday morning was the 11:30 start time. the hotel crew ate a hearty meal of pancakes, french toast, oatmeal and lots and lots of butter at a local diner. seriously we each had a half a stick of butter on our meals. that gave us all the energy we needed to power through a game of long and windless points against crafty, another brooklyn team and the #2 seed (shocking sectionals spoiler: top 3 held seeds). we ended up beating them 15-11. i felt like there was a bit more competition than we had last year in the
central plains section. apparently there are a few former puppeteers playing for crafty.

that’s it for the east coast correspondent. the surprise in the region was in the east new england tourney, where slow white lost to quiet coyote and had to play through the 2nd place bracket on sunday, eventually beating quiet coyote to take 2nd place overall (tandem was first).