Soul Searchings

It’s back to the grind after another power packed weekend.

Last Thursday, the stereo system in my Yaris suddenly stopped working. It was fine while I was driving home from work, and after I picked up my stuff to head back out for grass volleyball, something went wrong with it. The display was still functioning, but nothing would come out of the speakers no matter what I tried. Neither the radio nor CD player would work. That was no good, as I was planning on driving up to Whistler, and having nothing to listen to would have made the trip quite monotonous. It turns out it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as somehow I ended up driving a full car load of five people, and there was no way I was going to be able to fit everyone plus their luggage in my Yaris. Instead, I drove the Camry. It’s been almost two years since I last drove the Camry, and I had forgotten how it drove. Even though the Camry has 133HP compared to the 106HP of my Yaris, the extra weight and perhaps the wear and tear of the engine made it feel much more sluggish and unresponsive to the throttle. However, it got the job done.

Left a bit after 7pm to head up to Whistler and arrived there before 10pm. There were about 20 people between our two suites. I don’t even remember how we wasted away the time, but it wasn’t until 3:30am when most people went to sleep, even though we had to be up before 8am because we had to be at the field by 8:30am. This was the first reverse 4’s volleyball tournament I’ve played in, and it doesn’t really suit me too well. I’m not very effective coming out of the backrow, and can’t set very well either. All I was good for was passing. Along with Ron, Blessy and Stephanie, we managed to win two out of our six round robin matches. We were placed into the lower recreational division for the playoffs, which was a good thing. In our first playoff matchup, we got slaughtered 25-7 in the first set, but managed to win the second set. On the third and deciding set to 15, we were in bad shape, down about 13-8. Somehow I managed to run off six points in a row by serving tough to the girls on the left and right, and suddenly we were up 14-13. They did win the next point to make it 14’s up, with the next point deciding the winner of the match. Unless my recollections are mixed up, we received the serve and I got the set and managed to put it away to take the upset comeback victory. After that, we managed to win the next two matches fairly easily, which placed us into the finals in the winner’s bracket. We faced a very good team and lost, but there was no shame in having done so. We were then relegated to the backdoor draw, where we found ourselves facing off against the same team we had upset in the first round of the playoffs. It was one set to 25, and history almost repeated itself. We were down about 20-16 when I again managed to reel off six points on serve to take a 22-20 lead. We got the score to 23-21, before we finally collapsed and lost 25-23. It was still a very good showing by us to finsh 3rd, even if it was in the lowest division.

Out of all of our teams, we made it the furthest in each of our respective divisions, so everyone else was done by the time we finished, so we packed up and headed back to the hotel to get freshened up before dinner. It turns out that soon after we left, it started pouring, so those that were playing in the finals got stuck playing in the rain.

By the time we headed out for dinner, the rain had basically stopped. Finding a restaurant to eat at in Whistler is not the easiest task, and in the end most of us decided on going to the Keg again. We got there at about 7:15pm, and were told it would be about a 45 minute wait. We came back around 8pm, and they were not ready for us yet. Apparently the table we were waiting for had already gotten their bill, but they were just sitting around and in no hurry to leave. We sat around in the waiting area for almost another hour before they finally were able to fit us in. Because of the lengthy wait, they actually took off $100 from our bill of $240, which roughly works out to be a 42% discount. Not bad.

After that, we went back to the hotel, hung out, played some drinking games, and went to sleep at about 4am again. I was really glad I was not playing the reverse 2’s or men’s 2’s on Sunday. For the men’s 2’s, apparently because it was not widely advertised, there were only a total of ten teams signed up - eight who were advanced, and two who were recreational, with the two teams being Will & Gary, and Tony & Ron. They ended up having to play all of the advanced teams, and of course, it wasn’t very pretty. I got to sleep in a bit, until almost 10am. We cleaned everything up and vacated by 11am. Headed to Four N Twenty to grab some pies, before heading to the field. Since I wasn’t playing, I helped record a lot of game footage for them. In the afternoon, since there were tennis courts right there by the field, a few of us hit around for a little while. It actually helped me a bit, as I figured out I need a lot more drive in my backhand, because I was trying to uppercut too much to put spin on the ball.

We were done by 5pm, and we packed up to drive back to Vancouver. At the parking lot, I put my bags down on the ground behind the car, and then forgot to put them in the trunk. I started to back up, and even though Chanh honked me several times initially, I didn’t know what he was trying to signal to me, until I finally figured out I was running over my tennis bag. Fortunately, it had only run over the compartment with the tennis balls. While it didn’t run over my racquets, it put enough stress on the bag that it busted out the seams on it. Oh well. We drove to Squamish and stopped off at Tim Horton’s to grab a coffee, and then at KFC/Taco Bell for some dinner. It wasn’t until about 7:30pm that we left, and we got back into Vancouver at about 8:30pm. I dropped Blessy and Stephanie off, and then headed home. Decided I would drop by the triple birthday beach party of Ken, Ed, and Ash just to say hi. Got there when it was already pretty dark, but a lot of people were still there. A bunch of the volleyball people had decided to still go for late night sushi despite having had KFC/Taco Bell just a mere two hours earlier. Ken and I dropped by there just to hang out for a bit afterwards.

On Monday, we managed to get in what seems like our annual doubles game, with Ken and Gary against Ed and I. Nobody was playing that great this session, but Ken and Gary were both volleying exceptionally well. Gary’s serve was terrible though, and Ed and I managed to take the five-setter victory 7-5, 7-5, 2-6, 6-1. They definitely had their chances, especially in the second set, where they were up two breaks and had three set points with the score at 5-2, before we stormed back to win that and the next four games. I was serving quite poorly as well, despite having felt quite good about my serve this past month. Something just didn’t feel quite right yesterday. I think I will need to go out and have another dedicated serving session sometime soon.

To my amazement, while I was driving to tennis yesterday, after being inoperative the entire weekend, my car stereo inexplicably suddenly started working again. It’s still working as of now, so I guess if it’s still working by tomorrow, I should cancel the appointment I had made to get it fixed.

I don’t feel fully recovered from this weekend just yet. I think I should get a long night’s sleep tonight to compensate for it.