An Outtahand Side Note
(I keep forgetting that I want to mention this. Not that it has any significant relevance to anything, but I thought it was fun.)

At the tourney yesterday (or rather, I guess the day before yesterday now), there was this awesome volleyball player dude that my teammates were wary of as soon as he stepped onto the court for warm-up. (Wolfgang: "If that guy's teammates are anywhere close to as good as he is, we're so dead...") Anyway, point is this guy looked SO much like the lead singer from Coldplay, I swear! I mentioned it to Wolfgang and we had a good gawk. I'm sure that this volleyball dude was at least a foot taller than the Coldplay lead singer (named Chris Martin, btw--that's the Coldplay lead singer, not the volleyball dude) and though the resemblance was slight, it was pretty significant. Enough to make me wish I'd brought a camera of sorts.

Could you just imagine how awesome that would be though? To be such an awesome volleyball player AND an international singing superstar?! I don't think there could be anything more that one could want in terms of skills/talent! I lead the happiest life if I could do that...sing and play volleyball all the time. swEEEEt. Wolfgang dared me to go up to him and ask him if he was often mistaken for Chris Martin by others. I was going, to but didn't cuz I forgot all about it after watching a bit more of his hitting practice. I think Wolfgang forgot too.

AVD (Awesome Volleyball Dude) was a pretty cool and modest guy too; no smack-talk on the court, no hard feelings, no showing off the fact that he could totally smash a hole in the floor if he wanted to. How do I know? Cuz I got a personal comment from him, almost accidentally. There was one hit that I saw him going for while I was in middle. I somehow managed to read where he was going to hit it, it was only a matter of timing my block right and jumping high enough. To my greatest surprise, he brought the hit down low to the net where I could reach it, and I totally managed to stuffed his ass! I don't know who was more surprised, me or him:
    AVD - "Wow, you totally stuffed me! Nice block!"
    Me - (nervous laughter) "Whoa."
    AVD - (smiling) "Whoa, yeah, I think you just threw off my whole game!"
    Me - (more nervous laughter) "Sorry?"
    AVD - (kinda chuckling at my stunned-ness) "No, that was nice."
Apparently I did throw him off a bit as he totally shanked the next serve (AVD - "See? You did!"), but he got right back on top of things by the next serve, as any awesome volleyball player would do. I was so relieved that to discover that he was a good sport--for a while there (as indicated by the nervous laughter), I was seriously afraid of losing my fingers on his next hit in order to earn revenge on my block. Whew. Go Chris Martin!