Monday, February 26, 2007

Hotel Indigo, Beat by the Maroon Team

It was a great weekend with a bit of a crappy ending. Every so often, my darling bride and I disappear for a little weekend getaway. Her wonderful sister and brother-in-law are nice enough to watch our Monkey while we’re away…at this point, we owe them a ton of babysitting when they have their own kids, and we’ll be happy to do it. We made reservations at Hotel Indigo (we’ve never been there) and after a pretty cool Graduation ceremony at my school, we were off!

The place was pretty different from many of the other hotels we’ve visited. The colors were green, blue, and purple, and it had the feel of a hotel on the beach, in spite of the fact that it was nestled firmly behind the Galleria. And the elevators were BIG. We’ve been to several hotels in Houston, and honestly, they all seem alike to me. But this one stood out. Now, the Room Service menu was crappy, and we had to move out of our first room because the A/C didn’t work, but aside from that, it was a pretty sweet place. They had really big showers. Cool. We slept a lot, visited House of Pies for breakfast and dinner, wandered around Barnes and Noble…generally, just enjoyed our time together. There was some necking, but I’m not going to get into that here.

So Sunday rolls around, and we pack up, go get the Monkey, and head home. Thankfully, I had cleaned up the house before we left so that we wouldn’t come home to a mess, and I had time to bring in our stuff before changing clothes to play lacrosse. The weather was beautiful…perfect lacrosse weather. Blue skies, cool breezes, niiiiiiiice. The opposing team had what our coach refers to as ‘a bunch of young flatbellies’. Yes, the other team did seem a bit young by our standards. Many of them were just barely out of high school, while our youngest guy is 31. We also had heard that this was literally the second game ever for some of these guys. We looked forward to a win.

We started out well, leading by a couple of points at the half, but we had started to notice something…our shots were starting to bounce off the goalie with alarming regularity. I mean, the little guy started heaving himself in front of our shots, and they just stopped going in the goal. Dang. Sure, the other team had a ton of guys, and they were running all over the field with their youthful exuberance, but we handled the ball better, and should have been able to run the score up a bit. Not so, according to the maroon goalie. He had come out there to stop our shots, and was taking his job seriously.

Personally, I was feeling pretty good. I had already given permission to my teammates to rag me if I scooped one-handed (a sure way to get the ball knocked out of your stick because you’re too damn lazy to stoop over and pick it up safely) and so I was coming up with ground balls here and there. And I was hitting well. I recall going for a loose ball and seeing one of their guys coming in at the same time. “I got man!” BANG. Down he went. Good for me! Another time, I played defense on #14, and when I came off the field, someone asked me if he had insulted my mother. So it was a good day for me. I did take one lousy shot and totally missed a pass that I was apparently supposed to catch and immediately shoot, but I’ll do better on offense next time.

In the end, we lost. We just couldn’t make a goal to save our lives, in spite of the vast number of shots we took. They pressured us just enough, and got enough trash goals to beat us. Argh. I hate being their first win. Ah, well. Hopefully, we’ll do better next time.

And so, I’m preparing for another fabulous day of workouts, classes, and housework. Have fun, everyone.

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