Coming home.
I left on Friday at 4AM after staying up most of the night with my friend watching movies and shooting the shit about work and life. Ended up landing in Seattle about an hour later than expected but because of the time difference it was only 1PM boom! Managed to sleep 40 of the 45 minute flight to North Carolina, unfortunately that would be the only sleep I would get until eventually making it to Walla Walla.
Unabashedly I can say this was one of the most emotionally turbulent weekends of my life. Stepping off the plane (with a shit eating grin) I realized how much I longed to be back in the northwest. Over the past 6 months I have toyed with the idea of quitting playing frisbee. For better or for worse a large proponent of why I didn't quit was because I was introduced to a team of people I now consider my auxiliary family.
The impetus behind my journey back home was to play in a tournament called Onionfest. This was the very first tournament that I ever attended way back in 2004. High school juniors at the time, Alyssa Weatherford and Shannon O'malley talked me into going with the high school club team MoHo. Since then I have returned to the tournament several times with a similar group of people, and I can safely say this continues to be one of my favorite tournaments, unlike potlatch or poultry days, Onionfest is a small tournament that allows recent college graduates a chance to go back and relive the thrill of college one more time before returning to the real world. For those of you who have never played college ultimate before I would recommend it if you still have the chance. There is something about it, a feeling that you can try and recreate in club or high school but it just doesn't exist. The main difference that makes college fribsee so much different is that everyone on your team is living life in such a tight proximity and trying to hurdle through the brutal schedule of mixing ultimate and school work. You all live in the same general area, see one another on campus, are able to go to the gym with one another, you create bonds in college that seemingly last a lifetime. To this day some of my best friends are people that I both played and lived with in college.
Back in Atlanta.
I was going out to lunch with Matt one afternoon and we once again found ourselves at one of our favorite taco places near work. Moe's Southwest grill. While eating and talking about what we had left to go over for the day Matt stops our conversation and says, "Hey man I'm not positive but I think Charles Barkley just walked in..." Because of the outlandish nature of the statement I didn't even bother to look back until a moment later Matt said, "Wait never mind I think he is too short." Hearing this made me question whether or not he was telling the truth because as you may or may not know Charles Barkley was short for the position he played. When I finally turned around who is it standing there, none other than Sir Charles himself.
That's right! Ladies and gentleman, the round mound of rebound!
As we conveniently ended up leaving the restaurant at the same time as him and ended up getting to shake hands as well as exchange a few words with him. The days to follow I couldn't help but wonder why Charles Barkley would be eating lunch at essentially a taco del mar...
Piedmont Park Dogwood Festival.
Since before I moved here I had heard from a lot of people that Atlanta city culture is revolved around outdoor festivals revolved around food, art, or music. The Piedmont Park Dogwood festival was my introduction to this. A beautiful weekend 80 degrees both Saturday and Sunday I ended up walking around the 7mile park taking in all of the culture and beautiful sights. There were gorgeous flowers from blooming dogwoods as well as tons of carnival style games to play. Most notably however was an engineering event, which teams were given all the pieces to an Ikea chair and were given one hour to construct anything. The coolest thing that I saw a team make was a scooter. they bought skate board wheels from a shop across the street and used the wood from the chair to construct a fairly durable scooter.
Largest body of water that I have been able to find.
Sorry this post was a little bit of a roller coaster,
Allan
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