Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	guster- medicine,

a brief update, maybe
there had been several occasions in the past month that i felt quite obligated to bring this journal up to date. yet the ongoing hiatus has slowly turned into a nasty addition. today i finally gather enough will to at least give a brief update before my frequently short-circuited brain starts to forget the valuable and exciting memories. ok, yes, i don't think i wrote about the california trip in april, which was pretty fun.
i stopped by san fran for a few days, stayed with ryan and jennie before heading down to anaheim for annual AACR (american association for cancer research) meeting. the meeting was huge and a bit overwhelming. although parts of it were excellent, the sheer size and frustration of not being able to coordinate all the things i liked to do was quite a turn-off.
after california trip, i came back and put an end to my rather miserable volleyball season. well, let me rephrase that, the actual physical aspect of the season was abysmal(no offense to my teammates, some of whom might very well read this little piece. we were a great team, off the court, that is), there are probably few worse teams than us in the history of human volleyball playing. but the socializing afterwards had always been a very fun event. and i am still glad i initiated the team, very grateful to all the team members for sticking together and having lots of fun playing incompetent volleyball, and of course, i enjoyed the late night visits to the fells points bars immensely.
before the end of season, i snuck up to amherst for a weekend for jef's swordsmanship conference at Mass center for renaissance studies, which was interesting and enlightening. it was a rather tightly packed weekend, activity wise, i was quite torn between visiting folks. I actually missed jef's dedication ceremony of the collection of historical combat treatises to his late father's name, felt bad about that. in addition, as usual for this gang of friends, alana me and jef did a bit beer drinking while watching cartoons on demand. mm.. driving was insane though. 1000 miles in 2 days. my poor butt.
back to the sports, in contrast, my soccer team miraculously improved a great deal towards the end of the season. the strategies neal and i worked out had effectively prevailed. we beat the bottom team of the league 20 to 2 during the first round of playoffs. yes, that wasn't a typo and we were actually embarrassed to keep playing with our usual intensity. the second round of playoff we knocked off the champions from last season the fighting amish, 8 to 2. although i had to sit out due to my knee injury, the excitement wasn't any less just watching the game. some of the players on my team might have been a little too aggressive and dirty in some aspects, but the fighting amish never had a chance to put up any real challenges. and for the final, we played the champions from two seasons ago, the team that hadn't lost thru out the season. my knee probably didn't like the fact that i played for 10 minutes, but scoring a goal and an assist in a quarter of a game was just too exciting to miss. we capped our season with a 7:3 win, in a completely dominating fashion. yeah, i babbled a lot for the soccer but that was an awesome season.
yeah, the weekend before the end of soccer season, alana came to visit for a week. action-packed is an understatement for that week. the HFestival was great, 10 hours of musical treat. the lightening from the storm, the lighting on the stage, billy idol, cold play, foofighters, garbage, they might be giants, louis XIV, interpol, social distortions, the good charlotte, can't believe it was only 40$. then it was the NIN concert at the electric factory, what a show. and i saw the star wars III . a week of good eats, good conversations and tons of fun. and did i mention good eats? chuang cai, ethiopian, puerto rican....
so, since then, it's mostly just work. wednesday is the killers concert, so that should be another jolt for the week. and next weekend i'll be heading up to boston for the american craft beer fest, mm....

so it's late and i should end here, but this is the fear i have had that partially kept me from writing up this update. i feel like i am not doing enough justice to the past month, it was just, well, tons of fun to be effectively captured by words. *sigh* maybe i should write some up in more details later, when i have more free time, which i sort of doubt would be possible. but above all, i need to express some gratitude to the friends i spent all the fun time with, alana, jef, shoba, mark, matt (yeah, those two beer heads, i should write more about them later), and my entire soccer and volleyball team, and melinda and adam, also ryan and jennie, they had helped to make it a spectacular month.
btw, the softball season started today with a win right before the raging thunder storm, it is a bit overwhelming to manage a team of 22, i shall elaborate on that later.