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Last night was the Longmont ultimate league tournament, and the end of many years running that league. Despite the fact that it’s the end of May, we’d had snow earlier in the week and it rained the entire day before. The forecast called for rain the day of the tournament as well, and I fully expected that we wouldn’t play because the city would close the fields. But the weather held, and we took the field in a 40-degree chill.

My team beat our first opponent handily, and started off strong in the second game, but then sort of imploded and lost the semi-finals. That team went on to take a dramatic victory in the championship game. Several of the players, including the captain, had never won a GRU league before, so it was cool to see them finally make it happen. One of them told me she’s been playing in GRU for 18 years and never won, so I was happy for all of them.

Despite the unseasonably cold weather, it was a fun evening. During a brief bout of rain, as the sun was setting over the mountains, we were treated to an amazing double rainbow. The pictures definitely don’t do it justice.

Since I’ll be gone in the fall, I won’t get to play in Longmont league again. I was touched when, just before the championship game, a big group of people gathered around me to present me with some t-shirts they’d all autographed. A few of my friends had taken the shirts around to all the teams that night, asking people to sign them. Even though I’ll play in the summer league, it’s sad to leave behind Longmont league. This one has been dear to my heart for a long time, and I love the spirit in the league and the camaraderie of the hundred or so people who play in it.

It’s been a few ultimate seasons since I won a championship, so it was fun to be crowned in last night’s indoor league.

Note the spiffy fanny packs… those were the prizes for the winners. Yeah. I promptly gave mine away to a six-year-old girl (the daughter of Sam, who’s on the far left in blue). And no, the score wasn’t really 115-9; the scoreboard was wonky all night.

To be fair, this wasn’t a traditional league. We used a “hat” format, where teams were randomly shuffled every week. One of my co-league-coordinators wrote a simulated annealing program (I don’t know what that means, but it sounds cool) which generated rosters based on skill level, height, weight, gender, and a few other factors. The idea was to create new teams that were relatively balanced, and it worked pretty well. Everyone scored points based on how their teams did in a given week, and at the end of the season the top players were considered the champions. In fact, I suspect it was pretty much random chance, though, rather than any particular skill on the part of the players.

All in all, it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing on teams with almost everyone in the league.

It’s late May. And it’s snowing.

Dirk posted this on Facebook today:

Several friends (who don’t know Dirk or Jen) have seen it and commented that I seem a little under-dressed. I guess that’s kind of par for the course with me.

That was a fun day, being a part of their wedding. Happy anniversary, old friend.

Today was my last day teaching seminary. It’s been four years of getting up at 5:15am every school day and spending an hour with half-asleep high schoolers. Four years of going to bed early, trying to sleep when I wasn’t tired but knowing I’d have to be up in six hours. Four years of spending two hours every day preparing a lesson. Four years of figuring out how to make the lesson engaging and interesting to those half-asleep teenagers. Four years of studying the scriptures in detail, and reading manuals, and researching church history. Four years of wearing a shirt and tie every morning.

And so after returning home from my empty classroom today, I deleted my 5:15am alarm for the last time. That felt good.

When I first received my call to serve as a teacher, my supervisor said, “welcome to the hardest and the greatest calling in the church”. She was right. It was hard… definitely the hardest calling I’ve had in my twenty-five years of service. And it was great… so much fun to be with a roomful of kids every day, so much to learn, and so many blessings from all of it. I’m happy to finish, but sad to see it go.

Found in an old notebook of Kyra’s:

For some reason, I love the juxtaposition of an ionic reaction with copper chloride, and a bunch of little monsters.

I found a snippet of an article from the New York Times sometime in the 1990’s:

As a physicist, I can attest this is true.

Another thing I found in my box of really old stuff (in a manila folder called Miscellaneous, if you can believe it) is this beautiful page from a copier, circa 1992.

That’s Dempsey in the shades on the left, and those are my lips and nostrils on the right. We’d taken a road trip from Rolla to Jefferson City one night (because that’s kind of stuff we did) and broke into the State Capitol building. I think it’s okay for me to admit that now, because surely the statute of limitations has expired. We wandered the marble hallways for a while and found a copier, and decided to put it to use. Hence the “Missouri tax dollars at work” note at the top.

Ahh, college.

I’m going through boxes of old stuff, cleaning house, and stumbled across a page I’d torn out of a magazine.

Luckily Linux isn’t quite that bad these days, but yeah, I do remember days of figuring out arcane hardware configurations and the like. (I’m looking at you, X11.)

Like Alex and Kyra before him, Zaque has decided to serve a mission for the church. After a few months of preparing (mostly waiting for the earliest time he could submit his paperwork), last night he received his mission call.

Unlike past years, missionaries now receive their calls via email. So it’s a little different to stand around Zaque’s computer as he opens the email, rather than sitting on the couch as he tears open an envelope.

He clicked the link in the email and started reading the letter aloud.

It started out just like all the others: “You are hereby called to serve as a missionary of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…”

And then came the second sentence, the one all prospective missionaries read with a little anxiety (mixed with excitement) in their voice: the one that tells them where they’ll be serving.

“You are assigned to labor in the Oklahoma Oklahoma City Mission.”

Yep, Zaque’s heading to Oklahoma on September 18 for two years. Laralee and I are so proud of him. He’s going to be an amazing missionary.