It's a testament to how much I love soccer that I showed up for my 6.30 game tonight. It was raining at my house, it was cold. I wasn't feeling it. Still, I forced myself to go. And I'd point out that two guys wussed out, probably because it was too cold. Because of that, we played with 7 players (the difference between this week and last week is that we started out with 7 as opposed to 6. Then 2 players didn't get ejected this week so we didn't have 4 on 8 by the time the ref called the game, which is what happened to us last week).

Now, I've been totally up front about that fact that I am the biggest wuss ever when it comes to the cold. So I was wearing lots of layers. As in five layers of shirts. FIVE. Though I took off two layers (a long sleeve t and a sweatshirt). I was wearing a hat and gloves (leather gloves; next week I'll take better soccer gloves with me. Though any gloves make throwing the ball in hard.)

Yet it's even more a testament to how much I love the game that when I was asked to play in the 7,30 game, I did. (That team only had 4 people show up, so they got 2 from my team, and 2 from the team I played against to play with them. I suspect that the other team was not pleased that we stayed. Instead of winning by forfeit, they ended up losing. And it wasn't even close. I think the final score was 6-1. And the only reason they scored their one was because my brother kicked the ball and it nailed me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me. He just saw me go down and wasn't sure what happened to me (he later said b/c of how I grabbed my side, it looked like I was protecting my hand and he was afraid he broke it.) Anyway, my brother immediately walked over to me, so there was no one guarding the goal. (My damn brother knows better to walk over to a player, even a hurt player, when the play is still going on!) My brother had 3 goals to make up for that stupidity. (For the record, he had only one goal for our team. But our team won 6-0 too. Actually, I usuall play defense, but I played offense today, so I scored too. It was quite different, putting the ball IN the net rather than trying to keep it out of the net.)

Oh, and I agreed to play on a second team b/c they are down players, any week except when we play them. What can I say. I'm a glutton for punishment. And by the way, two straight games on my foot (no subs either game) is really hard on my foot. Part of me wonders how it can still be broken, what, a month later? Maybe 5 weeks later. Then another part of me thinks that maybe if I didn't keep playing on it, it would be easier to heal. It's in a lot of pain right now. And I shudder to think how much pain I'd be in if I wasnt taking pills before the games for the pain.

For those who care (and that might not be any of you, b/c I may not have mentioned it) , my speech today went ok. I was beyond nervous, extremely flustered, and I'm sure that you could tell it by my presentation, but it's over and I guess that's all that really matters.