Adventures, Musings, Commentary, and Associated Fun

We are the Champions...

Yes, it's a shameless self-plug.  Chilly won the Open Division title at Australian Ultimate Frisbee Nationals; here's the write-up.  Unfortunately, the official photos are not available yet, but 2 guys on the B team have put their collections up at Flickr, here and here.  Enjoy!  My personal favorite is the one below, which is why I always say that Ultimate is non-contact "in theory".  Nonetheless, he didn't call foul - perhaps because he was too dazed!

The tourney was fantastic, and to win a third straight title on home soil was great.  Even better, Dad came over for the tournament, and watching 3 out of the 4 days of the tourney really allowed him to get a feeling for the team and the sport, in a way that watching a one-off game doesn't.  I was happy with my performance overall; I feel like I've managed to make a role for myself on the team, and to be expected to make big plays and contribute makes for lots of nervous excitement (in a good way!).  University ultimate is just starting to really get going, which ensures that I'm never too far away from throwing a disc. :) We had a few beers Wed night to celebrate the win, needless to say.

Unfortunately, with New Zealand (photos on Facebook here and here) and Nationals both just memories - though very, very positive ones at that - I now need to get back into work mode.  My next chapter is due in about 4 weeks, which is somewhat daunting.  Nonetheless, I am excited about it.  I'm hoping to go to Singapore (and Indonesia if I can swing it as well) for 2-3 weeks in July as a sort of reconnaissance trip for my "real" research trip in Jan/Feb.  It looks like the cost of flights will be will be around A$1300-1500, which is a bit steep, but I figure I really need to get there to check things out.  It will be my first trip to Asia, which is reason enough to get pretty stoked...

Semifinals, finals on today...

Yet more ultimate talk...things have gone really well for Chilly thus far at the National Championships. We're undefeated so far, down to the final 4 teams (2 of whom we've already beat this tourney), and feeling good about our chances. The other team we haven't faced, "Barefoot" (Sydney-based), is built around largely the same core of players that formed "Thong", which those with good memories will remember upset Chilly in the semifinals of Worlds in November. If going for 3 straight nationals championships wasn't enough motivation, the prospect of beating those guys adds more than enough.

I'm pretty happy with how I've played in the tournament so far. I've scored a fair number of points through either receiving or throwing the disc, and with one or two exceptions I'm reasonably pleased with the defense that I've played too. My role on the team is largely to be a constant threat on offense (both through throwing and running the guy guarding me all over the field) and provide some hard, tight defense. I haven't had too many blocks this tourney, but I feel like I'm really stepping into a leadership role. It's been good fun, I love playing with the guys on our team, and if anything is bad about today it is that tomorrow it's all over. If things go well, we'll have a national championship and a lot of partying before that happens...

It's been great to have dad (a.k.a. The Rog) here, and he's been a big hit on the sidelines. He's seen me play games before, but he's never been to a full tournament and hung out on the sidelines with everyone to this degree. At last night's party (I was restricted mostly to ice water, unfortunately!), a bunch of people told me how "cool your dad is", etc. If you know my dad, you won't be surprised. Most of the time such a comment was followed by amazement, both by the speaker and me, that such a fun set of parents could result in a boring sod like me. :)

Off to the fields now, excited and nervous, knowing that the next 8 hours of the day will be pretty pivotal in the memories and athletic motivation I take from this tourney, as well as the overall impression I make within the ultimate community. With selections for the World Ultimate (country-based, rather than club-based like Perth) Championships in Vancouver 2008 not too far away, the last part is both important and too general to be my first priority at this stage. Updates to follow!

so far so good...

Yesterday was the first day of Nationals - it's wonderful to finally be playing! Our first two games were both walk-overs against low seeds, but our last game of the day was against the 4th seed and possible competitor for the title. Tight game, but we were in control for most of it and won 15-11. If you're so inclined, you can check out the scores at...

http://afda.com/trashtalk/showarticle.php?articleid=425

(Chilly is my team, not to be confused with Hot Chilly, which is our "B" team.) 2 more games today and at least 1 on Tuesday; if all goes according to plan we'll then have the semifinals and finals on Wednesday - which has the added benefit of being a public holiday here.

In other news, the Princess of Denmark recently had a baby girl, which is all over the news. The reason? She's from Tasmania, and met the Prince during the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Cute story, really - and there's been considerable talk that Aussies prefer the understated Danish royalty more than the insufferable British versions that are still officially the Australian head of state. Here's an article and some background.

in NZ...

Yes, it's been a while.  And yes, I'll stop saying that in every post.

I'm currently in NZ, having a great time with my Kiwi mate (and all-around rabble-rouser) Aaron Columbus, who I taught with at Aldenham School while I was in the UK.  I flew in late Tuesday night, spent Wed and Thurs in Christchurch, flew to Auckland Fri (and caught a rugby match Sat night) before coming back to "ChCh" Sunday afternoon.  We're off to the West Coast of the South Island (where Aaron is originally from) in the morning for a couple of days before coming back to Melbourn early Thursday morning.

Rog (a.k.a. dad) will be on his way to Oz very shortly - among other attractions will be the Australian Ultimate National Championships.  The competition runs from April 22-25, and for once we'll be playing a tournament in Melbourne!  My team (Chilly) will be going for its 3rd straight national title, which would be a pretty special thing to do at home.  I'll post results...looking forward to it, confident about the our preparation but realyl eager to get playing already!  Fingers crossed, etc.

Back from Tasmania...

Feeling the onset of a few habits coming back (i.e. horribly infrequent postings), I will try to head them off at the pass and put up a few thoughts.  Now that the semester has gotten going, I have settled down into a bit more of a routine.  Unfortunately, it doesn't mean I'm any less busy - just that I'm consistently busy now, rather than inconsistently as before.  Only a few more months and the (winter) holidays will be here...

This weekend I went to Tasmania for the ultimate Regional Championships, which served as qualifications for the National Championships to be held in Melbourne.  There wasn't much doubt about qualifying - Chilly will be going for our 3rd straight National Championship - but we still came out and played really well, which was a great feeling (it was also great to play in a competitive game for the first time since Worlds in November.)  We were missing quite a few of our key guys and big players, which made the high quality of play that much more satisfying.  Personally, I thought I played reasonably well, though of course there are things I can still improve upon.  I also took more of a leadership role given the dynamics of the team, which was nice.

I flew over a day early to drive around Tasmania and see a few things that I missed when I was there 2 months ago with my parents.  We stopped at the Bay of Fires, which is listed as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. (Hard to believe, but with Wineglass Bay as well, Tas has two beaches that usually come near the top of such rankings.)  To say that it was beautiful is, of course, a tremendous understatement; I'll post a few pictures once I take them off my camera.  We stayed at a friend's father's house on Friday night, and shortly after we arrived at  his house he had us out on his boat fishing.  While the hope had been to catch dinner, we had to settle for a (small) appetizer!  But you should have seen the one that got away... :)

In other news, I should (finally!) be moving into Trinity College tomorrow, which will bring my itinerant living to an end.  I'm excited, not least at the prospect of finally having a place to call home for at least the next 10 months.  Living out of a suitcase can get tiring.  I'm also planning a trip to New Zealand for next month to catch up with Aaron Columbus, who will be heading to NZ for a friend's wedding.  I can't wait, both to catch up with him and to finally see a bit of NZ...other international travel plans involve a prospective trip to Indonesia/Singapore in June/July and a potential skiing trip to NZ around the same time (during our winter holidays), assuming that I can get my financial house in order and save a few bucks between now and then...

The semester at Trinity

I seem to have fallen into my old habit of infrequent blog entries.  Apologies - if there is anyone out there still checking this to apologize to!

The past few weeks have been remarkably hectic.  The Confirmation process is completed - after a 30 minute public presentation of my research (so far), a 10,000 word report about what I've done and what I'm hoping to do, and an hour meeting with a couple of academics in the department about my project.  The meeting, which tends to serve as a culmination of your first year of study, went amazingly well: my supervisor (Derek McDougall), associate supervisor (Tom Davis), and the head of research students (Robyn Eckersley) all offered fantastically constructive advice for my research.  I knew that my report still needed some polish and was lacking in some areas, but they managed to offer me quite a few insights and ideas that I had yet to consider.  It helps, no doubt, that they are all fantastically nice and pleasant people (and that I taught with Robyn and Derek last semester) - despite the hype and my initial hesitations/reservations (mmm, tempting) about joining the ivory tower, there may be a career in academia left for me after all...

In other news, I managed to get myself a Uni Sporting Blue, courtesy of Melbourne Uni.  I really don't know too much about this means, but everybody I ask about it seems to think it's a pretty big deal.  Appartently, it's based on the Oxford/Cambridge system; I'm quite happily thinking of myself as a rower, having just completed a massive race against my arch-rivals, retiring to the faculty club and sipping my gin and tonic.  Or perhaps having a few beers following my triumphs on the ultimate frisbee field.  Either way, it feels pretty damn good to be recognized for sport, coincidentally at the same time that I've passed a major academic threshold (and the only one before thesis-submission!).

As I'm writing this, I'm watching Adaptation on television.  I was with it for most of the film, but the ending left me a bit perplexed about what I thought of it.  I also saw Babel at the cinema over the weekend; generally speaking, I'm a fan, though overall my jury is still out overall.  Great music and scenery, even if the plot is slightly overdrawn...in the case of both films, I'm a big fan of the big scope and unconventional approach attempted by the filmmakers, even if I'm more unsure on the films themselves.

If you're looking for Australian music - and you absolutely should be, as there is an absurd amount of talent out here - check out Eskimo Joe, Sarah Blasko, Youth Group, and David Gillespie.  The first 3 are huge already, while David happens to be a good friend and is still making a name for himself.  He's quality.  He puts on some groovy shows and is also a great guy...

Lots of hyperlinks on this post.  I'll be a bit more reasonable in the future!

he's...ALIVE!

Believe it or not, I am.  I'd offer my sincere apologies for incommunicado for so long, if I thought anyone was actually too hard-done by...instead, you just know a few less details about ultimate frisbee and/or soccer in Australia.  With the presidential election heating up (about time too, if you ask me; "only" 21 months until November 2008!), I figure I would offer a brief update of my happenings over the past few months - in quick-hitting, short attention span, 24-hours news style.

-Becca Kurtzig came to visit in December.  That girl rocks, and though I didn't think it possible, I think I enjoyed her second visit to Melbourne even more than her first.  Where are the rest of you slackers?

-Rog and Barb, aka les parents extraordinaires, arrived into Sydney mid-December for the beginning of what would be a month long trip around Australia.  In addition to making friends at every instance - the hotel receptionist, the waiter at dinner, random guy they met at the pub that turned into Dad's best friend - they managed to see quite a bit of the real Australia, rather than the touristy, check-in-the-box tourism that unfortunately gets enforced on most Americans due to the "tyranny of distance", as they call it over here.  Sydney, Melbourne, and Tasmania, with a couple of road trips thrown in for good measure; I feel safe saying that I, like most of Australia, are just now recovering from their stay here (in the best possible way, of course).  They left 3 weeks ago.

-went to see the Boxing Day test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground between Australia and England on Dec. 27.  If you don't know about the Ashes, think of what it would be like to the World Series, with each game lasting up to 5 days, between two hated rivals (Red Sox-Yankees, anyone?), played every 18 months...and it representing a REAL "World Series".  Multiply that by a factor of 50 and you might have an inkling of what it was like.  It was special.

-as a wonderful Christmas present, I managed to get two scholarships for the upcoming year: one that takes care of my tuition, and one that actually pays me a stipend while I am a student.  It's a huge turnaround from this year, and to deny that it makes my life enormously easier and is a huge burden off my shoulders would be a lie of truly ridiculous proportions.

-I've been appointed a Resident Tutor at Trinity College.  I won't go into detail about what exactly Trinity (or college life generally here at Melbourne Uni) is about, but if you're familiar with the system at Oxford and Cambridge, you would have a good start.  It's a residential college at University, part dorm, part fraternity/sorority, part Princeton-style eating club, and mostly the residents' primary social identification.  You'll no doubt hear many more details about it over the course of the year.  Suffice to say, I am excited.

-Ben Flood and Stacey Benzel are engaged to be married, and Ben has asked me to be his Best Man.  Big mistake.  I guess they figure they have a better chance of controlling my antics and general inappropriateness from within the wedding party than if I was left outside.  To say that I am excited for them would, suffice to say, be an understatement.  Sometime around Christmas, in Charlottesville, you're likely to find me howling at the moon, and soaking up with every bit of self-awareness the feeling of being in one of my favorite places in the world with some of my favorite people in the world.

-Assuming I get my act together and stop writing (supposedly) short and impressionistic blog posts, if all goes according to plan I will officially be a confirmed PhD student at Melbourne University by the end of next week.  This basically means the Faculty of Arts is confident that I have been doing reasonable amounts of work this year, and they think my project is both of academic interest and (arguably more important) that it is capable of being finished within the 3 year timeframe afforded to PhD students.  It also means that the next stop in my academic progression is the submission of my thesis.  Yikes.

-and let you think you were getting away Scott-free, ultimate frisbee is going very well. :)  We've started up our training (following a 6 week break after Worlds) again for the National Championships, which are being held in Melbourne this year.  We (Chilly) will be gunning for our third straight National Championship, which would be a first in Australian ultimate history.  I'll keep you posted, to be sure!

A few random thoughts...

Things are continuing apace here as I prepare for the fam's imminent arrival.  Rog and Barb, aka les parents extraordinaires, will be arriving in Sydney this Friday, while Stephen gets into Melbourne on Dec 23.  While seeing the 'rents is OF COURSE my first priority...there happens to be a beach ultimate tournament in Sydney this weekend as well.  Might as well play in it, right?  LeedsLeedsLeeds is the team fortunate enough to garner my services for the weekend (ha ha).  Quite a few of the international players that played at Worlds and at the uber-fun Hat tournament here in Melbourne weekend before last will be there as well.  In a lot of ways, its been one extended party, with lots of individuals (many of them American) still floating around, making a nice long holiday out of their Australian trip.  As for me, Chilly is taking a break before training starts again for Nationals (to be held in April)...which means I only need to survive a few more weeks without ultimate.  I think I can make it.

Also, Becca Kurtzig is here!  Thanks to a work commitment - her 2nd one here in 4 months, yippee! - I'll get to show her around for a few days before my parents get here.  (There's at least as much a chance that she'll be showing me around by the end of her stay, but nevermind that.)  We'll have a good time, no doubt.

On a completely different note, the recent weather in Melbourne has been seriously messed up.  Melbourne has a reputation for having very temperamental weather under the best of circumstances - the inspiration for Crowded House's song "Four Seasons in One Day" (Even when you're feeling warm, The temperature could drop away, Like four seasons in one day...).

I'm not sure if word has made it to the US, but we are currently in the midst of one of the worst droughts even recorded.  Australia doesn't get much rain under the best of circumstances, but this year has been woefully bad even by Aus standards.  Bushfires have been raging for some time already, even as its only the beginning of summer.  Temperatures hit over 40 degrees Celsius (100+ F) over the weekend, and Melbourne woke up to a thick, smoky haze Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Apparently, there was 10 times the healthy limit of particles in the air.  Some of the pictures were quite dramatic, and while things have cooled down since then the fear is that this is just the beginning of a very bad fire season.  That the fires were visible from space doesn't augur well, needless to say.  If there's a silver lining, it is that most of the affected area was National Forest, which has at least limited economic damage so far.

And then, within a 40 minute span on Sunday - the temperature dropped to 25C (around 70F).  I went from the oppressive, oven-like street into a bookshop around 3 PM, and while I came out half an hour later, it felt like a warm, breezy spring day.  Go figure.  The good news is that "the change", as they call a weather front that brings cool, breezy weather, helped bring the fires under (slight) control.

bananas, and (more) ultimate...

I bought my first banana in over 8 months last week.  If anyone had any doubt about the "theory" of the supply and demand, banana prices since Cyclone Larry blew through Queensland in March and destroyed almost the entire crop of banana trees should go a long way to proving it.  Since then, prices have hovered around $13/kg (roughly $6/lb).  At one point, I think they maxed out at $15/kg - and they were pretty sickly looking at that.  For a while, I was basing my choice of smoothies on which ones had banana flavoring - just so I could continue to get my fix.  They're not at normal prices just yet, but at $6/kg I figured I could splurge.  They're yummy.

On a completely unrelated note, if you follow the link below you can see an amazing catch by Steve Wealands (teammate on Chilly) in the semifinals of Worlds.  We lost the game, of course, but this was one of the best catches in the entire tournament.  If you pause it about halfway through (just after the catch), you can see me running down the sideline - I'm wearing the red visor with long black socks.  Did I mention it was a crazy grab?

http://www.ultivillage.com/Ultimate-Frisbee-Videos/Clip-of-the-Day/WUCC-Open-Semi-Chilly-score.html

Ultivillage does a bunch of filming at big ultimate tournaments, and you should check out the rest of their "Clip of the Day" section.  There are some pretty awesome shots.  That's all for now...

update

Just a quick one as I'm heading out the door.  Things going on at the moment:

-9 months in Australia.  A pretty crazy thought; to think of all that's happened since late Feb is to think of an awful lot of stuff.  Thankfully, the vast majority of it has been amazingly good.

-summer.  Remember when I was complaining about the weather in June and July?  It's payback time.  It still does my head in a little bit to have not just a not-too-cold Christmas, but actually a HOT Christmas.  Today's high was somewhere around 32C/88F.

-as if one Freise in Australia wasn't enough, in a couple of weeks Mom, Dad, and even younger brother Stephen will all be making their way over here.  We've more or less sorted out our plans; the 'rents will go to Sydney for a week while we wait for Stephen to arrive; once he gets here, I show off this fine city that I now call home (with a few daytrips worked in for variety, of course); this is followed by a trip down the Great Ocean Road, which if reputation is to be believed (and it sound like it is), is one of the most beautiful stretches of road in the world; and finally, a few days spent bouncing around Tasmania before we return to Melbourne and send Rog and Barb back.  I'm excited.

-cricket: the international competition between Australia and England in cricket is known as the Ashes, and it began last week. It is so named because after the first test series loss to an Australian team on English soil, someone declared that this represented the "death of English cricket".  They proceeded to hold a mock cremation for the bails (the little pieces of wood that sit atop the wickets).  After about 20 years of domination, England won the series when it was held in the UK 18 months ago; to almost all Aussies, this was an absolute abomination and unthinkable act.  5 matches are to be played (5 days each); Australia won the first in convincing fashion and look to be on a roll.  People seems to be follow it with an intensity (and rivalry, given that it's England) that surpasses most other sporting events I'm aware of.

Heading home to enjoy the delightful early summer day...