GYM: Points Galore

the sky looked artful this evening
It's Wednesday which means two things: Toastmasters and volleyball. And today, one was good and the other not too good. There were needed breaks realized and a mystery solved. But which one's which and what is wherE?
...
Toastmasters
Okay, Toastmasters was the not-too-good one. And because so, I won't spend many words on it. There were just a lot of assumptions in setting up the meeting that just didn't pan out -- and I ended up rushing to get things together. It would've been seamless if I had five more minutes and also not had a full travel mug of coffee right beforehand. Luckily, we didn't have to twist people's arms too hard to fill in quite a number of big roles at today's meeting.

The speeches and evaluations were all good. It was just the table topics that bothered me. The theme was our president, and immediately I started to cringe. I really don't like politics being introduced at the meetings because it turns into hate-talk, and it's like having to listen to someone bad-mouth your mother and not being able to say anything in defense. Frankly it was very disheartening.

It took me a while to recover from the meeting, but at least there's a couple weeks before our next meeting, and I'm signed up to speak. I'll be keeping it light-hearted and universal.

Anyways,...

Volleyball
I can always count on volleyball to lift my spirits. Tonight, there were 24+ people there to begin with, and it stayed that way well past the first hour. This time, it was very fine because everyone there was amazingly chill -- and the newbies were of the HS volleyball girls variety, so none of the off-putting machismo demonstrated on Monday. I do have to say that there were really no weak links tonight, and the level of play was well above average.

Because of the numbers, we played points and teams for most of the session. Susan, Cara, Mike, Greg, me, and a rotating sixth person made up one team, and we did pretty awesome (even though scoring didn't really mattered). Communication on our side was good, and it was like everyone had their own specialty -- setting, spiking, serving, chasing,... plus we were all quite consistent.

I did well with the chasing, and my ups were visibly-improved. My serving was consistent, and my play at the net was cooler than Monday (no fantastic spike today but a lot of good knockdowns). The most fun point for me was when I was center and knocked the ball down on the completely wrong direction -- a hybrid of a spike and a pass; luckily Cara and Susan were paying attention and managed to put it back over the net.

With fifteen minutes to go, we were down to fifteen people and dropped points, rotating people in. I didn't so much mind the point-taking tonight. I would've also been perfectly happy just hanging out on the sidelines. Oh, about the mystery guy... we have a mutual friend and a little more than a year-and-a-half ago, we were at this friend's house for an Equality Florida fund-raiser dinner... small world, and in the good way.

Anyways, that was today. Now it's again past my bedtime. I'm getting a crown tomorrow morning... hopefully, I'll wake up in time for it. G'night.

In the meantime, here are tonight's post-gym pics: