I had a great summer at home. Highlights were playing beach ball, hanging with the crew, spending quality time with the fam, Phoenix, Michigan, Lollapalooza, and the Danes visit. They aren't listed in any order but all stood out in a fantastic summer!
I have been in Denmark now for just a day over two weeks. I'm all settled in to the new apartment. It is starting to feel more and more like home everyday. Solid upgrades on the living arrangements are 1) Dishwasher 2)Washing Machine/Dryer 3) Normal sized Fridge/Freezer. Check, check, and check! The location is nice too. A stones throw from the train station, and centrally located between Marienlyst Center, Idraetspark, and CCS. The three places that I spend most of my time over here. The weather has been reasonable too. No heat, but it has been relatively dry which is nice for the daily commutes. (It's raining now wrote this first part this morning!)
My shoulder has been a problem basically since I got here. I'm not sure if I tweaked it lifting luggage on the train into the overhead or I slept on it funny. All I know is the day after I arrived when I woke up I couldn't lift my arm. I tried to practice a bit that night and it never loosened up at all. I tried to swing once and I think I tweaked it even more. Lots of ice and ibuprofen since then. Also lots of light shoulder work at the gym. It has been making progress. I have regained most of my range of movement but I still can't go all out on a swing without pain. So it's a waiting game right now. I have treatment scheduled tonight before practice so hopefully we can figure this thing out. Not being able to play is very frustrating. I need to get going because I haven't really played indoor ball since nationals which was the end of May. I know it's a long season and I shouldn't rush it but I have never really been injured in my entire career so sitting out is not something I'm used to at all and I really don't like at all. I've got my fingers crossed that I will be 100% for the Middelfart pre-season tournament next weekend.
Some new additions to life in DK in the last two weeks have been pretty big as well. As most of you have heard by now Christa finally got her baby dog. We are picking up little Molly this Sunday. She is an 8 week old brown dwarf Dachshund. And as many of you have also heard I got my little baby too, a red Puch Maxi K scooter that I have already got a ton of enjoyment out of. And no Mikkel it's not lazy riding a scooter, but yea ok maybe gay.
We have finally just got everyone to practice so we can see how we are going to look this year. We have a lot of new faces. We lost 7 players from last years team. We added 5 players. The average age has gone down dramatically. I was in the middle last year. This year I am the third oldest. Not sure if that's good or bad but it's just different seeing all these different faces in the locker room. No Bits stories and suana oils, Merty Gerdy hammer left leg, Soe's shoe collection, Travis' saying "nah mate" or "I reckon", Nelly's Ray Lewis hagabow D, Joaks flailing on the ground, or Bertle aka Dilf blasting balls off the ceiling with foot or fist. We will miss you guys. The 5 new guys signature moves TBD.
We had a team trip last weekend. Laid out all the team goals, expectations, roles, and grievances. First night we slept on a gymnastics pad that was harder than the Marienlyst gym floor, if thats possible, in sleeping bags. The next day, after maybe sleeping 2 hours because I couldn't get comfortable and Hjorth was snoring like a chain saw right next to me, we had breakfast and our first team drill was flag football. I ran QB for our squad. Spread the ball pretty well I think everyone on our team scored a touchdown or a PAT. We won 35-13, gave a pretty good beating to the other side. After that we biked to the military obstacle course just like we did the year before. Man that is tough work. Lunch was sandwiches and a beer and then we walked and talked with a partner all the way back to the city center to Munke Mose which was a good hour away. Once we all arrived we had another team building exercise where we had to use some strings and a bike inner tube to move a bucket filled with water to another bucket 50 ft away all while not coming closer than 5ft to the first bucket at any time. And once you have moved it to the other bucket you still need to dump all the water from bucket 1 to bucket two while not spilling any We failed the first time. Second time through we nailed it. After that we biked all the way out to Kaj's house which is not close either probably 30 minutes by bike. Once we got to Kaj's we had to set up a 9 meter x 3 meter tent so we could all "maybe" sleep under it. The "maybe" is because there was this weird secrecy to everything that we were doing. Not at any time did we really know what was going on or what was next. So every question we asked it was either "yea maybe" or "I don't know we will have to see". Once the tent was up everyone had to take a shower. No problem Kaj had a nice outdoor shower with only cold water. Wait what? Yea it was maybe 50 degrees outside and he had a only a cold water pipe on the shower. I said no way I'm not doing that, that is crazy. But according to Kaj no food if you don't shower. So I sucked it up and had the coldest shower of my life by far. It actually felt kind of good but I wouldn't do it day and night like Kaj half kiddingly said he does. After that we sat around a table and went over what our hour long walk talks were about but this time in front of the whole team for people to comment on. And finally at this time we had some ice cold beverages at hand. They were well deserved. We went through that and got ready for dinner. Just about everyone had a job to get the meal ready. Some in the kitchen, some on the grill, and some on table duty. It ran smoothly we ended up with a ton of meat. Chicken, steaks, and sausages. Cold ones going down and wine flowing we were having a good time. After dinner was done we had some more team stuff to do. This time it was called something like team or sport theater. We had to first play a game similar to telephone where you pass on a word down a line and see what you come up with, but this game was a bit different. You had three words to pass on, a weapon, a handicap, and a profession. With only acting using no words you had to get the next person down the line to guess the three words that the other team came up with. The first person in the line is the only one who knows the real words. Once you act each out and get a thumbs up you were done and out from the back room the next teammate would come out and the guy who thought he knew what you just showed him, did it all over again but with what he thought the words were. As you can imagine down the line things were lost and by the end it was hilarious. We had ninja star, dyslexia, and glass blower. I think at the end we had bare hands, illiterate, and fire eater. Bare hands was funny because it initially started out two words 1) ninja - so there was kicking and breaking of necks 2) outside pointing to a star. Then tying it all together. As it progressed to the end all that was left was a guy coming up and breaking someones neck going "ahhhh" it was really funny. We played a few more acting games that were hilarious and then got ready for bed around 2ish or so outside in the tent. Was really cold outside but the sleeping bags did a good job only the ground was so hard my back was and still is really tight. In the morning we had a nice pancake breakfast and went out for a walk to get a stretch in. We had one more team meeting and that concluded the team weekend. Lots of laughs and we got much closer as a team so it was overall a success.
Other than that we have just been practicing and lifting like usual. We did have a scrimmage last night in Arhus but it was pretty uneventful the competition if you can call it that was very poor. Good to see us in a 6 vs 6 against someone other than ourselves but the other team didn't help us much other than to put it bluntly waste our time. Sad but true. We have this weekend off and next week we will be very busy. We have a German second division team coming up to scrimmage us. And next weekend we have the Middelfart pre-season tournament. Like I was saying earlier I hope to be good to go by then otherwise I might go crazy. So it should be good to see how we match up even though it's just pre-season and doesn't really mean much other than bragging rights. We are looking good and I expect us to be just as good as last year or better. Things are looking good. All for now. Miss everyone at home. Talk soon.
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