Weekend Wrapup

It’s going to be interesting explaining the welt on top of my head to my coworkers tomorrow.

I’ve got a few more on my arms as well, and I’m beginning to feel like Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club, flashing a grinning mouthful of blood to a coworker in a meeting.

Since most of my face never gets a chance to heal, I’ve got nothing to lose in the looks department. My boss, at work, he asked me what I was doing about the hole through my cheek that never heals. When I drink coffee, I told him, I put two fingers over the hole so it won’t leak.

We played at Paintball Invasion today, and it wasn’t nearly as good a time as it was the last time I played there. First of all, the weather started off pretty lousy…torrential rain. My friends and I had to drive at a crawl to get there to avoid hydroplaning off the road. Then once we’re there we had to wait more than an hour to get started. PI has an indoor field so the rain wasn’t such a big deal, but the pacing of the games (today at least) was. You’d get out there, play a game, then they’d shut down. The refs would slowly sweep the field, and the rest of the players would just loiter around aimlessly. A couple of times the rain slowed and 90% of the crowd would bolt outside, hoping to get some games in on the outdoor fields. We followed, only to be turned around when the rain resumed. The net effect was that we got damn little playing time in for our money.

Then there were the gun problems. My buddy Fax was breaking in a new gun, and ran into a couple of glitches that should’ve been avoidable. Initially the bolt wasn’t returning back all the way after each shot, resulting in the balls not being able to decend far enough to be fired. We fixed that (after a couple of calls to the shop) by loosening some screws around the back end of the gun. The real issue came with all the indoor/outdoor Kerryesque flip-flopping. Indoor you have to chrono at 260, whereas outdoors you can shoot at 280. Fax being new to the gun overtightened the velocity screw – to the point where it got stripped and was unadjustable. That ended his day…

I eventually got into a couple of games in outside, and it was fun and all until I decided to be a hero and run for the back left laydown can on the break. What looked like dry land from the deadbox turned out to be 3 inches of water and soft mud under a layer of tall grass. As I made my turn, my feet slipped out from under me, and I landed twisting on my back. My feet were in the air, my gun was in the water, my hopper was cranked around 180 degrees, and I swear I heard something crack in my spine. Meanwhile my opponents are still shooting at me, sending spray into the air as their paint strikes the surface of the puddle I’m lying in.

I don’t remember how made it to my bunker, got my stuff sorted out, and got back into the game, but I did. I remember whiping a lot of mud off of my gun, and spitting out some grass. My hopper kept spinning to the side whenever I leaned out to take a shot. I had to hold the thing in place with one hand while shooting with the other. I somehow managed to tag two guys before getting marked on the head. Totally covered in mud, and my hopper flopping around in the wind, I decided to call it and head home before I killed myself.

It was just one of those days…