Maybe...

Maybe I write about Homebrewing and Rugby so much because it is what is currently dominating most of my free time? That, and wasting time on the internet.

I've begun searching for a job. I don't need to, however, there are two compelling reasons behind this. A) Minimum wage down here is $12 something, and I'd be earning $14-15-ish minimum because it's age based. With the USD being so low, I'd still be bringing home $13+ an hour for doing whatever. B) I have lots, and lots of free time. I currently spend it waiting for the internet in my apartment to load pages. This is probably not the most productive use of my time. I'm allowed to work up to 20 hours a week, and would really be happy if I could do so.

I just opened the first beer out of my second batch. Again, it's not bad, very drinkable. Definitely needs to sit for another week or so, there was still priming sugar in the bottom and it wasn't very carbonated. It tastes much like the first batch, sort of cidery...which isn't bad, but it's not the way it's supposed to taste. It's much lighter, both in color and flavor. We'll see how it improves after it sits for a bit.

Tuesdays have become mandatory conditioning at rugby training. We did laps and laps of alternating sprinting and jogging, and then 5,10,15,20,25,30 meter sprints with pushups and situps at each yard line....and then we did everything again...and then played a full contact game. Needless to say, I am sore today. We did full contact tackling drills, which I've been doing in pads for years, and which is probably most of the reason I am sore today. Afterwards, one of my teammates informed me that "everyone is very impressed with your tackling and ball running, we just wish you were around for a few more weeks so that you could learn to position yourself better and do both more often". Haha, I still don't know what's going on.

Another thing that's been programmed into my head from years of gridiron is to lower and square your shoulders, cover the ball with both hands, and keep moving when you're getting tackled. The first time I did that, somebody suggested I should turn my body sideways when I hit somebody and put the ball in my back hand, the advantage being that when I am tackled, it is easy to recover the ball. I failed to see any other disadvantages to my technique until yesterday, when two larger gentlemen came at me, and I caught a beefy shoulder right in the jaw. Oh, yeah, I'm not wearing a helmet. Good thing I was wearing a mouthguard, or I, no doubt, would have been concussed...I definitely saw stars. For what its worth, he took a few minutes off, rubbing his shoulder and wincing. Haha.

The reason I haven't really written about class is that it's really not at all different than it is back home. There are minor differences, but nothing worth writing about.

OH! One of the bars on campus has beer bingo (called laughataloser), in which the bingo caller mocks every person playing. Everyone gets a nickname. When it was learned I was from Wisconsin, all the numbers called in the next hour were Wisconsin jokes. I was nicknamed Wisconsin Pete. When calling bingo, you are given a dart, and told to stand at a random location in the room and throw at a spinning dartboard. You are usually throwing from three times the normal length of a dart throw, which is difficult until you get the hang of it. There are prizes on the board, t shirt, water bottle, hacky sack, free beer, free pizza, etc. One of my friends jokes that Beer Bingo has "fed me, clothed me, and gotten me drunk for the last 4 years". Upon winning a hacky sack, he said "Oh no! Not another one! Who wants it?", and tossed it to somebody else. The bingo caller said "I wouldn't give that away so easily, they use those as currency in Wisconsin", and then to the new owner of the hacky sack: "You just bought a house in Wisconsin, but don't think that means you're rich!"


The bar also has trivia on Wednesdays. I won bar trivia tonight! Some of my Rugby mates and I go on Tuesday, win two, three, or four vouchers for a beer, pizza, or bowl of wedges, and then go to trivia on Wednesdays and drink free beer and play trivia for more free beer.

The answer sheet has 20 blanks. There are 20 questions asked. You score your own sheet, and hand in a copy of your own sheet, and if you win, your answers are checked. You are allowed to work with your own table. This week, everyone in the bar had 15/20 correct or less. The other two guys at my table had 16/20 correct. I had 17/20 correct, because I guessed that Paris was the first city ever bombed from airplanes. (They guessed Munich and Berlin...come on, France has to be losing!) I won two tickets to tomorrow's concert at Bar on the Hill. Apparently, Magic Dirt is a decent name, tickets were $20/each otherwise. We shall see how this goes!