Do I wake or sleep?

Maybe it's because fall is approaching but I really have been feeling the knitting/craft urge lately.  Might have to have another session of Drunken Knitting soon, before I get busy with Rocky Horror!  I am also craving some baking--my organized soccer league team (Dolphman) is in the playoffs which start this weekend and I usually bake something for that.  Winter I made my chocolate- and peanut-butter chip blondies and for the spring league I made pumpkin bread.  I was thinking of my espresso brownies this time around...

Tatum Kenney, who was in Pirates and Rocky Horror with me, contracted with me--I proofread her piece of freelance writing, she will bake me some mac & cheese.  Mmmm....I'm looking it over now (just a few tiny nitpicks, mainly comma overkill and incorrect usage of quotation marks) and checked out her website where I noticed a more obvious error--"www.TatumKenney.com has been deemed fit for public consumption by it's neurotic Type A creator!"  Oh, gurrrl...

Just finished a huge proofreading project, BTW--possibly the longest one I've ever done, over 600 pages.  I finally raised my rates this year so this should be a nice chunk of change.  Yay money!

Soccer--since Pirates ended, I have WEEKENDS FREE.  Which means SOCCER.  I've been doing these soccer clinics on Saturday monrings and then playing two hours on Saturday evenings with the full-field guys.  And scoring quite a bit--I pulled off not one, but two hat tricks the past two Saturdays!  What is obviously thrilling and I'm very pleased but it's not like, say, a hat trick at the Olympics.  As I explained to someone on my Dolphman team, when you're playing forward for two hours with no break, if you're reasonably good, you're probably going to score a goal!  Also with the pickup games, we don't have a dedicated goalie, someone who loves that position and is terrific at it--we have whoever's willing to be a goalie for a little while, we're supposed to switch off.  (Never me, though--for one thing I'm always the smallest person on the field because no women ever seem to show up to the full-field games, and for another I told them outright "you don't want me in goal."  It terrifies me.)  However some of these goals were so pretty, I wanted to frame them :)  One was from a cross--I was in front of the goal and the right wing looped it in the air, and I kicked it on the fly into the corner.  The guys were all slapping me and one of the opposing players, who was Irish, said "okay, that was pretty fooking awesome!"

Now the Dolphman (organized league) games are different.  The games are much shorter (21-minute halves) and we have substitutes.  And it must be said that the guys on that team are not very good about passing in general, much less passing to the women.  We are a team made up of a lot of good individual players, but actual teamwork is not as good.  That said, one of our players, Brian, had a couple of cornerkicks at our game this past Sunday, and as I was at left wing, he was kicking them to me and I was trying to head them in.  This happened twice and both times, the kick was just a little bit over my head--I headed the ball but it didn't go in.  Okay, well, it happens.  But I reaaaaallllly wanted to score a goal in a Dolphman game--as I explained they're more rare, and not just for me, for all of us this season--we drew an incredibly tough draw this time, and all of our games are against the top half of the teams (all the best teams).  So our goal differential is very low--we've been winning games by 1 goal in most cases.  Annoying!  Okay, so anyway it's the 2nd half and I've got the ball--I'm close to the goal but there are two defenders, plus the goalie, between me and the goal.  I see Brian further out to the right and no one is on him, so I pass it.  Brian takes it out even further and then crosses it--to me.  I head the ball into the goal, so sweet!  It was TEXTBOOK.  Even the other team was congratulating me, they were saying "you finally got your head goal!"  One of our other players, Adam, said "what made it even better was how unselfish it was, because you'd had the ball at first and you passed it to Brian."  I said "well, I knew I didn't have a clear shot at the goal and he would have more room--can't be selfish!"  Going back to what I said before, another one of our players, later, was driving with the ball and had at LEAST two defenders on him--I was behind him with a clear shot, yelling (several times) "I'm behind you, you have support, pass it back."  I can only assume he did not hear me because he didn't pass it, though he had several opportunities--he just kept trying to push the ball through.  PASS IT BACK.  Good Lord!  Of course they stopped him.  Zach is a cool guy and I don't think he's particularly sexist but come on, guys!

At one point I heard one of the other players asking the referee about...well, a hit I'd delivered--I went after the ball as he was driving and he felt I'd fouled him.  He was very polite and low-key about it, not being a jerk at all (he wasn't a flopper, in other words), and I felt horrible.  I apologized to him at the bar afterwards, saying it's a rough game and I play a rough game but I wasn't trying to hurt or hit him, I really was just going after the ball and I'm sorry.  He was very nice about it and we ended up drunkenly telling each other "you played a great game" "no, YOU played a great game" "your ball skills are off the hook" "that was a great header you did."  One of his teammates corralled me into a picture with him, her and a bunch of the others on their team.

St. Patrick's Day coming up soon, yay! I am looking up Irish knitting patterns in honor of the season--I bought two Aran sweaters back in Dublin but you can never have too many Irish sweaters. I like this one.

Just finished (re)watching 2005's Kingdom of Heaven. Okay, the history is sort of crap--it really, really wasn't just Frankistani = bad, Musselmen = good. Very simplistic view of the Crusades, although it does get you interested in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And holy crap, Reynald de Chatillon! Pretty much WAS that bad. Saladin didn't suffer fools gladly. The leprosy stuff, though--leprosy wasn't genetic, even then they knew that. It was contagious, that's why lepers were quarantined. I love the bitchslapping Baldwin IV gives Reynald.

But the best parts were the battles! Especially the siege of Jersualem--I'm starting to think I should've gone to the Naval Academy after all (I did consider this for a time in high school, my dad's uncle is friends with Bush Sr. and Daddy told me he would be able to get me the appointment). Battle tactics are very interesting--they never change. It's all the same principles. The cinematography in the siege of Jerusalem was GREAT, especially when they start shelling the walls with FIREBALLS. From trebuchets! You see it from the defenders' POV at first, and you just see this glowing orbs approaching and then they hit and you realize what just entered the walls. And THEN they pan over to these glorious, towering trebuchets, these precise, elegant machines of war and death, swaying back and forth and snapping these fireballs over the walls. Trebuchets were *very* accurate because you could make the counterweight larger or smaller.

The only real change I can think of in battle tactics in the last 3000 years would have to be the introduction of air attacks, which combine artillery and cavalry (you can shell and you can use your plane as an intrument of blunt force although although only as a suicide maneuver). Which makes me wonder how the hell Leningrad held off for two and a half years. Against the Wehrmacht *and* ground troops? Supposedly defense is the inherently stronger position in war but not when your fortifications are THAT porous! It's pretty incredible.

I'm on a couple of history listserves at Columbia, and they're having an event next week--an inaugural event for a group called Quadrivium, which explores medieval history along with other disciplines. My professor from last semester who taught Medieval Intellectual Life, will be one of the panelists.

Yay for Chris! We don't know what he did but somehow I have internet access again. Yay!

I'm curled up at home, knitting, decorating, watching TV and making ice cream. I'm scalding the milk right now--in a bit, I'll have to bundle up and trudge down to the corner to get some ice (you pack it around the ice cream canister when you're churning the mixture).

Heavy snowfall is a different experience here in the city. We don't have to worry about getting around--the subway still runs. The landlord is responsible for shoveling the sidewalk. And the closest grocery store is on the corner, so no frantic bread and milk runs. It's all just fun.