back in the goal

I forgot how much I like playing goalie. I went to my first gaelic football practice in two weeks, and even though I started out on a bad note, feeling kind of dizzy, I ended up enjoying myself a lot. while I was sitting down for a bit, hoping that my head would stop being stupid (good luck), one of the others in our group (we had been seperated into senior players and, well, not-senior players) came over to see if I was ok. we started chatting and whiled away the time spent on that particular drill, which consisted of lots of people trying to get the ball in a very small area. when they had finished with that rather futile exercise (there were 16 to a side in a field the size of a kids soccer field) we all went down to a goal, where there was a drill of three offense trying to score past 3 defense and a goalie. there was another girl in goal, but we decided to switch off every 5 turns or so. I didn't start out very well: one of the first shots against me was a lobber that was coming straight at me, but I didn't time my jump right. a few tries later though, a ball came in low and hard and I couldn't get down, but I stuck out my leg and deflected it beautifully. I had a couple other nice stops, and even though I was able to gain control of the ball, I stopped the offense from scoring. I'm going to have some lovely bruises tomorrow (especially that one on my leg), but they'll look good at the camogie match. I had camogie practice today too, which was pretty short, but it was the first time in a couple weeks where we actually went out and hit slitters around. even though I haven't been practicing all that much, I really seem to have improved. maybe all that time freezing my ass off on the sideline at matches has payed off. who knows.
this weekend in carraroe was great. good, homemade food, sleeping in, a stinky dog, and wonderful people. noel is one of the best cooks ever (besides mom, of course). on sunday we had amazing roast beef with potatoes, carrots, leeks...mmm... it was just so good. and I went to the gaelic football match between carraroe and lettermore (which, for the people of carraroe, is the equivalent of a usc v. ucla game) which domhnall played in. carraroe won, and their goalie was pretty darn good. no fist-fights broke out, but domhnall did get clobbered, so all was not lost.
now I'm going to go to bed early so I can be sure to wake up for history seminar tomorrow.

and remember people, vote early and vote often.