Knights in Shining Armor

Last week I crossed yet another item off my Oregon Bucket List: Go to a Corvallis Knights’ game. The Knights are a collegiate summer baseball team who play at the OSU baseball field. 

Non-major league baseball games are incredibly fun. You get the entertainment of the sport, the thrill of the event, the dedication of the fans, and none of the overwhelming crowds or over-priced food & drinks. It’s just great. An additional fun aspect of this particular game was the extreme number of foul balls. You might think so many foul balls makes for a boring game, but on the contrary it makes for a whole lot of fun in the stands. My roommate Alison & I almost got drilled once, a few people we knew in front of us nearly got hit twice, a man in the section to our left had an epic over-the-railing catch of a stray hit, and then there was the cluster of kids. 

Outside the stadium, back behind home plate and the first base line, was a gathering of young boys out to catch as many foul balls as possible. They made it into a game of sorts, racing one another to each ball that made it over the stands. At first we thought they were all part of the same family, like the parents only bought two tickets for themselves and told their kids to just stand outside the field. But once we heard them calling each other by shirt colors-- “Hey! Green shirt kid! Have you caught one yet?”-- we realized they were mere strangers brought together by the common cause of rowdy ball wrangling. They were really quite fair to one another, sharing balls with anyone who hadn’t caught one yet and playing catch between innings. Their camaraderie made the quaint event all the more enjoyable. Seriously, low-profile sports are the way to go. 

The Great Race

The San Clemente Ocean Festival is the greatest show on surf. Seriously, that’s the slogan for the event. The annual festival includes athletic competitions revolving around the beach. There are dory boat races, surf competitions, biathlons, stand up paddle board competitions, a sand castle building competition, and then some. While my mom & sister compete in various events throughout the two days, my dad & I are excellent spectators. (Side story: I’ve tried competing in the past and it typically ends quite poorly. For instance, I did a beach swim and was so slow the jet-ski lifeguard offered to give me a ride back to shore multiple times.) 

This year, my sister had a particularly exciting experience. Early Sunday morning she and my mom did a 5k beach run. As they took off down the sandy shoreline at 8:00am, my dad and I took to overlooking the course from the wooden pier above. Since we had some time to kill and because we’re Arnolds, we made up a game. We were trying to guess what time the first runner would come in. I figured it would be a man around 8:18, allowing him to be running at a 6 minute per mile pace. Sure enough the first man ran in right beneath us at 8:18. I recalled Nicki having said she wanted to try to complete the run in 25 minutes, so at 8:20 we descended from the pier down to the beach finish line. Once we got there we realized we hadn’t seen any females yet. Just as this thought occurred we saw three women burst out from under the pier. As they came into focus, we realized we knew one of them. Nicki was charging toward us in her patented mismatched outfit in a full out sprint. We cheered, I snapped a photo finish pic, and we watched Nicki almost vomit afterward. She ended up coming in second overall for females, but first in her age division, which means gold medal for Nicki! Hooray! It was quite the eventful race. 

Mom finished the 5k in a stud-like fashion and then won a bronze medal later on in the day for dominating her age division in a beach swim. Go family members. 

What the Craft?!

Every few years I get the inexplainable urge to craft. I’ve never been a crafty individual, but as time passes I either forget that I have no crafting abilities or I think I mystically developed the skills it takes to craft out of zero practice and no determination. As a child, I assumed once you hit a certain age as a female you would magically develop sewing & cooking competence...turns out that age is not 23. 

My most recent crafting endeavor was a maxi-dress. I began with high hopes and thoughts of ease, assuming I could bust out such a product in a matter of hours on a lazy Sunday. I found on Pinterest (or the Devil’s playground) a “simple” maxi-dress tutorial. Except here’s the thing about expert crafters who create tutorials: they assume everyone knows the language of their people. They throw around terms like “gathering stitch” and “elastic thread”. Wtf is elastic thread? I thought thread was a thing and elastic was a thing, no combination about it. My first mistake was buying all the materials before actually reading the tutorial all the way through. I saw a pretty picture and claims of easily turning a tank top, some elastic, and a yard of material into my dream dress. After buying elastic and fabric, my second mistake was turning an old tank-top into a crop-top, still without reading all the directions. 

After cutting my elastic, the fabric, and the tank-top, I decided to give those directions a thorough read through. Once I hit the point in the directions where I was required to click an external link leading to yet another expert crafter’s tutorial I began to lose faith in the alleged ease of the project. With increasing groans of frustration leaking out of my mouth, my craft-savvy roommates jumped in to help me sort out the situation. As they brainstormed ideas of salvaging my pre-cut pieces, I dreamed up this blog post. I found it less stressful to stick to honing the talents I’m comfortable with rather than pricking myself with a needle in attempts to force a talent I have no knack for. 

Plus, I’m clearly ravishing in the final product:

Nailed it!