feng_shui_house

I managed to kick my cold enough to play the ice hockey tournament Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One of my teammates gave me a lift from Cambridge rink to Romford each day. It's an easy drive and we get on well, and the tournament itself was great fun. Exhausting, but fun and definitely great for developing and improving play. The other four teams playing were pretty friendly and we made some connections and enthusiasm for playing more games against each other as individual teams.

Unfortunately my ride home got injured in the last few seconds of the last game of the tournament on Sunday evening, a "needs A&E and good drugs" level injury. So I went with him to the local A&E on the grounds they'd probably want a responsible non-drugged adult to get him home, and it'd only be a few hours, right? Ahahaha, it was 16 hours before we got out and it was not a good experience.

Also neither of us had showered between "playing lots of ice hockey" and "showing up at A&E", so very sorry to anyone who had to sit too near either of us.

I got a very minimal amount of work done today on my phone from the hospital, but went to bed for a few hours as soon as I finally got home and feel more human now. I will have to figure out whether I take leave for today or make up the effort elsewhere in the week. But that is a problem for tomorrow; tonight I'm hoping to reset my sleep schedule by going to bed on time.

Goodness having a cold is dull. I spent most of yesterday resting/asleep, felt able to work today, but did it from home and definitely favoured the easier tasks from the todo list. I skipped indoor cricket this afternoon, and TriBase scrimmage tonight, in favour of continuing the recovery curve enough to play an ice hockey tournament this weekend.

I have successfully wrangled a car pool for the Kodiaks B to go to Gosport next weekend, which includes me driving a hired 9-seater, whee. Car pooling has been wrangled, mostly not by me, to get Warbirds to Romford tomorrow and Sunday. (The women's team and the mostly-men's team living up to stereotypes about planning, not for the first time.) The weekend after Gosport is playoffs in Sheffield, where we see if Kodiaks A can win promotion to the next division, and as a bonus I can meet up with my mother-in-law.

A couple of weeks before my Czech holiday I started taking all the morning school runs while Tony took the afternoons, after a long period where it was mostly the other way around. It is suiting me much more than I had expected, and has also led to me going to the office a lot more. Essentially, once I've cycled to school, it's as easy to go to the office as to go home, and usually I'll go to the office. Partly because my role and personality make "useful spontaneous in-person conversations" more likely to happen. Partly because once I'm on site, it's easier to take advantage of the university's Active Staff programme. I'm generally only working from home now when not-quite-well (as today) or if my schedule is All Online Meetings All The Time. The downside of the office is I have no privacy at the hotdesks and need to use a pod for meetings. I quite like the pods, but not for hours on end.

Active Staff is a recent initiative of the University Sports Service. Through it, I can get two exercise classes a week for free (mostly yoga, pilates and similar) and additional ones at the Sports Centre on a PAYG basis. While the most popular classes often book out really fast, people seem pretty good about cancelling if they can't make it, so a space often pops up the night before or morning of. I can also join the indoor cricket and table tennis "Give It A Go" sessions which are shared with students, which is how I've ended up playing cricket again for the first time since I was a teenager. It's not helping my workload problem but it's not making it worse, and it is bringing me a fair bit of joy, so I'll call it a win.

Oops, it's been about three weeks since my last update of substance: I was in Czechia with C, and anticipating the last five games of Women's Worlds. I think literally none of those last five games went the way I wanted, but I'm very glad to have watched them and been part of the highest attendance ever for the Women's Worlds tournament. (Breaking audience records for women's sports! yet again!).

Sunday night, after the gold medal game, we hung out with some new friends in a bar. Afterwards, very slowly saying goodbye in the main square (I'm on a groupchat now, yay), we saw pretty much the entire Finnish team walk past dressed to the nines and wearing their bronze medals. I went to bed far too late given the time we had to get up in the morning, but no regrets.

Monday (Easter Monday), we left České Budějovice on a train at 8am, changed at Linz, had nearly four hours stopover in Frankfurt (boat tour, discovered the Too Good To Go app works there and thus picked up some delicious curry for dinner) and arrived in Paris at 11pm, checking into a hotel a very short walk from Gare de l'Est.

Tuesday we walked up and down the steps of the Eiffel Tower (to the second floor, they don't let you walk up the really high bit), took a boat tour with a really mediocre audio guide, had the most delicious lunch in a very cramped restaurant on the Île de la Cité, got fancy ice cream from the Île Saint Louis and walked from the Seine right back to our hotel for the luggage, onward to Gare du Nord and the Eurostar and home.

Wednesday morning I was back at work, the children were both back at school, and Wednesday evening I was back at hockey practice. And since then my life has reverted to the usual whirl of work, family, ice hockey, with a new summer addition of cricket with the West Cambridge team. (Obviously one sport with a concussion risk was insufficient.)

České Budějovice seems like a world away now, nearly three weeks ago: I am very glad I went, I am very glad to have had C's company on the trip, and I'm very grateful to Tony for keeping the lights on and taking care of N at home so we could go. I could write several long posts just about the tournament to be honest but the short version: it was really good ice hockey, it was an amazing experience, it was exhausting and slightly crazy. Czechia treated it like a serious tournament and the fans showed up in response. I very much want to go to future Women's Worlds, if I can afford to.

I miss that little city and the beautiful, very walkable, historic centre. Like but not like Cambridge in a lot of ways. The hostel worked well for us, the weather was lovely almost every day of our stay, and we got the budget about right. Six months of Duolingo Czech was very far from sufficient, but I could at least manage please and thank you and simple food & drink orders. I still want to do better, and I'm going to Prague for a hockey camp in June, so I'll keep persevering I guess.