urgh.

well, the breathing was nice while it lasted.  this morning i am stuffed up like a stuffed thing.  fortunately, it'll just be a matter of loosening this crap and getting rid of it, though; i'm not actually feeling that bad.  but, argh.

in curling news, i see that my friends Plainfield Dubberly have defeated the Forces of Evil in the form of Utica Delmonte in the first event semifinal at the kayser*, so that's all right.  :-)  go Dubberly in the final!  and Delmonte drops to the fourth event semifinal playing against Potomac Galebach, which is also okay; it's not that i don't want The Most Annoying Man Alive to win ever, it's just that i can't handle how insufferable he'd be if he won the whole thing.  beating Delmonte is no problem.

*utica delmonte is the team that datlowen, jgesteve, darthrami and i beat in the third event final at our first kayser, when we were rank firsties and nobody, least of all we, could quite believe we were doing that well.  and they were sort of obnoxious.  to be fair, the most obnoxious of them was their second, and the following year they told us hardly anybody at their club would play with him anymore; but their skip was no prize either, i'll tell you what.  at our second kayser, the theme was "college" so there was, like, a cheerleading contest, and the cheer they came up with went "we're utica three, we're utica three, something something something, we sting like a bee" -- they wore yellow and i swear they gave their opponents cortisone cream, ha ha, because they planned to sting so badly -- and we were this close, although we didn't play in the cheerleading contest, to entering with an off-the-cuff cheer:  "we're potomac four; we beat them."  :-D  (we did go on to beat them that year, as well, much more handily than we'd beat them in the final the year before.)  so although curling is a gentleman's game, and you don't cheer your opponent's missed shots or anything, it's really fine with me when Utica Delmonte doesn't succeed.  as for The Most Annoying Man Alive, well, he's the most annoying man alive, and also his technique ranges from not great to actively bad, so it bugs a lot of people that he does as well as he does, because he's doing things wrong.  doing things wrong and being really really smug about it:  not the way to win friends and influence people.  so it's okay with me when he doesn't succeed, as well.  (happily, the couple of times i've skipped against him, i've won.  so it's not a matter of personal rivalry, if you see what i mean.)

the winning cheer, incidentally, went like this:

skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a guard!
team:  takeout!
skip:  gimme a takeout!
team:  long guard!

kayser update (from someone four thousand miles away)

bummer -- it appears my friends Plainfield Dubberly did not, in fact, win the kayser.  ah well.  they still get nifty jewelry.  in good news, though, our friends Potomac Hamilton won the second event St Andrews Medal.  go them!  [waves banner reading "Pototomac II" from 2004 women's challenge at Utica]

(ahem.  also, The Most Annoying Man Alive didn't win the fourth event.  but his team gets hardware as well.)

further update:  hey, you can totally mouse over the names of the teams and get the names of the team members, and therefore i discover that Utica Delmonte is made up not just of the vaguely-obnoxious skip (at skip) and his long-suffering wife who viced for him in 2004 (at lead), but also the aforementioned incredibly-hostile second (at second) and his wife, who, we were told at the 2004 kayser, wouldn't even curl with him anymore, that's how bad he was (at vice).  the snarky-but-competent vice from the 2003 kayser (who won the 2004 women's challenge; i forget her name), and the genuinely-funny-too-bad-they're-hanging-out-with-jerks couple who played front end at the 2004 kayser were not listed!  perhaps they'd had enough.  or, aged out.

also, it appears that three of the four teams from albany were skipped by women.  go albany! (of course they each lost their first game.  but so did plenty of teams skipped by men, and there were teams skipped by women that did win in the first round, so, you know, so what.)  (mixed teams have to have two men and two women, and they have to alternate, is the thing, so customarily women throw lead and vice and men throw second and skip.  this is so customary that at the training session for USCA officials, the past president of our club actually asked, in all seriousness and without meaning to sneer or offend anyone at all, if a woman could skip a mixed team.  at least two of us young enough to be his granddaughters said "why on earth not?" and the matter rested, but suffice to say, women don't skip anything like half the teams at mixed events, even five-and-under mixed events like the kayser.  at this kayser, if the roster is correct, six out of 36 teams had women at skip.  so, i'm just saying.)  (of course, me, i prefer to vice rather than skip, given a choice, so it's not that twelve of the remaining 30 teams can be assumed to be subjugating their women or anything.  but, you know.)