Fruit Bandits

8/11/11



11am

Yet another birthday today. Shaina is celebrating here in Canada today with some rugby. We’ve had our first practice already and are gearing up for some lunch and another practice. My shoulder is feeling worlds better (acupuncture = secret weapon to recovery), and I’m ready for some contact this afternoon.



Here in the dorms, we’ve started a puzzle. It’s pretty entertaining—that is the puzzle itself, more than the actual solving of the puzzle. It depicts the creation of our earth. There is “god,” or some wind guy, in the upper left corner, and he is blowing (V says “spitting”) all the animals of the world out in this mixture of stars, clouds, and sunshine. There’s a unicorn, a bunch of snakes and a rabbit riding a dinosaur. Yes, that’s right, apparently Uncle Remus forgot to mention that Brer Rabbit had a sidekick, Brer T-Rex.



5pm

Second practice is done, as is our puzzle. Despite an attempt by the “fruit bandits,” Sadie and Lo, to hide a piece of the puzzle, we finished. The “fruit bandits” were dubbed as such last night when they slyly snuck around the dorms stealing fruit and players’ clothing and putting them in random places (i.e. I found a scrum cap with a melon in it in my shower).



We’re all just relaxing right now. We rookies will be putting on a skit tomorrow evening, and so we’re going to work on that this evening. As the ratio of rookies to vets is about 1:1, this should be a pretty elaborate and hilarious skit. Perhaps I can get someone to film it and maybe post it if everyone is okay with that.



In other news, we found out that some of the English players are police officers and some of those officers are on the riot squad, so they will be thrown into the fray that is London when they return. Here’s hoping that it all quiets down before that. Here’s hoping that it quiets down, not because some fellow ruggers will possibly be involved in the mayhem, but because the whole thing is senseless.