Tournament day.  Emily has been amping up for this Arroyo Seco wiffle ball tournament for over a week now and today is the big day.  

I started off in the garden today, watering and transplanting my fighting little cabbages.  I had another clean shift today only today I was cleaning by myself.  Here’s what I’m currently thinking:  This experience is far less garden time and excessively more cleaning up after people than I originally anticipated which is what is causing my episodes of discontent with this place.  But anyway... 

After lunch we went to Mouna’s for another acupuncture lesson.  Today was on a man and wife and it went much smoother.  I’m really enjoying learning this! We then took 20 min to make “3 min cornbread” and continued to prepare the food and field for tonight’s big game.  I love how everything is made from scratch here.... well everything except the tortilla chips, but that’s more for convenience than lack of ability I’m sure.  We even made our own bean dip.  There just happened to be some cooked pinto beans, we blended some onion and garlic with salt, pepper and green chillies and just like that you’ve got the most delicious bean dip ever.  The rest of the food was equally as gourmet.  I’m not sure any other baseball/softball/ or wiffle ball game any where in the country had better food then us that night.  Botan made pad-thai noodles, there was bbq’d chicken, a spinach salad, cabbage salad, salsa... mmm, dang good.

The game maybe wasn’t as good, although I had a blast. Our team name was “The Diggers” even though the rest of the town thought of us as “the hippies”.  Tonight we were playing “The Artists”. The atmosphere was fun - Emily and Tido had assembled a baseball music playlist that they blasted across the garden.  There was a tent set up with benches and chairs and coolers upon coolers full of beer.  

I played second base for the whole game and we alternated girl/boy batting.  I hit a few, got out a few times, and made a few good plays.  I was really disappointed and embarrassed to be a part of my team by about half way though.  Tido was taking this far too seriously.  Talking trash and bullying the other team.  It’s one thing to do it in jest, but its another to make personal attacks during a WIFFLE BALL game.  The final eruption was Tido actually slamming their female pitcher to the ground by her hair... Tido was obviously asked to leave the game and from the sounds of it his reputation in this very small town is ruined for a good long while.  That was really stupid.

But after many sincere apologies we got back to the game and had a mediocre inning. The final score was Artists- 7, Gardeners- 6.  Since we were playing The Artists, one of them created a ceramic trophy that looked awesome.  I love creative people :)  

After all that excitement some of the girls wanted to go out for an adventure!  We were all craving ice cream so Ramone and his kids and 3 of us girls piled into his car to make it to Baskin and Robins before it closed.  The perfect way to heal a wounded spirit after a defeated ball game :)