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The night before I usually dream of playing football. I take marks, kick the ball and play awesomely. It is great visualisation stuff and I always wake early and raring to go.

The time before I leave the house is taken up with collecting my gear, double checking I have everything in my bag and making sure I leave on time. I am always early. Today I arrived 3rd to the ground, taking Miranda with me. Its cold and there is a chilly wind blowing, though the sunshine is warm. I feel old, cold and very fragile at this point. Doubts swirl in my head about my ability to perform.

I get a ball into my hand and go and kick a few shots – barefoot. I make all but one of them so feel very happy about my ability to kick goals, though I probably will play in the back line.

Life has been going by too fast to write about it. Sorry about that – but sometimes it happens.

Here's a quick summary of the last few weeks.

• Major software development project that the Jethro team has been working on coming to the point where it is to be installed at the clients for testing. Now in testing, bug fixing and finalisation stages. This has been a massive project and taken almost every weekend for the last 2 months.
• Another software development job coming to completion this week.
• Firming up new contracts with clients so as to ensure a steady income stream for potential new full time staff.
• Finalising the hand over to Gordon of the Web Services Management. He now handles most of this on his own.
• Installation of two new servers and decommission of three old ones. Migrating all the users, setting up remote access for all our staff and troubleshooting the inevitable problems.
• Basketball coaching – preparing for a competition in September.
• Football – have had to skip due to some niggly injuries and inability to play.
• Photography – Nelson Lai came to me to take me through a professional shooting tutorial, followed by a real live model shoot and then post shoot editing techniques in Photoshop. Wow what an amazing day. I have started editing photos and will slowly display them as I get them done. There are already some up on facebook for those who connect to me there, and the public  flickr and redbubble accounts get the better quality versions.
• Family – with so much work on I have prioritised family time over other activities (including blogging). Hence why I have not gone to football training and skipped a game I would dearly have loved to play in. We went to see Ice Age 3 the other day and have also gone to game zone, gone to the bike riding park and spent a lot of time watching Masterchef together.

The older we get the faster we were!

And that is the slogan of our football club. http://sandgatemasters.com/

There are a bunch of photos in there from our first pre season game.

Our first proper game was cancelled due to flooded grounds, but our next game is this Sunday.

Here are some of the photos of me. I am number 7.

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Sometimes it feels like so much has happened since the last time I wrote on here that I don’t have time to stop and get it down. And that makes it worse because then there is even more that has happened.

So this is not so much an attempt at a catch up as just a rambling post covering various things that have happened to me recently.

Football

We played a night game Saturday night. We won in the last few minutes after a pretty tough contest. They got an early lead and then we had to peg them back. I played defence for 3 quarters with one entire quarter off the ground. I did give away a 50 metre penalty in the last quarter with a few minutes to go and we were leading by 5. Fortunately he missed his kick at goal and we rushed it through for a behind. We ended up winning by 4 points.

I had to get up at 6:35 this morning. Was on the road by 6:45 and at the ground by 7:15. We stood around talking for a few minutes then headed into the change rooms to get rubbed, strapped and dressed. Coming  out on to the ground we discovered it was still quite wet with dew, and very small for an AFL ground. I think it was probably 30-40 metres short and probably 20 metres less wide. This made for an interesting game as 36 blokes got very close together – not a lot of room for kicking.

I was put at fullback for the entire game. The first bloke I had to mark up on playing full forward was way too fast for me. He got in front of me and took an easy mark. So I played a little in front of him for a it and spoiled the next couple of marks he ran for, and then a ball cam spiraling down toward us – I held him off and the ball sailed over my head and he grabbed it. Very annoying. Two goals scored on me. The next ball that came our way was way out on the sideline and was being tussled over by the forward pocket and half forward for their team and our back pocket and half back flank. My man went running there looking for the ball and as he got there I hit him hard. He didn’t come back for the rest of the game and I had a succession of other players rotate through full forward. One was a good 8 inches taller than me, but he was the easiest to mark. All though he ran hard he wasn’t too fast and i was able to keep body contact on him long enough to spoil his runs. I was also able to hold him away from the ball and stopped him getting involved in numerous passages of play. I did have one other chap that subbed for him who kicked two easy goals on me which was also annoying, but the rest of the guys who came in I either blocked them from marking or punched the ball away.

I had never played in the back line before the last game, and now I have had 2 games at full back, got coaches award for one and was mentioned second today. I didn’t think I had that good a game, but the other blokes all reckoned I did. Maybe I am just too hard on myself.