hello faithful readers, my apologies for my absence of late. we're at that time of the grant cycle where i don't have much time during the day to play. i shouldn't be taking time today either, but oh well.

this weekend was a good one... a bunch of us went climbing on friday for stephanie's 30th birthday (liz f's axis coworker). i hadn't been in about two months and was very rusty, so i had a frustrating climbing night. i think we all decided that we need to go climbing more often, especially if we go for that crack-climbing class in yosemite next summer!

saturday i slept in until almost noon, when i got up to race over to the polo fields for zephyr's last game of the fall season. we won 2-1, which puts us in second place in the division. yay! we played a really solid game against a team that was resorting to dirty play, and came out the eventual victors. a number of my teammates and i went to park chow for dinner and yancy's for drinks to celebrate the end of a successful season and liz e's 25th birthday. i'd been to yancy's before-- it's a really chill bar near golden gate park with a big-screen, a huge bar, darts, video games, and lots of space. i'll definitely be going back there.

sunday, after some soccer-watching that i'll mention in a minute, heather and i headed down to san jose for the annual csaplár christmas tree cutting ceremony. i love christmas trees-- they smell so good, and they have such an aura of joy and happiness and holiday spirit. plus, when else do you get to bring a huge tree inside your house and put lights and stuff all over it? anyway, we found a good tree pretty quickly in the diminishing light up at mcpherson ranch, and then stood around chatting and drinking amaretto tea and admiring the smoky sunset view. we finished up the day with dinner (complete with pizookie!) at the newish bj's at oakridge. parking wasn't too terrible for holiday mall hell, but i'm sure it'll get waaay worse in the next few weeks.

not the best weekend in ucla sports news. former ucla men's soccer coach, tom fitzgerald, was killed in a car-vs-motorcycle accident on saturday. i had the fortunate experience of inspiration by this man, who led the ucla men's team to a national title in 2002. he was the keynote speaker at an alumni event i attended about a year and a half ago, and he instilled a great sense of passion, team ethics and mentality, and of course a love for soccer in every word he spoke. complete with a road-to-the-championship video clip montage, his speech had me nearly in tears. (you can tell he was a good coach in that sense-- he probably was able to inspire his players in the same way.) he will be missed.

in other ucla sports highlights, both the ucla women's soccer team and the ucla football team lost to national champions this weekend. the soccer team lost to notre dame in PKs in the ncaa championship game, and the football team lost a hard-fought game to top-ranked usc. i'm proud of both teams for stepping up to the challenge in both games, although i wish the outcomes had been different. (ucla will be playing wyoming in the las vegas bowl on december 23 to close out the season.)

in bad-taste-in-mouth sports news, the BCS strikes again! the pac-10 is yet again under-recognized as #4-ranked cal gets relegated to the holiday bowl (not even a top-eight bowl!) in favor of #5-ranked texas going to the rose bowl. wha?? when will people learn that the pac-10 actually has a lot to say for itself? i hope that usc blows oklahoma out of the water so these folks get a taste of their own bitter medicine. sorry bears, you really did deserve roses this year.