war in the woods

Paintballing!!!! When my coach announced that we were going paintballing as a part of our team bonding day I was not jumping up and down with excitement like some of the girls. Paintballing is one thing I told myself I wouldnt do..why would you purposely go and get yourself hit with paintballs that hurt and left bruises for days. But the coach assured me we would have some protective gear.
So that Saturday the team loaded up in the cars and headed to the paintballing place. I think most of us were expecting some kind of course or area lined out for us. But we get there and we are in the woods. We are paintballing in the woods with like 2 feet of snow. So we get all our gear which is just like a camouflaged jumpsuit which garnered no protection or padding whatsoever, so i wore my big jacket and sweats underneath for some extra padding. The they gave us our helmets, which didnt have a anything to protect the back of our heads,which led me to more worrying about my safety. And sidenote the helmets were so bad because they fogged up so fast so you couldnt see anything!
So the rules were pretty simple,it was just like capture the flag. We were divided into 2 teams, the blue and orange team. Go blue! There was 7 on each team. We played 3 rounds for 20 minutes. So one team went to one side of the woods and the other side of the woods and the man blew the whistle and we were off. Since I was so afraid to play this dreaded game I offered to stay and play defense and guard the flag. Really I just wanted to find a good hiding spot and stay hidden so I wouldnt get hit. Well my planned worked. I hit behind this huge rock and was perfectly hidden and I nailed our assistant coach before he could get the flag! yes!! But that round ended in a draw, no one got the flags.
After the first round my competiive side came out. I wanted to go and sneak around and try and capture the flag. So the whistle blew and I made my way around the outskirts of the boundaries, hiding behind trees and rocks and laying low in the snow. It is very hard to be fast and agile while every step you take there is snow up to your knees. So I made it close to the flag and all of a sudden someone was shooting at me. The only way I was safe was to stand behind the tree as still as possible and wait it out. Finally, they stopped shooting at me and went on to someone else, thats when i turned at started firing at her, and I got her!! Ok so I was that much closer to the flag. As I was making my way over there I saw my coach, who was on my team creeping forward to the flag, so I thought Ill go and join him. As I was making my way over there I started getting fired upon from 2 different angles. So I quickly hid and started firing away. But then I ran out of paintballs!! I saw some lying on the ground that must have fallen from the gun so I tried to grab them and put them in my gun but then it hit me! I got hit in the leg by the enemy! Right as I got hit the whistle blew. Time was up and it was another draw. But when the final players that were playing that round made it to base, me and a teammate from the blue team realized we were shooting at each other!!! haha!
Third round. Our strategy was to have 2 players go and get the flag and everyone else stay on defense, well right away our 2 offensive players got shot and alot of their players got shot, so I decided to go and get the flag. I was going on the outskirts again and almost made it to the flag but it was gone, another teammate of mine had it and was taking it to our side but time ran out and it was another draw!
I was so happy when it was over and I had only gotten shot one time and it didnt leave a mark or even hurt! But I was a sharpshooter for my team. I had hit 6 people the whole day! The girls said I was a professional shooter ha! Im glad I got out there and faced a fear of getting hit with a paintball! It was a fun day!







After our day in the woods we got to relax with a team dinner then a sauna party. After that we headed over to Thais' apartment to play some games and get ready to go out. We were playing dance dance revelution on the wii and some crazy card games. Once we were all ready we headed out to our favorite place, Cirkus! This was the last time we were able to really go out and have fun as a team before we focused completely on playoffs! We were now ready for playoffs to begin!!

Mita muija, mika boogie!

Fintelligens, you have probably never heard of them unless you are into Finnish rap, but they are definetely a great group! Their new song that just came out is one of the teams favorite songs and we sing it all the time, although me and Thais know only 4 of the words, mita muija, mika boogie. Which means something like how are you feeling tonight or whats your swag like. Anyway, they were having a little concert in Hameenlinna so a few of us decided to go. It was a fun time and the concert was pretty good even tho we didnt know much of what they were saying but the guys in the group, there are 3 of them, were so entertaining and you could tell they loved what they were doing. One of the guys was just up there smiling the whole time, i know thats not kosher in the rap world, but who knows maybe in the world of Finnish rap its cool. He was our favorite guy by far tho so the smiling paid off. Im not a huge huge fan of rap but I just might be a huge fan on this Finnish rap group! the song in the video is the first part of our team song!

CaRnIvAl!!

Our Brazilian teammate, Thais, has not been home for the big celebration Carnival in her country in a few yrs so we decided in honor of her we will have a carnival day at practice. We all dressed up in crazy colors and costumes and practiced! It was so much fun to have something like that to make practice more fun, somtimes after many months of practice you get bored, so it was a great pick me upper! To make things that much better there was a mens volleyball game right after our practice so we had an audience while we were all dressed up! One of the guys asked the girls if we were dressed up as some sort of punishment!!!

its a celebration!

For Valentines Day I decided to make the team a goody bag full of fun things. I put some cute lil pads of paper in there, cute pencil and a lil heart sharpener, some candy from home that my mom sent me, some lil heart candies and then i also made rice krispy treats!I also had lil cards in the bags too. I handed them out to everyone on the bus as we were leaving for a game,( against Orpo the 3rd place team),wishing everyone good luck, since i still couldnt play because of my ankle. Most of them never had rice krispy treats before but they all loved them!I think my goody bags helped because we won the game in 5!



After the game the team decided to all go out and celebrate since that win had secured 2nd place for us! We had so many things to celebrate that night: the win, someones birthday,someone got a new job, one of our players that was injured all season played in her first game, it was carnival in Brazil, a "hen party", and we have a great and fun team! We started the night off at Kata's apartment playing sing star! Ha what a entertaining event that was! Sing star is basically karaoke at your apartment. Then we headed out for a night on the town! Fun times with the team!

a lil R and R

Yay!! We finished off league in 2nd place! It was a great season and we played some great matches. And I was very happy to be able to play in the last 2 matches of the season! I didnt want to go into playoffs after my injury without playing in some matches to get the rythem of the game back. My ankle is doing pretty good, it still hurts when i make certain movements, im still a lil slower than normal and it still swells up after practices, but its getting better!
Since we finished league in 2nd place our team has a bye until the semifinals, which start on March 24th. So we got about 2 weeks off before we have to play the first game. It is definitely a much needed break. Playing non stop volleyball for about 7 months in a row can take a toll on your body and everyone has aches and pains so it was good to be able to take some time off and just rest. We had practices and weights but very light and no jumping. The playoffs will be brutal on our body because the semis and finals are a best of 7 series and we play the games pretty much back to back. There is a possibility that we can play 14 matches in about 3 weeks. But hey thats what playing a sport is all about, who can rise up to the challenge and play their best!




So during my time off I mostly rested, slept alot,watched alot of movies and took some walks around town. The weather is changing for the better and the sun is coming out of hiding alot more now! Dont be fooled tho, it is still about 0 degrees out, but it was so beautiful outside! Here are some pics from my walk around the lake, which is till frozen over.