Monday, January 30, 2012

Mexican Burgers, Arm Wrestling, Workday, and a Game Night

This past weekend was fantastic! I already blogged about Thursday's awesomeness, so I'll just skip to Friday night! Friday started out pretty bad, the SMASH rehearsal was cancelled because of the icy snow. That was the second time my scenes were canceled due to snow and ice. That day became much better that evening. That evening all of us Clarkes went over to the Donahues for Mexican burgers and fellowship! The Donahues are great people to talk to, so that's what we did until the burgers were ready.

The burgers, man... in case you don't know what a Mexican burger is, it's like a burger, but tacoified. They were so good! I usually only eat 1-3 burgers, but this time I had 4. They weren't small, I just had to eat more, if you know what I mean...

Anyway, after we finished eating burgers, we played some Dutch Blitz. That game is always very entertaining... the sounds people make are hilarious! I ended up in second place to the Shannon and Brenna team by 1 point. It was intense.

During that visit we got on to the subject of working out a few times... duh, that's gonna happen when I'm going somewhere. I gave the Donahues a few tips on working out... but from there we went onto the subject of arm wrestling. The girls arm wrestled some, and then they wanted me to arm wrestle Mr. Donahue. The Donahue girls made Mr. Donahue sound really strong by the stories they told. His job also aids in his strength building. Not even their older brother (who was 24) has beat him yet. So I figured I'd get crushed. Though. I guess the thousands of pushups, pullups and weight lifting I did in my life paid off: I was not crushed right away.

We started arm wrestling. We held the starting position for bit, then I realized he's playing with me, or I stand a chance. His face showed that I stood a chance. So I went full blow on him. I then could tell I had stronger fast twitch muscles. I brought him down until I only had an inch left. We held it there for a long time. My arm felt like it had nothing left. My hand then went up about an inch. That angle change let me use slightly different muscles. So I gave it a little burst and pushed back to the one inch remaining position. It was now down to who could last longer. I knew that he could, because his job requires him to have very good muscular endurance. So I then looked at our hands. Both of our wrists were still straight. So I put all my willpower into curling my wrist. It took me another minute to fully curl it, giving me the inch, giving me victory!

I felt pretty good about that. I was quite surprised to win. My arm felt dead. Then my dad, knowing I was stronger than him, took advantage of my tired arm and decided to challenge me to an arm wrestling match. So I accepted. At first Dad was winning. My arm just felt like it wasn't working. I then just pushed as hard as I could. Dad has a good amount of fast twitch muscle fibers, but his slow twitch aren't as good. That's because tennis (Dad's sport) using more fast twitch fibers in the arms. So once of pushed his arm half way down, I snapped his hand down, giving me victory.

I thought I was done then, but no. Mr. Donahue wanted to try my left arm. I told him I have an injured shoulder, he then said: all the better! I lost that match quite quickly. Once he pushed my arm to the point where I had to use my injured tendons, I snapped down and lost. Turns out, that to isolate the rotator cuff (what I injured) you have to do an arm wrestling motion. So beforehand, I already knew for sure I was going to lose that match.

After all the arm wrestling we had dessert, talked, and then ended up leaving. Thank you Donahues for having us over!

The next day was a workday with our church at the Root Cellar. A lot of the girls painted, a group of us guys did more of the 'brute work'. We cleaned out and rearranged the Root Cellar shed. Shoveled a path or two, and then we had a lunch break. After lunch two other guys and I fixed a few broken things indoors. I was then put to work on cleaning windows. That sounds boring, but it's fun when the bottom of the window is at your neck, the window is about 4 or 5 feet tall, and you don't have a ladder. So I got to use my athletic ability and jump up into the window frame and clean the windows.

When I finished, we all waited around, talked, and then schemed to have the Kidd kid's over. We ended up only having Millie and Grace over, but they're still pretty awesome! That night we hung around, played Dutch Blitz, and ate pizza until something like 10:30pm. The next morning we went to church. After the service we brought Kevin, Millie and Grace to our house. We pretty much just played Dutch Blitz, ate lunch, and then had a snack before we headed off to our home group game night. On the way to the game night we picked up Kyle Almquist. At the game night we ate some really tasty snacks, played a bunch of games, and solved mini mind games. After the game night we brought the Kidds and Kyle home, and then went home ourselves.

Over all, the entire weekend was extremely fun! I'm a bit tired, but it was totally worth it!

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