Yah, so, like I promised, I've got some pictures of the old eye. Everything is back to normal now, but this is what I looked like about a week and a half ago:

So yah, as you can tell from the stitches, I was pretty lucky to get hit where I did. I've been wearing eye-guards ever since, and it seems to be working out alright. Nikki tells me to stop taking them off and they won't fog up, but I think that's just because when I play her, I'm the one doing all the sweating and running.

I'm feeling pretty positive about squash right now - Like I mentioned before (I think I mentioned it), I've been jogging on my lunch breaks, and I'm slowly pulling things back into shape. I'm not really winning games yet, but I have specific things that I can work on, and that helps motivate me a lot more than hating every single aspect of my game.

The Vancouver Island Open is this weekend, and a bunch of friends from out of town are coming out to play in it (Bevan, Blake, etc.), so I'm excited about that too. I don't expect to place too highly in the tournament - this time around, my goal is to play well and not focus on the score. I just want good matches.

I'll give an update afterwards and post what I've got to work on.

I haven't made any dance related entries lately because I've been injured, and because once I was ready to get back on my foot, I wanted to focus most of my efforts on bringing my squash game back up to speed. I've been working on the same old stuff, and while it's come along slowly, there's still a lot of things for me polish up. My friend Simon has been taking lessons with some really major dancers (eg, founders of some of the styles that I do), so I've understandably been very jealous of that opportunity. He's coming over here for a few nights before he leaves Canada to head back to his homeland in Australia.. Hopefully we get a chance to bust out together before he's out of here and exchange knowledge with each other. Will post more about that too.

Enjoy those photos!

Alright, for the first time in a six weeks or so I'm finally starting to feel like things are getting back to where I want them to be. So, that means it's time for an update (that and the fact that I think Jarryd will quit being my friend if I don't get on it).

Getting injured sucks. All of the training I'd done during the past summer to improve my fitness and game are gone... It's frustrating stepping back onto a squash court and not having any of that with me. Then, on top of that, add the fact that none of my physical game is where I remember it being.

I had just started getting back into the mix two weeks ago, when I got caught in the eye doing some drop shot drills. Getting hit was my own fault - I was cheating forward to get the drop shot that I knew was coming, and put my face right in front of the path of my friend Rob's racquet. Oh well. He drove me to the clinic, I got four stitches put in my eye, and was out the door.

You know what four stitches means? It means two things: I'm off squash again until I get them taken out, and that I'm wearing goggles everytime I play from then onwards. The irony of the situation was that I had randomly decided to wear goggles this time when we were doing drills. I got frustrated part way through though, because they were fogging up and constantly getting sweaty, so I took them off. Three minutes later? Beaned!

The racquet caught me just above my eye, on the lid, so I'm actually pretty lucky - if I had actually gotten hit in my eyeball, I'd probably be dealing with some vision loss, and I'd be taking a much longer time out from playing.

So things were pretty rough. I got the stitches out in time to play the first game of Division 2 league, and I got PWNED. The guy that beat me was named Gary Sawada. He was pretty nice, played reasonably well, and the way I was playing he deserved the win hands down. I felt like I could beat him if I was playing the way I had been before injuring myself, and that was somewhat frustrating. By far the most frustrating thing was people offering me advice on what to do. This is always tough, because I know that it's given with good intentions, but when you're coming back from an injury, you know that you suck. It wasn't that I didn't know I needed to hit the ball tight and deep. It was that I couldn't. I guess I should just suck it up and be gracious that I have people that are willing to give me advice - better that than have noone want to help.

Anyhow, I've been putting in the time since then working on drills and playing games in between that. I started jogging again, which sucked (I barely made it half the distance I was going at the start of the summer) but it's all a step in the right direction. The past few days I've really felt like things are starting to come back to where I remember, and the best part about that is that I'm actually having fun playing the game now, rather than leaving the court miserable at how poorly I'm playing.

Dan and I did some work on volley boasts the other day, which is a shot I see him use all the time. I've always played this shot, but not really understood why it's been so ineffective. I see Dan use it to great effect, and then when I would go and do it, the opponent would cover it easily and unleash some devastating attack on me. This is what I was doing wrong:

• Hit the ball softly

Stupid eh? I should know better than this, but for some reason, I would just make the assumption that I need to crank on that ball. This isn't a kill shot - it's a moving shot, and you need to hit it softly so that the ball ends up softly in the front corner. As soon as Dan pointed this out to me, I realized how much sense it made, but it's just one of those things that didn't occur to me until it was said explicitly.

• Don't make this shot after the opponent has made a weak lob

Usually the times that I would make this shot were after my opponent had hit a weak lob. This is obviously a bad play. Why? Where is the opponent sitting after hitting a weak lob? Right at the front of the court, waiting for me to volley boast the shot right back to them. It's just a bad choice. I want to be hitting this shot after my opponent has hit a weak drive - they'll be caught behind me and have to run through the diagonal if they want to make a return.

• Use this shot to cut off balls that would otherwise make it past me.

One of the nice things about this shot is that you can hit it with a little less time than you might need if you were trying to hit a volley drop or drive. Standing on the Tee, watching your opponent, prepared for their shot, you have a good amount of time to step across and softly launch the ball on its path to the front corner.

So that's what in the mix right now. I took some pictures of my eye shortly after getting the stitches put in, and I'll put those up tomorrow night, once I pull them off my camera.

Cowboy up.