Splat!

My allergies have been kicking in and when I got up this morning I had a headache. I really didn't feel like going, but I'm glad I did because I had a great time.

Jullian and I went with the Singles department from church to play paintball. We had never played before and Jullian has been wanting to do this for years. We played several games in teams, Main Campus vs. North Campus, and in the end both teams were tied. There were two courses we played on - one that was set up with hills, mounds of dirt and trenches, the other was through the woods with forts, barricades and trenches. Both were fun courses, but I enjoyed the woods more. In all the games, except the last one, the object was to stay alive - obviously - once you got hit, you were out. Play would continue and whichever team eliminated all the members of the other team won.

The first couple games were fun with everyone playing to stay alive, but everyone started becoming more strategic as the games went on. We wore face masks, which is a necessity, because if you got hit in the face you could be seriously injured. I got hit square between the eyes at one point when I had three people teaming up against me. (See the mask in the photo below.) In the last game it was every man for himself until you ran out of ammunition. It really got messy in that game. My gun was losing power at this point and my paintballs were barely reaching the feet of the people I shot at. I got hit, again, on the mask and couldn't see anything except out of one little corner of the mask. Once I finally got the paint wiped off so I could see again it was all over. I got shot in the head (so I had orange hair) and another time on the mask by the mouthpiece which sent paint into my mouth, which tasted horrible and left me spitting orange spit until I was able to rinse my mouth out. The only thing I had to wipe the paint on was my clothes, so they were pretty messy. When I walked off the field everyone was laughing at me because I looked all beat up. But it was fun and I look forward to doing it again.

This combat fighting was right up Jullian's alley. He played pretty well and was not too messy in the end. He got hit on the mask one time and the paint splattered inside the mask, across the side of his face and neck, which left him looking like he has a serious war wound, but other than that he stayed pretty clean. In another game Jullian was the last man standing on our team. I asked Jullian on the way home if he thought paintball was as fun as he thought it would be. He said it was and this was one of the funnest things he's ever done.

Here we are after just a couple games. We got a whole lot dirtier than this.