And You Thought I Wasn't a Sporty Kind of Gal!

Okay, so how many of you have had a stranger come up to you at an athletic event (in which you were a participant) and say, "Wow...you're pretty good at this. Been playing long?" I can now add bocce ball to the other sports that I am pretty good at; ski ball and Wii bowling.

This is kind of a head rush for me. You may not know this, but I was not very good at sports in school. For me, most sports involve either terror (I still have nightmares about the balance beam and uneven parallel bars, both instruments of torture that should be used only on small, eastern Europeans), or sweaty (Anything that requires running or moving quickly) or dirty (Sliding into home base??? Whose dumb idea was that???) or extremely unflattering athletic wear (Speedos...need I say more?).

In bocce, I have found my athletic home.

We just spent three days in Pleasanton, attending Bill's other office's Christmas party. (I need to stop giving out Mayan calendars as white elephant gifts.) May I say that it was worth the wait? The party was held at "Campo di Bocce," in Livermore.

It was a very nice Italian restaurant, with both indoor and outdoor bocce courts. After our meal we got to play on two of the indoor courts for an hour. There were fifteen of us, so we split into two teams. It's a sport (I'm going to insist on calling it a sport rather than a game. I get no head rush from being good at games. I've always been very good at games) with everything going for it; it's easy, it's clean and you don't have to change clothes. It takes about 30 seconds to learn (but a lifetime to master). One person throws out a small, heavy metallic ball called the "pallino," then everybody takes turns rolling their colored balls. The team whose balls come closest to the pallino get points. The best part is that with it being so far away, no one can make me prove my claim that I'm pretty good at bocce ball. You'll just have to take my word for it...