Paintball!

One of my lab-mates is getting married tomorrow. In lieu of a bachelor party, he decided to invite his groomsmen and the guys in our research group to go to a paintball park and riddle each other with welts.

The park is a little bit of a way off. Past Magic Mountain, even, and immediately contiguous (possibly locked in by) to what I think is a prison workfarm. To get in you have to be shuttled by folks with special passes from the prison parking lot up to the paintball park. No stopping allowed on the approximately one mile drive, keep your doors locked.

Despite some early difficulties locating the shuttle-point (didn't expect to have to go into the prison parking lot), we got there with little trouble. After a bit of a wait getting all the waivers signed and guns handed out and crappy field-clothes put on we had a good ol' time.

There were thirteen (!) of us and so we divided up into a team of seven and one of six. I was on the short handed team, and we wrapped crazy pink ribbons around our arms to differentiate the folks. We squared off in a variety of venues, including a strange small course with big inflatable geometrical solids, another small course with a variety of barrel-structures, another, larger one on a hillside, with only tires piled into, well, piles, for cover, and a big fake bombed out city (a la Beirut)...

It was good fun. I didn't get "killed" many times- though I had a number of balls hit me and not burst. Fortunately it seems I didn't welt up too much. More often I went out for technical reasons. E.g., my gas canister came undone one time, and a few more times I ran out of paint.

However, being out of paint didn't stop me from faking some guys out, making them surrender by charging up to them and yelling: "Surrender! Surrender! Surrender!" I had a few great shots- nailing folks in the head from far, far away, hitting a guy in the butt, etc.

All in all, it was great fun, but I was intolerably dirty by the end. I came home and showered twice. Not really. Once sufficed- after all, I use soap.