Tag: Honey Badgers

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Adventure Sports

2015 Honey Badger Holiday Party

Honey Badger Holiday Party 2015Had another fine Honey Badger Holiday Party this season. It was an excellent turnout, and a lot of fun.

It was held at my home for the second year in a row, and I was glad to at least have a couch this time around that they were able to sit on. I suppose I’m getting there slowly but surely.

Many brought amazing treats or beverages. It’s really great to see so many contribute even when we’re not playing a team sport. A pretty great bunch.

We picked teams (my partner was multi-defending champ Cait), and got started on some games.

  • First off was Hannukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa. It’s just a variation on rock, paper, scissors, but oh so much fun.
  • Then we played the Christmas Ornament game, which involves moving an ornament across the house by blowing on it. Again, a fun time to watch others.
  • We then had a round of Honey Badger Trivia.

After all that fun, we had our gift exchange. Jen provided all the rules, and the exchange began. All went well, everyone came away happy and it was a good time. I got some card based games.

In a surprise gesture, the team created an amazing Honey Badger card (it really is awesome), and were incredibly generous in giving me gift certificates to Home Depot, Wawa, and Amazon. I mean they were really generous. So very kind of them, again they are pretty great.

I then coaxed the team into having our photo taken in front of the Christmas tree at the arboretum. It’s a pretty scenic spot, and just a few steps from my home. Everyone was a good sport, and we got a pretty amazing Honey Badger photo.

We then returned to play some Marit Kart 8. People then began to slowly slip out as it was on a weeknight after all.

All in all I’d have to say it was another success!

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Sports

Amazing Night of Dodgeball Crazyness

I’ve been playing dodgeball for five years now, and this past week had some truly rare moments. Luckily were were able to defeat our opponents, Bad Mother Duckers in a most fun and exciting game.

The first amazing play for me would be when I won a match, knocking over a guy with my peg. Granted, clearly his momentum and lack of balance at the time were what sent him tumbling to the ground. Though the timing of my peg and his fall looked most dramatic. It looked like I literally knocked him back off is feet. My team erupted in excitement and his team laughed. It was pretty amazing to behold.

The second amazing play is when I was involved with the first double peg I had ever seen. Ron and I both squared up and ripped off throws at one another. Ron’s hit me first, but mine got him as well. We were both out, and both amazed at the play. It was pretty awesome, and again a scene out of a movie.

The most exciting play for me though was my game winner with the matches at 8-7. They had a much deeper rotation and we were beginning to tire. We didn’t want this thing to go to overtime.

In what was a pretty exciting match on both sides, eventually it was down to 2 on 2. Jared and I threw everything we had and them, and they were doing the same. It was pretty exciting, and you could feel the entire team reacting to each close call.

With around 10 seconds left in the match Jared got hit. So we were not down 2-1 with only 10 seconds remaining from a loss and going to overtime. I immediately, knew that I would have to somehow get a catch even though they would most likely not give me anything at all to catch. So I saw their guy wind up and I took a step back like I was going to retreat to the back wall, then sprinted forward upon his release.

I gambled that he would throw something short thinking I would be in the back. It played out perfectly and I caught a ball near the front court with just around 5 seconds remaining. My team exploded in excitement and I just waited for time to expire as we were now up 2-1.

An amazing victory and probably the most dramatic play I’ve had to date in the fine sport of dodgeball.

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Adventure

Cornfield of Terror

This installment of the Honey Badger Fun Day took us to R and J Farms for their Cornfield of Terror. We’ve done the corn maze in the past, but decided to be a bit more brave this time and enter the Cornfield of Terror.

We got tickets then waited in line for a little bit. The line wasn’t too bad, however had we arrived a few minutes later it would have been an entirely different story.

A tractor picks up a group and takes them away into a maze of corn. The driver was a good sport, and put on a solid act. While on the ride to the Cornfield of Terror and chainsaw wielding guy and Mike Myers paid us a visit. They both did a really good job. Myers smelled weakness and taunted a poor old lady for most of the ride.

Once we got off the hayride, we could enter the fun. Sadly a poor girl in front of us got a bit too scared and backed out at the last second. We did attempt to cheer her up and encourage her that there was nothing to fear, but alas I don’t think she ever went in.

Walking through the maze was a lot of fun. Again, I though the various actors did a pretty amazing job. My favorite was their taunts. They did a great job of taunting a “blondie” throughout most of the maze. It was quite funny to overhear.

The guys also did a great job of popping up out of nowhere, running by, and a scarecrow come to life was well done too. What really stood out to us was a green fox laser light tunnel thing. It was really awesome looking, wish I had a photo of it.

All in all it was a very fun time, and I was very impressed with the experience. It was a lot of fun and I’m glad I got to take it in this year.

Categories
Sports

32 Kickball Runs

Though earlier in the day it was looking like it might be a rainy day, it turned out to be probably the nicest kickball weather we’ve had all year. A lovely day for some kickball against our opponent the Star Spangled Bangers. They are a very athletic team and though we’ve had some close battles they tend to take the majority of the victories.

Well today would turned out to be an explosive offensive performance right from the start and continued throughout the entire game. What really made the difference for us were the numerous 2 out kicks. There were so many times where what would have been a small inning for us turned into a big inning with us continually finding the defensive holes kicking with 2 outs.

The kickball gods were truly with us yesterday as we just continually dropped kicks exactly where they couldn’t be played. It was quite a nice feeling and great to see everyone have a great moment or two against a quality opponent.

All in all we would wind up scoring 32 impressive runs and had a lot of fun doing so. It was relentless, and we managed to score several in each inning. Quite a fun time and I’m glad everyone had fun.

Categories
Adventure Sports

3rd Annual Honey Badger Holiday Party

While the official Honey Badger Holiday Party was a bit later this year, it was still quite an amazing bit of fun! Since it fell at the end of January, we worked in a Chinese New Year theme in some bits. The turn out was pretty amazing, with a steady 18-20 Badgers throughout the entire night.

I was a bit worried since I was hosting this year at my home, but all seemed to go well. I wasn’t sure if there’d be enough room, I still hadn’t purchased a couch, and frankly I’m not the most domesticated guy out there. Once again the team stepped up and chipped in just like during a game and brought folding chairs and countless yummy dishes to contribute to the great time.

We had a games challenge similar to last years, with numerous random activities.

  • chopsticks challenge
  • sticker stalker
  • Chinese Zodiac match
  • Mario Kart
  • push ups
  • drawing a picture
  • dart gun (sadly the gun broke?)
  • Wii Fit luge
  • sudoku

All the games with the exception of the dart gun game went extremely well. Sadly the dart gun broke early on, but not before the Shepherd put on a clinic in accuracy. It was kind of frightening to see, but impressive.

The majority of the guests stayed up until the end when Caitlin and Allen/Scott were crowned champions!

My only regret on the night is that I didn’t take photos! I was so busy keeping track of the events and keeping things going that I didn’t take the time to take any photos.

Overall I’d say it was another tremendous Badger success. I had a great deal of fun and will have to have the Badgers over more often!

Categories
Development Sports

QR Codes on Honey Badger Awards

QR codeA few years back at work QR codes were really becoming quite the fad. Every industry article seemed to herald them as the next big thing. They were supposed to be on everything by now.

Sadly we had a difficult time not only finding great success using qr codes, but also finding examples of others finding great success with them too.

Well, at the end of every SJSL season I hand out awards to my teammates. It’s a lot of fun to come up with nicknames, haikus, stats, etc. and share them with everyone at the end of the season.

This year one of our dodgeball opponents whom we played twice happened to of recorded our games. He was kind enough to post on Facebook, and I downloaded them all and began to sort and edit all those minutes into personal highlights for everyone on the team.

The really cool part was that I was able to upload a nice little clip to YouTube and then I created QR codes for each clip that were then included on their award. So simple, but also turned out to be a perfect use of the technology.

They can hand their award up with pride on their refrigerators and friends and take out their smartphone and get to view their personal dodgeball highlights right on their smartphones.

This turned out to be such a very simple and effective use of QR codes! I will have to do this again for future seasons.