I'm pretty down right now.  I've gotten back into refereeing soccer recently which is something I think is a lot of fun.  I've done about 10 games since getting back into it after not being a referee since high school.  Well it's been going well and a lot of fun.  I like getting paid to excercise.  But today I did a slightly harder game than I'm used to.  It was a disaster.  They were boys who were freshman in high school. The first half went ok, but the second half quickly went south.  I messed up some calls.  I wasn't being quick with signals.  I wasn't doing that great.  Well the sidelines noticed and got pretty mad.  Well and then a disaster happened.  With 5 seconds left in the game a player on offense is fouled in the penalty box.  I thought at first it was a normal foul and whistled it dead and was going to award a penalty kick.  But then I noticed he was bleeding.  I called the couch over and the player was crying in pain on the ground.  Well that's when things got bad.  Both sidelines were already rather roudy, but this set it off.  I ended the game without awarding a penalty kick, which I think is against league rules, but due to a time crunch my AR recommended that I end it.  Well this caused the whole team to get mad at me and my referee crew.  They were going at us hard.  Pretty much us referee crew had to run away so that the whole sideline didn't tackle us to the ground.  I know I didn't call a very good game, but it turned into a disaster.  I had never lost control of a game like that.  So I left and went to the referee headquarters.  An ambulence shortly shows up and the kid who was fouled was strapped to a stretcher and loaded into the ambulance with paramedics and firemen.  It took them half an hour to get that done.  The referee crew ran away from the game so I did not award a penalty kick like I should have.  One thing that also made situations different were that one of my Assistant Referees is actually a league assignor and referee mentor.  So overall, it was a disaster.  Both sidelines were fed up.  I got shouted "you need to go back to referee school" many times and got some explitives thrown at me (which are things that I don't care about at all) but worst of all, a kid probably broke his arm if not worse.  If I had the game under tighter control, it might not have happened.  Ugh, that didn't go well. 

In other news, work has been crazy.  I was at work until 8:30 on monday, 3:30am on wednesday, and 4am on friday.  It has been ridiculous.  I've been working on implementing new software to test out hydraulics and it did not go well at first.  We were having a lot of problems with the new tests and since hydraulics are dangerous when they fail, most of the tests are done at night.  It's been quite difficult.  I've adjusted into a 4am bedtime noon wakeup schedule.  Fortunately we did pass the tests on friday morning, so I won't be working nights anymore for a while.  Work has been crazy with hours, but overall it's good.  I love my job. 

My parents are on a round-the-world trip where they are going to all sorts of exotic places and looking at the origination of man.  They are in Mongolia today and i think are headed to Cambodia next.  It's organized by National Geographic.  They are flying around on a chartered 757 to take them to all these places.  It's an amazing trip.  I hope to do something like that one day, but I'll have to ref a lot of soccer games and work quite a bit of OT to pay for that. 

Cheers!

Javid