Have Hockey Stick, Will Travel
Deborah Kelly's career as a field hockey player began when she was a majorette in the 8th grade band. "I whacked the girl next to me with the baton, and the hockey coach came up to me and said, 'Maybe you should start playing field hockey,'" says Kelly, 43, a senior consultant at Clarkston Potomac. She's been playing ever since.
After she graduated from high school, Kelly and about five other classmates started a club called Norlanco, which stands for Northern Lancaster County in Pennsylvania.
While they play against coed teams, Norlanco is an all-female team on purpose. "We don't have any men on our team, and we never will," says Kelly, chuckling. "I don't like sharing the ball, and most men are ball-hoggers. We don't need them!"
She continued to play with her team even after her employer, Warner Lambert, transferred her to New Jersey. Now she has a two-hour ride to her games. Once there, she'll play two or three 60-minute games. "I'm very stiff on the drive home," says Kelly, who runs an average of 20 miles a week to keep in shape.
Because the United States Field Hockey Association's national tournament is held over the four-day Thanksgiving weekend, Kelly hasn't had a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving Day in 20 years. "I do miss turkey. It's one of my favorite meals!" she says.
Under the Sea
Kevin P. O'Brien's favorite place on Earth is in the Caribbean about 100 feet below sea level. To be more precise, O'Brien's paradise is located off an island in the Netherlands Antilles called Bonaire.
"The coral is just beautiful, and there's lots of marine life," says O'Brien, 47, a senior manager at Ernst & Young's Cleveland office.
O'Brien has been diving since his college days. Over the years, as he traveled to different parts of the world, he refined his diving skills and worked his way up through the ranks to instructor. "The first time you get arm's length from a five-foot barracuda or a 10-foot reef shark, it's pretty neat," says O'Brien, who now holds an advanced instructor rating called PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer.
He will teach you how to do all kinds of diving — wreck diving, night diving, deep diving, underwater photography diving, rescue diving.
And he knows all the hot spots. If the goal is to see big critters like whale sharks or large mantas, go to Honduras, O'Brien says. If it's sharks you want to dive with, then the Bahamas should be your destination. The Cayman Islands is the place to visit if you'd like to see barracudas, stingrays, or a few good wrecks.
Not too surprisingly, when he retires, he knows exactly where he's headed — someplace warm and sunny, with lots of water.
It's in the Cards
If a card has a magnetic strip on its back, it is most likely in Brad Mack's combination-locked box. Mack, an ERM program director at iXL, collects all sorts of cards — credit cards, smart cards, prepaid phone service cards, royalty cards, hotel key cards, and his old driver's licenses.
"If I were to activate them, I would have a million dollars worth of credit," says Mack, the owner of 50 gold credit cards. "If anyone were to steal them I'd be in big trouble."
Any time a company sends him a card in the mail, it goes in the box. Cards from AAA, MCI, Lipton Tea Co., the Weather Channel — it's all in there. He started his collection a decade ago. Now the cards total 400. Except for his frequency cards, most of his cards are unemployed. Mack, who loves smart cards, will actually drive to a company and ask for a card.
Once in a while, he and his 4-year-old and 11-year-old daughters take them out of the box, build a matrix, and pick out the best- looking ones. "You'd be surprised at how creative they get," he says. His personal favorite? The purple one from the Weather Channel. "It has a lightning bolt coming out of a cloud. It's really good-looking."
He knows only one other person who has a similar collection — conveniently, a coworker at iXL. Sometimes, they'll trade.
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