!Php754ojsam By Heidi Kim, TW Contributing Writer
Hope you all enjoyed the exciting tournament last week, Tribe! DC took a hiatus because I highly doubted anyone would be on this thread rather than the CC during the Roddick-Federer match.
Don't forget to keep sending along your news and photos. We're a bit short this week, so here's another photo from my recent Connecticut trip of the Mark Twain House. It's an amazingly designed and restored Gilded Age house, not to mention the literary connection (he lived here while he wrote Huck Finn). I highly recommend it if you're ever in Hartford.
In honor of Earth Month, I've come up with some eco-friendly tips for tennis fans:
1) This one comes from The Green Book: Play tennis during the daytime. Who doesn't love the wham as those floodlights come on at night? But they eat up energy.
2) Reuse your tennis balls. Slit them and they make a great squeaky for smaller dogs; bigger dogs can play fetch with them. I also found out while playing with my friend's small dog that squashing a slit tennis ball with your foot provides quite a good foot massage. No doubt there are also kiddie art projects to be made, walker feet to be padded... post your creative uses below.
3) Organic/sustainable tennis wear? Nike supposedly has a line of these, Nike Organics, but I've honestly never seen them even in a Niketown. Has anyone here? You can always go for Bono's Edun t-shirts, which are also fair trade. There's a lot of organic clothing out there these days.
4) As you search the web for all your tennis info (though of course so much can be found at tennis.com), use Blackle instead of Google. Blackle is powered by Google but puts it all on a black background. It can be a little hard on the eyes, but I set it as my homepage and use it for short searches.
5) Finally, there are of course a thousand travel tips that would help as tennis fans everywhere trek out to their tournaments: use public transport, trains rather than planes, etc. Maybe I'll run some of these next week.
Enjoy the other DC (Davis Cup) talk and go off-topic here!