A Scattered Brain

After a long day of calls, I had to take a late lunch and decided to get some practice in after Wednesday night’s poor performance.  The scores were as follows: 192, 182, 236, 259, 249.  The first two games were warming up and trying to put into practice one very valuable piece of information someone gave me on Wednesday… more on that later.

The last three games, I had a total of 1 open frame and if those would have counted, would have given me a 744 series (my first in a three game set of any kind).  So, what was this piece of very valuable information that helped today and hopefully can in the future?  I was told to “throw my second ball first”.  Apparently, to no real knowledge of mine until pointed out, I was trying too hard on my first ball, but had a nice relaxed swing and release on any spare ball.  So, today, instead of trying to guide or muscle my first throw, I just picked my target and went.  I didn’t try to add extra speed or revolutions.  The result; more consistent throws that hit harder.

Now, I know this was one practice session on one particular day and previous results don’t predict future outcomes; but if I can try to remember what I did (or really didn’t do) today, hopefully that can translate to better scores when it does count.

Have a great weekend!

So, this isn’t a great start to the revival of the bowling blog.  Last night we lost all 7 points (3 games and total pins) to our opponents, who were great fun to bowl with so that’s a consoloation.  The nearly one month layoff really didn’t help my scores:

Ouch, a 2 pin drop in average for one week.  Not good.  I was using a new ball, but that wasn’t the issue entirely.  I kept trying to hard.  I have a tendency to try to guide the ball which ends up taking away any power and drive.  When I start to do that and notice, I tend to over correct and throw the ball hard.  Usually I can make smaller adjustments and work out ok, but last night kept going from one extreme to another.

My spares really did me in.  Other than the times I had splits, I missed 2 easy spares in the first game, 4 in the second, and 1 in the 3rd.  That’s a total of 7 missed easy spares in 20 opportunities.  If I made those, that adds approximately 70 pins to my series and gets me to my average.  I know what I need to really practice on: smooth arm swing letting the ball do the work and spares.

I hope you all have a good rest of the week and weekend!

Greetings to all of my friends and family and Happy New Year.

I’ve never really been big into resolutions since most I’m sure are broken each year.  But for some reason, I feel like setting some this year.  More importantly, to help hold myself accountable, I want to make mine public.

Here they are in no particular order of importance:

• Daily Devotional – Most days this past year, I would read “Our Daily Bread” online.  I want to make that more of an automatic habit each day.
• Continue to lose weight.  My all time high was 263 lbs about 3 years ago.  Since then, through moderation, and don’t laugh, bowling, I’ve dropped about 55 pounds to around 208.  I would like to continue this trend even though it may start getting tougher here soon.  If I could be around 190-195 by next year, I’d be ecstatic.  I will settle with going under the 200 mark since I can’t remember when.
• Bowling Blog.  I hope to start it back up after next Wednesday’s night.  While I’ve kept track of scores, I’ve not done much reflecting and that always helps to improve.

Those are the three things I want to work on most this year.  Hopefully I’ll post more regularly too, and the bowling posts should help out with that.

I hope everyone has a healthy and happy New Year.

Greetings to you all.  I know it has been a long time since I’ve posted and I apologize for that.  There are many reasons for the lack of posting, but most of them come back to just being too lazy to write about something in a timely manner.  I had lots of great comments about the election season, the bail outs, sports, and life in general, but they’ve all stayed up in my head.

I probably won’t post again this year, but wanted to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and my New Year’s Resolution will be to write on a regular basis.  Even if that means just bringing back my bowling summaries. 🙂  Take care and be safe and we’ll see you next year!

We are just one day away from the 2008 Beijing Olympics and I can’t wait anymore! I love the Olympics and always have. For me, the first week of the Summer Games are the best because that is when all of the swimming events take place. I am caught up in not only the events themselves but the side stories. Michael Phelps going for 8 Gold medals, Dara Torres competing at 41 years old; they are all so compelling. I will DVR every bit of content I can and will probably watch a bunch on the web as well. I will keep track of the medal count constantly hoping that the United States is always in first. I get almost as excited about the Olympics as I do the NCAA Tournament.

However, there are a couple of aspects of the Olympics that I feel are lacking and need change. The first; the IOC should have never chosen China to host. For all of the geopolitical reasons that exist, choosing China was irresponsible and arrogant by the IOC. There was a time I felt that the U.S. should protest and not send a team to China and I agree that we were right to not send a team to Moscow in 1980. However, I do understand that the Olympics are supposed to be about athletic competition, not the policies or politics of the host nation and the athletes should not have to suffer to serve a political end. That is part of why China should not be the host. When it is known long before hand that a country will be controversial for significant reason, that country should not be in the running for an Olympic bid. It isn’t like this is a new concern, people have been protesting this choice since it was made. So, while politics shouldn’t have an effect on the athletes, it absolutely must play a role in selecting the host and the IOC should be ashamed of considering China for the games and I believe they did so partly just to cause the controversy in the U.S. especially.

The second aspect covers all Olympic Games and that is the allowed use of professional athletes in the games. The primary reason for allowing professionals was understandable; to counter act the USSR and Eastern European Bloc’s use of ‘professional’ amateur athletes. The world knew that while they weren’t part of professional clubs, team athletes from those countries were by all accounts professionals. So, 20 years too late, the IOC allowed professionals for all events. Of course, that started in 1992… after the fall of the Berlin Wall… at which point, the need to allow professionals was greatly diminished.

This is another area where I have changed my mind over the years. I agreed with the use of pros for the primary reason that the Olympics should showcase the best athletes regardless of pro/amateur status. However, now I take the stance that pros are paid already to perform in their profession and are showcased already through the countless TV networks and internet. If you want to see someone play, you have ample opportunity to. However, rising stars and those currently not paid directly for their competition should get this chance to show off in front of the world. It was easy to allow professionals before, it should be easy to go back to amateur competition.

Despite some flaws, I love the Olympics, the competition, and the side stories. I think NBC does a great job mostly of presenting the Games (except for that nasty time delay issue that is hard to avoid) and I will look forward greatly to the next 2 weeks!

Second verse, same as the first?

Well, not exactly, but close enough.  I’ve decided that Houston doesn’t like me.  Yesterday, I had another client in Houston that I had to fly out to meet with.  I scheduled the same flights as before so that I could do all of my travel in one day.  Last time, if you recall, my flight was stranded mid-air and we were diverted to Austin and I missed my meeting and flew straight home as soon as I finally landed in Houston.  This experience wasn’t quite that bad, but it wasn’t good either.

The flight from Vegas to Houston was uneventful and we even arrived a little early.  Great.  I was able to meet up with my co-worker and we got to the meeting and the meeting went well.  Great.  Afterward, got to have Chick-Fil-A to eat.  AWESOME!!! Highlight of the day!  Got to the airport to fly home… and this is where the story unravels once again.

My plane was supposed to leave around 6:44 pm CDT and arrive in Vegas at 7:52 PDT.  I would have gotten home before 9:00 easily and still had some time to relax before bed.  Around 6:30, we hadn’t boarded yet and they finally changed the departure time from 6:44 to 7:16.   Not a big deal, that happens.  We board the plane and after everyone is on and they’ve closed the door, we get an announcement.  “Thank you for flying with us, we’ll be at the gate here for 30 minutes or so.”  Upsetting but whatever.  30 minutes pass by and the voice comes over, (using valley girl paraphrasing from our captain) “Umm, yeah, like there are 4 planes behind us blocking us in so, like, we’ll be another 30 minutes here.  Y’all can use your cell phones if you want to call anyone… oh and by the way, once we pull from the gate, we’ll taxi for about another hour before we take off, there were like, awesome storms that came through.  Totally cool, huh?”

About 45 minutes later we push from the gate and get the message (no paraphrasing). “Greetings from the flight deck, we’ve pushed from the gate.  You can probably feel us moving now.  It’ll still be about an hour before we take off as there are a lot of flights ahead of us due to the storm that passed by.”  That’s great, come on the speaker just AFTER we start moving to tell us we’re moving.  Our captain was a real winner, I think she liked the sound of her voice on the PA.

Now we’re on taxi and again the captain comes online and says, “If you’re on the left side of the plane you can probably see the really long line of planes we’re behind and that magnificent storm in the distance.”  I don’t care.  We’re on the taxi with the engines off, it doesn’t really matter how many planes are ahead of us.

30 minutes later, still on the taxi, the captain graces us with her presence again, “I’ve been asked to move the plane up so I’m going to start the engines and move.”  Did we really need to hear that?  Come on.  Around this time, almost 2 hours of sitting on the plane, they come around and offer a glass of water.  Great customer service.  Couldn’t they have at least run some programming on the TV’s during this wait; or even better not board the darn plane until we could have pushed away.  Continental’s customer service leaves much to be desired from my last two experiences.  It’s one thing to have delays, but the way the staff handles them could make things much more bearable.  Continental gets a D for service.

40 minutes later we’re taking off and I seriously hear clapping behind me.  What the ??? You’re clapping because we’re taking off 2 and a half hours late?  What an accomplishment!  As we’re just getting airborne, the flight attendant comes on and says, “Thanks for handling the short delay, we appreciate your business.”  Short delay, as if to say it could have been worse; which yes, it could have, but don’t try to placate me by pointing that out.  We took off around the time I should have been landing in Vegas.

The flight was uneventful from that point and I got home around 11:00.  Missed the entire Celtics game and any reasonable time with Kylah before bed.  Houston just doesn’t like me apparently.

I’m sure that when the time comes to fly again to Houston, I’ll be able to complete a saga.  Stay tuned!

So now comes the final chapter in our house hunting adventure… we finally moved in yesterday.  There were issues with worry all the way up until last Friday when things finally recorded.  Title was still working on some money issues due to a rate lock extension and the seller had forgotten to sign some documents but those all got worked out in the nick of time.

Originally, our plan was to rent a truck and move ourselves.  We had thought about hiring movers but decided against it.  Last week we changed our mind and did hire some movers… boy was that the smart thing.  Without them there is no chance we would have gotten everything over in one day.  No chance.

Even with the movers, Kylah and I were busy moving smaller stuff and keeping things organized.  Connor and Grandpa spent the day together hanging out at the houses.  Grandpa was amazing to keep company with Connor and Connor was just the bestest little boy in the world.  He took one nap in his stroller after he had been up for 5 hours and didn’t complain at all.  His second nap was in the new house just as soon as we got the crib and even though it was a new house and totally new environment, he went down like a champ!  I couldn’t have been any prouder.

There are still some outstanding issues.  We are getting our RO system serviced and Cable phone installed today.  We will need to get garage door openers and a mail key.  With bank repos, many of those types of items get lost in the shuffle and it is up to the new owners to correct.  Something we’ll take care of soon but at least we are all moved in.

Overall, we are over a major hump and that is very satisfying.  The new house already seems to fit us well and I’m excited to be there for many years to come.

So after the last two months of looking, submitting offers, waiting on very slow banks, and a lot of headache and frustration; we finally signed our paperwork yesterday afternoon.  We still have to wait a bit for (you guessed it) the bank to sign their part but it looks to be a done deal.

Our original plan had us moving today but that can’t happen so now we’ll look to move near the beginning of June.  Hopefully nothing more will hold this up.  Once we move we can more aggressively market our current house for rent or sale.

I’ll be so glad when this is all over.  I really thought the buying process would have been easier this time than last.  It wasn’t… different headaches, but still headaches one after another.

Greetings all.  Major things have started going with the new house.  The bank finally signed documents and we are in escrow.  All that is left in the air is how fast we can close and fixing one (hopefully minor) plumbing issue with the kitchen sink and hot water.  We hope to have that resolved today and all can continue.

Our closing date isn’t known yet, but should be no later than May 19th.  I’d like to close any time next week if title and loan documents can be ready by then.  Then we can quickly transfer utilities, buy appliances and move in!!  Once we move in, we’ll thoroughly clean our current house and touch up paint here and there.  If we can be fully moved before a business trip I have at the end of May, I’ll be ecstatic!  Things are finally starting to come along which is great.

Personal Note to the J: My excitement is back and you can be excited to look for your own house once again. 🙂

I went through a McDonald’s drive through for breakfast yesterday and I saw a very intriguing sign for a new sandwich: the Southern Style Chicken Sandwich.  On first glance it looks strikingly similar to my beloved Chick-Fil-A.  I looked it up and all of the press information confirmed my suspicion that this sandwich was created to directly compete with CFA.  I decided that we would come back here later for dinner to try it.  I knew it could never replace CFA, but if it was at least close enough to substitute from time to time I’d be happy.

I told my wife about it and she agreed we could go there for dinner.  Pulled up to the drive through and ordered 4 sandwiches, 2 with pickle (for her), and 2 without (for me).  They told us it would take about 6 minutes to cook up (must not be a big seller if they cook it to order).  We pull around to the parking lot and about 10 minutes later our food comes out.  Now for the taste test and results.

First, my wife loved it.  She thought it was a terrific sandwich and close to the original and for her would certainly work as a substitute.  For me, not nearly close enough.  Even though the sandwich has no pickles, they use dill juice as part of their seasoning because the whole sandwich had strong dill flavor to me.  I think this is probably because McD’s uses lower quality pickles and wanted to supplement that flavor.  Ok, if you like the pickle flavor.  Beyond the dill, the breading wasn’t nearly the fullness that CFA provides and fairly plain.  The chicken itself was tender white meat and did compare to CFA.

So, my wait for a Chick-Fil-A to come to Vegas will still be met without any substitutes; although I’m truly happy that it will work for my wife and I can find other things at McD’s if she is ever craving a Southern Style Chicken Sandwich.