Saturday, August 12, 2017

In my email inbox came a suggestion from YouTube: Disguise Your Attack.

This is another level of play. Beyond just getting the ball where you want it to go, and not just surprise but intentionally misleading your opponent as to where the ball is to be going. There isn’t all that much of this going in the games I’ve played.

 

Sunday, August 13, 2017 (Court Day #57)

I am so disappointed. I found out that two of my posts from last week disappeared. I have no idea where they went. It’s like painting a painting then having it stolen. WordPress, what have you done? I hope it doesn’t happen again. I’m tempted to jettison WordPress and go to something else but, I’ll stick with it for now.

Sunglasses

I went to grab my hat and sunglasses and noticed that the frames to my sunglasses were snapped. Bugger. Such a drag. They were nice since they stayed on my head well. I’m not sure how they got broken, but I am currently sharing my house with my wife and two other people for the summer—our kids. I think those sunglasses are discontinued too, so I can’t get more. My wife is my fashion designer. I’ll have to drag her back out again so she can pick out sunglasses that she won’t give me a hard time about . . . not that I’m going to pick out anything other than black simple sunglasses, but she always wants to make sure they are the right proportion for my face and all that. This is where my 1/4 German heritage comes out—I’m not too worried about such things as long as they are functional!

Derby

I arrived at Derby Park at 9:15. One game was underway. I warmed up with a man named Tom. Yes, another Tom. Not visor Tom and not Tom S. And a woman named Gail, whom I’d never met before.

About 10 a.m., a fellow named Rolando. He said he came from racquetball. Dave Allenbaugh spent some time showing him the ropes. A short time after, Eric and Rolando took on Ted and myself. Rolando did all right. A newbie, but promising.

Oleg and I played a game against Terri and Katie. I’d seen Katie once before. She arrived about the same time as Jeff—I went to doube-check the name but the posts that listed him were WordPress bug casualties—who I played with recently. As you might expect, Oleg and I won.

The last game was Grita and me against Oleg and Eric. They charged out to a commanding lead, but after I stopped making so many mistakes, Grita and I came back and won by two points.

A first today. I was hit three times by a ball. Eric hit me in the left wrist in one game and later, Eric hit me in the right thigh followed by Oleg hitting me in the right thigh about five minutes later! I guess I need even quicker reflexes!

Lunch and Touraments

Things wrapped up about 12:30 and Eric asked if I had time for a taco, so we headed to Mexican food. I told Eric about my continuing hopes to play in a tournament. He said he’d like to make a better showing against the “Brommer crowd” before he enters a tournament. I told him that a lot of those people are higher graded players, like someone had told me that Leslie is a 5.0 player. Karen Long is a 4.5 player and her husband Terry is 4.0. The shorter fellow—later I looked up the blog post and found his name is tom—said he’s  a 4.0. I said that Terry Long told Grita that he’d probably rate her as a 4.0 player. I told him that I believed that at this point, we’d be competitive in the 3.0 matches. He was still hesitant but said he’d be willing to start by visiting a tournament as a spectator. That’s a start.

Monday, August 14, 2017 (Off Day)

I just spent a bunch of time this evening rewriting a couple of entries—then copying, republishing, and deleting the chronologically later posts to keep the blog in the proper order. If you are reading these things in order from the beginning you’ll see that I had to rewrite posts from last week. To top things off, that republishing changes the date stamps on the blog entries so they are a number of days off from when they were truly first published. A little thing, but annoys me.

On my iPhone, in the WordPress app I found two old drafts—what are called “local versions”, that is, not uploaded to any server—of two already-published blog posts. Not wanting to overwrite the published versions already up on the blog with these old versions, I trashed these local files on my phone. Then deleted them from the trash for good measure. I didn’t want those things coming back.

To my horror, I went to my blog and discovered two posts were missing. It didn’t take long to put two and two together and figure out that when I deleted the obsolete locally saved versions, the WordPress app mistakenly deleted the published versions too! So idiotic of the program! That’s one serious bug! I have to be super careful now. I may not use the app now and just use the browser on my phone instead. I don’t want that happening again! Unbelievable.

But as my wife says, it’s just a pickleball blog. Right? It’s just hitting a plastic ball around with a paddle.

Which is what I did tonight in my garage. 10 minutes of practice. I spent a few minutes of it switching hands so I can hit extreme backhand dinks with my left hand instead. I didn’t do too badly with it. There’s hope for a functional shot with that someday.

Number of days on a court: 57
Number of total hours: 163