Sunday, March 24, 2019 (Court Day #249)
I arrived at Derby Park at 8:50. I was the first one there—Wayne didn’t beat to the courts me, for a change! It would be a beautiful day with perfect pickleball weather. Sunny and warm enough to be very comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt but cool enough not to get sweaty easily.
The two City of Santa Cruz nets were back. Cal must have returned them after he took them last week.
Attendance topped out at about 32 people today. We had a couple visitors from Montana, a man and an Asian woman named Lynn. I didn’t have much interaction with them, but they seemed very nice when I had them sign the waiver.
James, the excellent player, made an appearance today and I got to play a game with him. James and Gary versus Binh and me. Binh and I both got nailed with the ball by James. I got hit in the hand twice and Binh got one right in the chest. I think it ended 11-7 with us losing. James keeps you on your toes!
Carl hamming it up for the camera as Gary sits and James leans. Wayne in blue and Ted B. in red can be seen at the far left.
My tennis elbow has taken a small turn for the worse this past week. As has my right ankle, it’s not constantly painful, but at certain angles or rotations, it’ll hurt.
A man, whom I don’t play with much, when he was leaving said, ”Oh. You’re playing left handed—I did remember you being better.” He had been puzzled why I wasn’t as good of a player has he recalled. Yeah, left handed.
Just when I was about to leave, the visitor from Montana overheard me mentioning my tennis elbow and how I was playing left handed, he voiced approval and a big “attaboy” grin.
It was almost 1 p.m. I left Stewart in charge, stowing away all that I could in the club storage bins. Cal was teaching on one court using a City net and the Montana visitors were playing at the other City net against two locals. A grandmother and her daughter came to play tennis with two little kids, so we moved one net over to clear a tennis court and accommodate them. They were very patient and nice.
Today was a definite step backward on my serving. While I made most of them, I missed maybe 20-30%. Not good.
As I was winding down in bed, YouTube suggested this video uploaded two days ago:
This new website looks really good. A new modern features-rich interface for PickleballTournaments.com is to be rolled out in May. Right now, the current site looks like it was coded 20 years ago by someone with no design sense and no background or training in “user experience”. It’s ugly, clunky, and inefficient. It looks like the websites that I helped construct in the late 1990s when HTML was still a new thing and CSS was yet to come. Of course, it may be next year before I’ll be able to enter a tournament, so for now the update is irrelevant for me. Melody was asking today if was in any upcoming tournaments. Ha! No way.
Monday, March 25, 2019 (No Play)
This may seem a bit weird to talk about cutting toenails. But this morning, I cut the toenails on my right foot. No biggie. Normal. But when it was time for my left foot, I simply moved the clippers to my left hand and started cutting. My immediate thought was, “Woah. That’s an ambidextrous moment!” The playing left handed has flowed over into other aspects of my life. Crazy.
Rain is expected Wednesday, but I have a scheduled meeting with a client that morning, so rain is A-ok with me that day.
Tonight, I saw that Joe Baker released a new pickleball video today. I haven’t seen a bad one from him yet. This one is a good one too.
Number of days on a court: 249
Number of total hours: 685
To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.
Leave a Reply