Saturday, October 26, 2019 (Court Day #317)
73rd day playing lefty. (Tennis elbow.)
My plan last night was to get to Skypark by 8:30 a.m., figuring there’d be at least some people there early since it would be hot today. As it was, I got there just before 9. Parking was easy, there were a number of spots open. Mark Dettle was in the process of pulling net bags out of the storage bin. I fished my Scotts Valley punch card out of my wallet and made my first punch out of seven spots on the card. I’d bought it—boy, maybe even two years ago. This was only my second time ever playing on a Saturday there. I bought the punch card on my first visit. I carried a net bag onto the courts then Richard and I set one up. I hadn’t seen Richard in months. (He’s the 60-something man with a beard.) He hasn’t been coming to Derby.
Richard and I warmed up on a court with Stuart and Kent. Soon we were in a game against them. They clobbered us 11-2 or something about that. I was popping up too many shots left-handed. Richard played well, better than I ever remember him playing. Once they got to 11, Stuart called “4-2-1.” Initially, I was confused, but then I figured out that he was enjoying the game and didn’t want to give up the court yet. The courts were already full but it wasn’t clear if there were enough waiting players for a new game or not. So, the game “continued”. Perhaps Stuart should have taken the win, since Richard and I went on to solidly win that next game!
Maybe it was the draw, but I’ve been finding the competition at Skypark better than that at a Derby. That’s a switch.
I got to play a game with Kent as my partner. That was fun. Kent is a pleasure to play with. And while he’s over 70, but plays like he’s 10 years younger. I played pretty well. A few wild shots—like the overhead slam that went flying parallel to the ground out the left side of the court—but solid overall.
Binh and I played a game against Janet and Charles. I love playing against Charles, he’s getting better and better. He’s a very good challenge now. Recently, I overheard someone asking him about being a 4.5 rated tennis player. He shrugged it off saying something about that being within the confines of Santa Cruz competition. Janet and Charles beat Binh and me. I made too many mistakes. Of course, Binh made some too, but I deserve credit for the bulk of them.
Binh and Janet played three games against Larry and me. Larry and I lost by a decent margin the first game, won the second, and lost the third in a close game. Janet was playing the best I’d ever seen her play. Those were the last games of the day.
I was done at 12:10. Off to home, then work.
I missed some serves today. I also had some inexplicable shots. Two miscalculated ATP failures—the balls didn’t bounce wide enough and I hit the post. But I’m getting better overall. I was able to dig out some slams at my feet. There were some great rallies in those last three games. Like 15-20 hit points. They were fun.
Hosting Woes
This afternoon, my pickleballjourney.com website was unavailable and wasn’t loading. A few days ago Jetpack, a plugin for WordPress was having some “issues” of hogging the server CPU. And the hosting company temporarily disabled access to my site. I installed a server cache plugin suggested by the company hosting my site and also turned on the Jetpack offsite caching feature to help rectify it.
Today, I went to upload an image and the app wasn’t working, Well, it wasn’t the app, my site was disabled again. Annoying! Not long after, it was up again and I got in and disabled Jetpack altogether. Jetpack enabled a email subscription feature that I want. I’ll have to figure out another way.
I was bagpiping at an event this evening at the request of a friend—it went very well—but by the time I got home and settled in, PG&E turned off the electricity at our house as a fire safety precaution. So no internet access and no working on the website. Also annoying! Hopefully, it’s not off all day tomorrow!
Number of days on a court: 317
Number of total hours: 886.5
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