Tuesday, June 7, 2022 (Court Day #504)

On Thursday this week, my wife and I are flying to Italy. I found an Italian group in Rome and I reached out on Facebook Messenger saying I was looking for a game on Saturday. I received a reply telling me to contact a certain phone number two days before my arrival to arrange a game. Easy enough! He said we’d be playing playing at newcountryclub.it. But I looked it up and figured it would probably cost 30 Euros to be driven there. (Too far to walk!)

Later, my wife determined it was actually at least 30-40 minutes of driving from our hotel in central Rome. And therefore probably very expensive by taxi. We’ll have to figure that out! Maybe one of the players lives in Rome … I messaged back offering some money for gas if I could get a ride. There’s a 9 hour difference in time zones, so communication might be a bit tricky. Fingers crossed!

Online

Someone named Troy Gabaldon posted this to one of the Facebook groups and it’s father funny:

Isn’t that the problem with most of us?

IFP Troubles

An email appeared in my inbox, a newsletter from the IFP (International Federation of Pickleball), talking about a mass resignation this spring by officers/board members of the organization with a statement of “no confidence”. I’d heard of a slew of countries abandoning the IFP, including the USA dropping out, but had no idea why and if it was actually true.

The newsletter link:
https://files.constantcontact.com/098685af801/2bfdebca-cac1-4522-bf31-fab067636dd2.pdf

This prompted an online search to see what this is all about. And I found this fabulous article at Sports Illustrated about the movers and shakers in the pickleball world:
https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/2022/05/24/pickleball-fastest-growing-sport-daily-cover

Workshop?

Last night, I messaged Kyle Yates inquiring if you’d be interested in coming out and doing a workshop here in California. And I chatted with him at a tournament back in 2018 he said that he spent part of his time back in Florida in Fort Myers his hometown, and part of the year in California where the weather isn’t quite as bad during the summer with regard to heat and humidity. Will Kyle write back? No telling, he’s a busy guy. He’s obviously quite famous in the pickleball world, still competing in pro tournaments at the highest level.

Healthy

The good news today was, while my wife still tested positive via a lab test for COVID, my daughter Charlotte tested negative. Charlotte, being very outgoing and very social, having COVID was quite a damper on her life. She’s very happy that she can now get out of the house and circulate with her friends again. She’s heading to a San Francisco Giants baseball game tomorrow to celebrate. I’ve continued to test negative and continue to be careful managing exposure.

Skypark!

I dropped off my brother Matt at my parents’ house after work then headed to Skypark in Scotts Valley, arriving at 6:48 p.m.

It was a fairly routine evening of play I played ok, not great, but ok. There was a game where every time I would make a mistake I would, all in fun, loudly and dramatically proclaim “shame!” (I was told this kind of droning chant appears in ‘The Game of Thrones’ TV series which I’ve never bothered to watch.) I’m sure I did this number of times within a five minute span, making me realize that I was not playing as well as I wanted to be in that game—making the dramatic pronouncement less “fun” and more depressingly “instructional”!

As we were packing to leave, TK asked me, Paul, and Matt what our rating was. Paul answered first saying that they played some tournaments in 3.0 but they will be entering their next tournament as 3.5. It’s all TK can I play in 3.5 in tournaments as a 4.0 on a very good day. Then I repeated this with more emphasis: “on a very good day”.

The rest of work pretty well, I didn’t feel the back of my hand at all during the session. However when I got home later it did hurt a little bit. I iced it along with my elbow as well.


Number of days on a court: 504
Number of total hours: 2,344.5

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