Thursday - July 10, 2014

late night tea

Gosh, I hope this isn’t becoming a regular column! Once again it’s 3am. And I’m up. Ok, I admit, it started out as one of those semi-conscious trips to the bathroom, but I was wide awake by the end. So now, a cuppa tea. PG Tips Strong, with a splash of organic half & half, which is fatty on the level of about medium cream from the typical grocery. And a slight spoonful of sugar.

Hey, this is neat. I put new filters in our Whirlpool under the counter 3 stage water filter here in the kitchen sink. We get slightly soft water here, and it’s actually pretty good. No problems at all drinking it straight from the tap, and you can boil away gallons of it in the kettle with hardly any scale. So when I run that water through the filters, and the filters are quite fresh, and I boil that water in a mug in the microwave ... it just sits there. No bubbles, no roiling, no apparent boiling. Maybe some steam? I didn’t notice. Then when I add a bit of sugar, or dip in the tea bag, it’s like it effervesces. Slightly. Ssshsshssh; a quick burst of micro tiny bubbles. Wiki says this is superheating; I’m using a very clean mug with a high gloss surface, and settled water with just about no dissolved gases or impurities in it. Wiki calls them “nucleation sites”, and I guess they’re little bits in a fluid around which boiling, or a disturbance in fluid tension, occurs. Hmmph, at 3:20am I’m thinking of them as condensation nuclei, the bits of floating dirt in the upper air that water vapor forms clouds around and then eventually rain. Betcha it’s a very similar process. link.

Right, so we got squashed at bowling league tonight. M was absent, nobody knows why. So we found a sub, some guy with a really high average. And he bowled ... a really crappy game (80 under), a freakin’ fantastic game (69 over for a 289), and a lame game (40 under). Since our efforts were only modest tonight at best, and the other team was sober and rolling well, .... we got one game out of 3. 2 points out of 7. Hey, that’s how it goes sometimes.

Looks like I’m doing my almost annual routine of reinventing how to bowl. FINALLY I’m opening up my back swing, trying not to muscle the ball, AND feeling it on my fingers for once as I come up under and behind, past my left ankle thumb loose do just a little wrist roll to the left elbow straight till arm at eight now snap it up and answer the phone. And the ball is revving up quite well and hooking, but I now have to adjust my approach considerably. I have to either choose to go Down and In and go right 5 boards and move my target right, or try for Out and Back and stand much further to the left so that I can throw out over the 3 arrow, but I don’t know if I need to throw fast or not. Which means a higher or lower push away and a bigger or smaller swing. I want to stop muscling the ball completely, and I seem not to have a problem adjusting my timing to match up with the changed swing times. Which is cool. Now I just have to learn where my arm is going to throw the ball. So until then ... as usual ... my scores are going to suffer. Wish somebody had told me this “feel it off your fingers” shizz years ago ... because I’m a total oblivion, and this is what bowling feels like naturally to almost everyone else automatically. Really? I never even noticed it. The ball just seems to fall off my hand. No finger snap at all unless I force it. And I have. Which is why I was muscling the ball. Funny, it comes free with a bigger back swing and a bigger swing. But I wasn’t doing that, because FOREVER the guys who work at the place have been advising me SLOW DOWN DREW. But without detail. Seriously, WTF does that really mean? Slow my swing? Slow my feet? Take a longer time between the start of the push away and the start of my first step? YOU NEED TO ADJUST YOUR TIMING. Again, without much detail of any kind, other than to know that my swing arm should go past my offside foot on the release before that foot stops sliding, and that the offside leg needs to be bent some in a kind-of lunge, with my torso leaning forward chin out over the knee but shoulders still parallel to the foul line (for a straight approach), I don’t know from faster or slower.

What I need is to go practice. By myself. Without people around who have a preconceived notion of how I should look while bowling. So I can just try stuff and hopefully find what works. Because I KNOW what I really want. I really want to throw the big hook just like the big boys do, BUT I want to throw it not just accurately but only big enough to give me the most possible margin. There has to be a magic balance spot between rev, ball speed, ball and lane dynamics, and shot line such that it will overcome minor variations in my throw and my precision. I want to find the big groove. Maybe not the ultimate giant out-to-the-zero-board groove, but one with enough late belly in it to look like the damn ball is actually turning the corner. Skid flip. I’ve found all the other ones to the inside, and they just aren’t as much fun. Even though I’ve thrown many super scoring games with them. Less hook, less boom, less fun. I want to break pins, from the side.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/10/2014 at 02:05 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
• Comments (2) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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