Wednesday - July 09, 2008

Summer Bowling League

Huh? Well, you see, marriage is a never ending act of compromise. Which means you do what she wants, always. Right now my wife’s work schedule is really messed up and highly dynamic. Which means sometimes she doesn’t even know on Monday what hours she’s working on Tuesday. It’s very stressful. They actually do have a schedule, but so much changes so often that it’s hardly worth it.

We bowl on Tuesday nights, and her schedule has her working every other Tuesday night. Last night was supposed to be one of the nights she had to work, so she went to the alley this weekend and pre-bowled. I went with her and pre-bowled too, not that I needed to, but that’s how it goes sometimes. I get to share in her suffering. So we both pre-bowled, and turned in some pretty decent scores. Her series was at least 30 pins over average, and mine was more than 100 pins over average. Looking good!

Monday comes along and she finds out she will have Tuesday night off. “Let’s go bowling then.” Um, honey, we pre-bowled already. “But we’re playing an easy team. Why not use the scores next week, because I might have to work, and besides, next week we’re playing the really good team and we’ll need those scores.” But, but, but ... and so we went.

The lady at the alley was so thrilled to see us. “What the !#$% are you doing here? You pre-bowled!” Naturally it was up to me to explain things. Great. And so we crossed off our great pre-bowling scores, saving them for next week, and proceeded to bowl like total shit. And lost all 3 games. Had we used our pre-bowl scores our team would have won at least 2 of them. So this pretty much kills our chances of getting in the top positions; our wins over the past couple weeks had floated us all the way up to 3rd and we were only 3 points out of 1st. Now we’ll sink down at least as far as 5th. And it’s our fault, totally.

Sure, we can blame some of it on life conditions. She used the drive up there as a bitch session about her job, and got herself all worked up and pissed off before we even got there. That was a fun trip, oh boy. I had very little sleep the night before, and I hadn’t even eaten before we went, so I was a no energy lump. And our little summer league is small, and the only league scheduled for that time slot, so the alley tries to save a bit of money and doesn’t run the air conditioning for the first two hours we’re playing. Great. So I’m sweating my socks off as well. Yup, these are all excuses, and there are really no excuses at league. You have to put everything else in a box and ignore it, and focus on the job at hand. You can’t go getting annoyed at other people, you really have to fight hard at getting upset with yourself when things don’t go right, etc. It’s a game after all. Sure, it’s competition and you want to do your best and it sucks when you blow it, but that’s life. Now get over it, right now, and bowl better the next frame.

I plan on getting up there to practice at least once this week. Without her. And while I’m there, I’m going to talk to the alley owner and see if I can’t get him to adopt this set of house rules for pre-bowling. What we did last night was wrong, and it should not have been allowed. Ok, we paid the price for it already, but I think the pre-bowling idea needs some clarification, so that in the future nobody can get away with it:



HOUSE RULES FOR LEAGUE PRE-BOWLING

If your bowling league allows individual pre-bowling:

• The score sheet must be filled out properly and include the date that this pre-bowling is for use on.  If you pre-bowl on October 2nd because you can’t make it to league on October 6th, you put October 6th in as the date on the form.


• Score sheets without a For Use On date will not be accepted. You can not keep a generic pre-bowling score on hand “just in case”.


• Once you elect to pre-bowl for a certain date and have started your pre-bowling, that’s it. The scores that you pre-bowl are the scores that will be used on the date you enter on the score sheet. You can not bowl for score at league on that date. If an actual personal emergency occurs while you are pre-bowling and you have to leave, please try to come back and complete your pre-bowling before league night. If you can not, then your pre-bowling scores will reflect that you had to leave, and absentee scores will be used for the missing and incomplete games.


• There are no do-overs or mulligans. You do not get to pre-bowl multiple times for a given date and submit your best score. You get one go at it, just like when you are at league.


• Because lane conditions might be different when you pre-bowl compared to those at league, no awards will be given for any pre-bowling scores.


• Your league may not allow pre-bowling for position rounds and playoff rounds. Check your bylaws.

Furthermore, although it might be a little ex-post facto, I would throw out the pre-bowling scores we did an end run around last night. Screw us. And maybe next time, just maybe, she’ll listen to me. Ha!

Posted by Drew458     on 07/09/2008 at 12:16 PM   
Filed Under: • Daily Life •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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