7 posts tagged “curling”
A few days ago I had a birthday, which I enjoyed. Birthday's for me have been kind of low key for many years now, but they don't make me sad or anything like that. Unrelated to the birthday, this week has been a stressful one at work with many things seeming to unravel. I almost started today feeling very overwhelmed and out of control, but somehow I switched from that point of view to being upbeat about solving problems and getting things taken care of. How very positive of me.
This past weekend was the regional playdowns for what is known as the Club Nationals for curling. The Detroit Curling Club is in the Great Lakes Curling Associate and the GLCA regional playdowns were held at that very same club. Myself and three other gentlemen entered the competition ranked 7 out of 7 and then 6 out of 6 after one team dropped out. Our first match was against the top ranked team out of Midland, and we pulled out a win. Following that we took on one of the best teams from Detroit and also managed to hang on to the lead, although it pretty much came down to the very end. Those two matches were on Friday, and then bright and early Saturday morning we played a team out of Columbus. We got off to an incredibly bad start and were down 8 to 1 by mid-game. Following the 5th end break we managed to pull together a fast and furious rally. We brought it to within 3 points coming home in the 10th end with the hammer and took those desperately needed 3 forcing an 11th end. The 11th end was a bit messy, but with many rocks in play and out in front of the house, the last shot came down to a tough in-off for our opponents and with that miss we kept our undefeated status. The next came of Saturday did not work out so well and we were blown-out by the Detroit team that would eventually take first place and go on to the national competition in St. Paul. Our very last game was also a defeat, but again we pushed it to an extra end. Our final 3 and 2 record put us as the runner-up in the competition and was quite a delightful outcome.
I'm not sure what will happen to our team in the future, but we seem to work well together. I think good things are in store for us, though.
Things have worked out well, timing-wise. Curling has started right about the same time as all this stress at work. If you haven't tried curling you might not think it looks very physical, but really it is. For me, at least, it's a great way to work off stress. It helps to have a good curling night like tonight was, of course.
Wow, stressful week so far for BenPositive. Everything will work out, but it seems like a lot is in the air right now. I like to go onsite to customers, though, so finding out today that I need to be near Houston Monday is not so bad. But rarely does anyone go onsite to customers because everything is going perfectly well.
I think today was a pretty good day, but right now I'm kind of bummed because I was trying to get on and watch some CurlTV but it keeps saying my account isn't the right kind to watch. Except I just paid them money, so it should work. Maybe it just takes some time to go through... alas.
An intelligent person I've been in various amounts of contact with for work has been saying for a while now that the Nintendo DS is the $100 laptop. Let me decode that a bit: The $100 laptop, now One Laptop per Child (OLPC), is a project to create a mobile computing device that in very large quantities (i.e. millions+) can be purchased and distributed to every child in the world. I'm simplifying things here, and ignoring a lot of interesting cultural and social discussion topics that seem to hang around OLPC. Back to the DS, though, the idea is that for 020 you can already get a mobile computing device with wireless networking, a touch screen, and even voice recognition - and it's already in the pockets and backpacks of millions of kids. Of course, the DS is a very closed system and the cost to get in to official development start pretty high, which contrasts with the OLPC all open source all the time policy.
