Thumper Thinks Out Loud

It’s Cold, and My Balls Are Blue

Ok, I only have one blue ball, but it weighs 16 pounds. And it was cold, very cold, when the Spouse Thingy and I decided to play with it today. I jammed two fingers and a thumb into that sucker, took a few steps, and let it fly.

Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m not equipped for those kind of balls…

We went bowling today. It’s fricking cold outside – there are even a few snow flurries in the air – and there was nothing playing at the theater we wanted to see (other than the new Harry Potter movie, but we’re not nuts enough to try to see in on the opening weekend), so we decided to pick up our balls and go bowling.

When we bowl frequently, we’re both decent bowlers. Not stellar, but we don’t suck either. I think we both have averages around 155-160. The problem is, because of my health problems, we haven’t bowled much over the last few years. We wanted to get into a league at the beginning of this fall, but I was still recovering from surgery and wasn’t sure I could safely fling a 16 pound ball around. I had visions of flinging the ball down the lane and having my brains squirt out my nose and ears.

Today was Family Day at the base bowling alley. For $6 each, we could bowl 3 games, and get a free soda and slice of pizza. That’s a decent deal, when you consider that other wise it would have been $2.40 a game. Yeah, that’s way too expensive for bowling, but I suppose the days of a dollar a line are long gone – and crud, I remember when that was considered too much.. We paid our $12, put our ugly-ass shoes on, grabbed the balls, and started to play.

When my hands are cold, they shrink. I think. All I know is that I can’t grip the ball well and it slips quite a bit – a few times in North Dakota I lost the grip on my ball on the back swing and sent people scurrying for cover. Today it just resulted in 2 sucky games, and one decent one.

Still, sucky games and all, it’s a fun way to spend an hour or two, even better when you get free pizza. Better still when the pizza doesn’t suck anywhere near as much as your game does.

With the cold weather – aside from not being able to grip my ball very well – we were both reminded that the holidays are zooming in on us. We started Christmas shopping, and have picked up a few gifts for the Boy that we’re pretty sure he’ll like. This is my favorite time of year, the smell of winter in the air, finding the perfect gifts for people, watching little kids get excited in the mall when they spot Santa sitting there, waiting to hear their wishes.

I wonder if Santa can bring me a decent bowling game…