Squash was also unusually good: I played against Paul-whose-dad-is-a-squash-coach, and we were pretty much even, considering he started with a handicap of 5 (for 15 point games). The handicap went up whenever he won a game by more than 2 points, and down whenever I won a game by more than 2 points. I ended with a handicap of 3. But we were both pretty exhaused by that point.

And archery was, as usual, fun but tiring. I’m beginning to get used to the new bow weight (34lb) but the scores are still wildly varying: my best was 55, and my worst was 38.

So now I’m sore, but in a good way.

It was a good Easter weekend. We ate much, watched Dr Who, played music (new tune for us: Black Umbrella, by Even), went to the movies (The World’s Fastest Indian) and watched DVDs (Saw 2, Oyster Farmer, several old episodes of Arrested Development). I drooled in anticipation of Guitar Hero.

I also did a bit of work. I wrote up a very short FF of Oyster Farmer (and will do one of Saw 2 some time.) I worked on the video delay line project a bit, and got it into a good working state. I went to golf on Saturday and did very poorly indeed (getting my worst score on that course), then went to archery, and did very badly as well (285, or thereabouts, thanks to problems with my anchor point). But then the instructors were very helpful, and I finished the day thinking I would probably do better the next time I went, which proved to be the next day. On Sunday, I took the video camera and laptop computer to archery, and gave the video delay-line a bit of a run. It went well – my change in anchor point suddenly clicked, and I could really see what I was doing thanks to the video delay, and I got my best ever score: 317 (54, 51, 50, 54, 54, 54).

Anna made creme caramel for the first time, and it worked well. They were extremely tasty, and I had to do much exercise on Monday night to stay under 86kg, thus being able to continue scoffing chocolate today.

Until I finished that sentence! Now I feel fine. All it took was for me to write it all down [1] and now I’m ready to get back into things: which is, continuing to write down lists.

Recent activities: archery (293, 289, took along Anna’s brother George), music with Anna & Jon & Kate (continued recording our new song, laid down the drums and bass and rhythm guitar), Battlestar Galactica & Lost, “We Love Katamari”, continued Magic Invented Draft (8-1 games so far), BBQ for John & Claire’s housewarming, BBQ for Alistair & Helen’s engagement, squash last Thursday (4-1 to Ian including agonising loss when I was leading by very much indeed), golf on Saturday morning with Owen (59, Owen got 60, so it was the first time I’ve beaten him. Notable for me starting very well, and then completely losing it in the second half and getting very cross, but trying to be entertainingly cross rather than just unpleasant.)

Recent procrastinations: Rabbit Blog, “We Love Katamari”, Magic: The Distraction, anotherblog, sudoku, kukoru, sleep, hiding.

[1] This is a lie. I’m still down, but I’m keeping up appearances just dandily, don’t you think?

The heavier bow seemed a bit *too* heavy for me – I was wobbling a bit – but the instructor assured me I’d get used to it, and that it would be better in the long run and prevent bad habits from forming. Apparently, when you use a bow that is too light for you, it’s easy to release the bow in different ways (eg. pulling it further back at the last second, twisting it, etc.) When you have a heavier bow, it pretty much forces you to release correctly, ’cause it’s all you can do to hold onto the string for more than a few seconds anyway. Also, you have to be more efficient in your aiming technique.

Thus began a new phase in my archery: learning to aim much more quickly, ’cause otherwise the wobbles get too bad to shoot straight!

So, that was Saturday morning: shooting from undercover, and walking out into the rain to get the arrows out of the target (and having to put the umbrella down for arrow extraction, since they were too wet and slippery to do one-handed).

I almost forgot: one of the kids accidentally shot a bird, which hopped away indignantly with an arrow in its wing as the instructors chased it. Eventually, they caught it and drove it away to the RSPCA. The hit really was a fluke – the bird flew down just as the kid loosed his arrow (which was a wildly off-target shot anyway). Apparently, this is a very rare event, something that only happens once every couple of years. I found it rather encouraging that the instructors didn’t find it funny at all, and were quite outspoken about shooting animals for sport (they’re very much against it).

Then, the next day, golf. Woke up at 5:00am, found that it had stopped raining overnight and that I would probably have to actually get up and play. Got to the golf course at 6:00am, and discovered that there was a tournament on, and that we wouldn’t be able to play. Swore eternal revenge on Owen, who was supposed to be organising, but was mollified by his suggestion of an alternate course nearby, which turned out to be open, and quite nice. Until the rain started again. We played six holes in mild on-again off-again drizzle, but then the lightning started and we decided to pack it in. We were playing rather poorly anyway.

I tend to get very motivated by competition, which I mention with slight embarassment as there were several competitions going during our stay – I entered into two archery competitions and won a silver and a gold medal, and I entered into a table-tennis competition and got a silver. And I got a certificate for having done the knee-hang transfer on the flying trapeze, an activity that was at once scary and wonderful and a bit painful. Marco has video footage, which I shall post in due course.

The archery was particularly enjoyable, and I spent at least an hour a day defending the resort from motionless wooden targets. I’ve been interested in archery since I was in high-school, when I used to shoot at a target in the back yard (very badly), but I very rarely get to do it. I enjoy the combination of relaxation and tension necessary to shoot well. The target was about a metre diameter, with a bullseye with a twenty centimetre diameter, and ten metres away. I managed to get the bullseye with all three shots three times, over the course of the week.

The golf was fine and enjoyable, and we steadily improved over the course of the week, though we didn’t record any remarkable scores. As usual, Marco and I played ambrose (both hitting from the best previous result) and really didn’t play safe shots nearly as often as we should have had we been after a good score.

And Anna was particularly keen on the kayaking. On the first day, we went for a kayak and Anna thought she saw a shark. Happily, it was actually a dolphin – no, two dolphins – no, three. We followed them for a while, Anna beaming with pure delight, and then came across a giant sea turtle, shell at least a metre round, which blinked at us a few times as we goggled at it. We didn’t encounter any exciting sea-life on any of the other days (although we continued to kayak), but it doesn’t matter. We saw dolphins, and we saw a sea turtle. That’s just excellent.

We got stuck right into the food, which was prepaid and buffet (and predominately seafood, though no dolphin or turtles that we noticed), and rather good. Despite all the exercise over the week, I still put on about two kilos in weight, and am therefore not having sweet things. Again. Enormous quantities of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And ‘free’ booze. Much beer. Many margaritas. A lot of lying down after lunch.

The trapeze was excellent. Marco had done this before, when he visited Lindeman Island seven years ago, and he was keen to continue. The trapeze was a high wire-and-pole-and-rope construction, which wobbled alarmingly as you climbed the ladder to the platform ten metres up. There was a safety net, and the guests wore harnesses, but it was still very, very scary, and after going up twice on the second day to do the basic preparations for a transfer (which were: swing down, bring legs up over bar, and hang from knees), I chickened out until the last possible day to do the full transfer (which had the extra step of coordinating with one of the instructors on another swing to have them grab you arm-to-arm and swing from their arms, before dropping to the net). Which I managed. Phew. Marco was keener. He did the basic knee-hang transfer on the first day, and spent the other days working up to more difficult transfers. Next time I go, I’ll try a bit more too. There were some people there who had come to club med and done the trapeze every year for ten years. They, unsurprisingly, were rather good.

Hm, what else. I performed on the “Gong Show” one night to an audience of about 200, swinging flurescent comet pois in UV darklight, and wearing black clothing. It went pretty well, considering how long it had been since I last did it, and people recognised me afterwards and commented on it throughout the rest of the holiday (though goodness knows how, as my face wasn’t visible). I had no idea how to conclude the routine, and half-way through got a bit panicky that I was repeating moves, but they seemed fairly happy with it, and I ended up concluding by gradually reducing the length of the pois until they were swinging very rapidly on very short strings, and then stopped them.

Marco and I performed the flying trapeze, on one of the other nights, to an audience of about 150 people. Actually, this was a more organised event – they asked everyone who had successfully done a transfer on the trapeze that day (six of us) to participate in the show that evening. So we did our transfers again (successfully) while wearing tight lycra outfits, and then our instructors did some more advanced transfers. Very exciting and nerve-wracking – the trapeze was hard enough without an audience!

Anyway. I’ll write more as I think of it. That’s enough for now.

Diceland
A neat game, though doesn’t really fit into the cheapass mould at $35. You assemble twenty cardboard eight-sided dice, which each represent a character. Form your teams of characters, then take it in turns throwing and moving the dice on a cleared-out table – it’s kind of like a miniatures combat game but with dice. Cleverly done, I’d like to play more but Anna hasn’t exhibited any interest yet, and Chris, Amanda and Andrea just want to roleplay whenever we get together. Sigh…

Real Tennis
Real tennis is an actual game, quite different from tennis (or, Lawn Tennis as the Real Tennis affectionados call it) and squash, but kind of a mix of the two. Actually, it’s more like the other way around. Real Tennis came first, then tennis and squash evolved from that. There’s only about fifty courts in the world, but one of them is at MacQuarie University, so John Dalton and I decided we’d try it out. Yesterday, it was my turn to show up and John’s to make an excuse – just as well, really, it takes a full hour to explain the rules and traditions. Fascinating. I’m thinking of writing a Monastery story around it – it was invented in 1100 or so in an Italian Monastery, so it would have been quite new when the Monastery was founded.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to playing again next Monday, hopefully this time to have a proper game…

Golf
On the way back from the Uni, I remembered that there was a golf driving range quite close by, so I went up there, rented a club, and bashed a hundred balls into the air with varying degrees of success. I started rather well, and it felt good – the ball was flying hundreds of metres and there were gratifyingly few balls beyond it (there were perhaps a dozen or so people at the range). Then I got the yips, which behaved very similarly to Kevin Costner’s yips from “Tin Cup”. I had no idea what the problem was, but after whacking the ball for a while, I was starting to hit them higher and higher into the air, until they were simply being duffed straight up, and sometimes alarmingly so – I came quite close to hitting the person next to me, twice. I think I was hitting too far underneath the ball, but buggered if I could work out how to fix it… I hit the remainder of the balls in a kind of embarrased frenzy, watching the ball fly high into the sky again and again, then gave the club back and noticed that I had a *huge* blister on my left hand.

I wonder if that had anything to do with it?