Bowl Games

Happy Australia Day, our 21st in this country.

Things don't always go as planned. Take yesterday, for example, when I planned to complete the post about the "musical" I am writing. Well, events overtook me.

The day started out wonderfully when Lily came over for the morning. We hadn't seen her for a while so we were definitely ready for a Lily fix. I fed her breakfast, which takes about an hour. I have never seen anyone eat so slowly in my life. She can take five minutes between bites, which is about the time I take between courses. Nonetheless, she eventually gets the job done and is growing fast and is very fit and strong so however she gets her energy, it's obviously going well.

After breakfast and some mandatory Nickoledeon Jr, I told her about the new Wii console. So it was upstairs to that TV for the rest of the morning. She loved the bit about the Wii where you can create a cartoon version of yourself. So first we made a Lily, and then she decided she should do one for the rest of the family. She was quite good at making the characters look like real people, except for Linda whose character looks more like Hilary Clinton than LK herself. But at least Lily stuck with the concept of Power Woman.

Lily proved quite adept at bowling and tennis, and quite intense also. I have no idea where she gets her competitive spirit from, but she does like to win. Anyhow, eventually Matt decided they were going out to a museum and maybe some real bowling after that. So by noon Lily was gone.

However, the Wii was still here.

Linda and I had a bite of lunch when she suggested the bowling looked like fun. Would I be interested in a game? How can you turn down a chance to play a few matches with a Hilary Clinton lookalike?

The Wii is actually an impressive bit of technology. You literally have to go through the motions of bowling a ball to make the game work. You put spin on the "ball" by going through the same motions as if you were actually hefting a 16-pound ball. (That's a little over 7 kg to my metric Aussie friends. And by the way, we're talking about 10-pin bowling here, played in proper air conditioned bowling alleys, not out on the lawn in the hottest part of the day.)

Anyhow, LK soon mastered the technique and eked out a 2 -1 victory in her last frame. "One more?" she asked.

I could go into great detail, but suffice it to say that we "bowled" for about 5 hours. In that time, we both scored new personal highs. I first set the record at 220 - a very respectable score I probably never attained when I was bowling for real. Linda did not want to quit while I had the record, so we soldiered on and around three hours into our play she had an amazing game of 264. I imagine the record she set on her first day may never be beat.

But she needed to find out for herself. She wanted to bowl more. And hey, it's not like I couldn't have stopped if I wanted to.

The Wii grades you with a skill level, and we both watched ours rise until we reached the Pro level. I never thought of Linda as the type to be interested in becoming a professional bowler, but she was exuberant and proud of her achievement. (And by the way, I probably should add that we were drinking nothing stronger than iced tea. God help us if we'd been on stronger stuff!)

Unfortunately, as the hours wore on, our coordination and timing suffered. Soon our scores were low. Maybe it was time to quit, I suggested. She snapped back at me, "I'm not leaving with a 136 as my last score!" So on we played.

Eventually our lower and lower scores led to our skill levels falling, and both of us lost our professional status. In the space of five hours, we traced the patterns of most athletes' careers: you start slowly, develop your skills, peak - and perhaps are good enough to play professionally, but then you keep on playing and your skills deteriorate. Eventually you're hustling for beers in some backwater bowling alley and getting beat by the local kid on the rise.

Anyhow, eventually we were shooting scores that were closer to what Lily shot than the records that we set . And we were also noticing that hips, shoulders and other parts were starting to ache. I had thought it ominous that the Wii's manual starts with two solid pages of health warnings, one of which is for repetitive stress. Now I understood what they meant.

I think LK might still have been ready to play on, but she didn't argue when I arbitrarily shut the game off and declared cocktail hour open. But last night, both of us grunted and groaned when we got up from our chairs or did just about anything involving our shoulders. I call them "painful bowl movements". But they're much better this morning. I don't see why we can't squeeze a few frames in before we head over to our friends' house for an Australia Day lunch.

A post about Australia Day tomorrow and eventually back to that music stuff.