August 07, 2003 - 2:31 AM

Playing with Balls Is Fun

The past 5 days rocked. Simply rocked. Well, not so much today. Today was kind of boring. But the other days...woowee.

Saturday was of course N's party which I've already documented. Sunday I went back over to N's house and we lazed about, eating leftovers from the party before we finally decided to go to the golf driving range a mile from his apartment. So N, his roommate LDBL, the friend from Maryland DZ, and me drove down there to whack some balls.

Now, none of us are seasoned golfers except for DZ who does have her own set of clubs and has been playing for some time (but I think even she would admit to not being seasoned...just lightly salted). In fact this was the 6th time I've been to a driving range in my life. So we were all hitting with varying degrees of consistency. But I kept picking DZ's brain about technique and she gave me some pointers that really helped me get into a comfortable groove at the end. My mastery of golf was to end there, however.

After draining two large buckets of balls, we then moved on to miniature golf. DZ's short game was impeccable and she handily kicked our butts over the course of 17 holes (hole 1 was out of service). LDBL had a nice showing with I think 7 birdies in the back 9, while N had steady but unspectacular play, and I just sucked. I blame my poor game on the 3 different spiderwebs that chose to attack me at different stages of the course. N pointed out that it looked like I was doing interpretive dance as I tried to extricate myself from the webbings. He was amused, I was not.

We then spent a little time in the arcade, playing skeeball and watching some young punks slam on the DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) platform. If you haven't seen this torture device...well, do you remember that Playstation game called Pa-Rappa the Rapper? It was this cartoon dog-thing that danced and you had to Simon-Sez along with him with your controller as the symbols for the various buttons flashed by on the screen. Each button did a different dance move and you bobbed along to the beat, hitting each button in the sequence that they showed up.

Well, DDR makes you Simon-Sez with your feet. You listen to the music and watch as arrows pointing up, down, left, and right move up the screen in time with it. You're supposed to step on these panels that have the corresponding arrows as they are highlighted, and the more steps you get right without missing or screwing up, the higher combo points you score. It seems easy, but it gets really stupid goofy hard; the guys who were doing it seemed like they must've been practicing on their own units at home or something, cuz they were good.

Our quartet then moved on to the batting cages where LDBL and I squared up against some 60 MPH baseballs and DZ took some slow-pitch softballs over the fence. I had some nice drives from the right side but couldn't hit anything when I switched over to the left. I think I'll go back later this week and try working my way up from 40 or 50 MPH on the left side. The hitting was brutal on my palms though, so I may need to invest in some batting gloves. Or wear socks on my hands.

It was around 11 PM that we packed it in and settled down in front of N's TV and did some damage to each other, Tekken style. My usual button-mashing technique was even more primitive because of the bruised-meat state my hands were in, but I did manage to win a few matches.

We made plans to wake up around 9 the following morning to continue our 3-day binge of too-much-fun at Six Flags Hurricane Harbor in Valencia...a story that I will go into in a later entry. If I can remember it. I was blind half the time, walking around without my glasses on.

Now Listening To : Victoria Davitt-Still (go to cdbaby.com to buy it. the first and last tracks are phenomenal)
Random Thought : Three days into my new position as assistant, and no work so far. This sucks.

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