It's been a full 5 weeks without me at the DUMBO bowling lanes for our league of sorts. While I was away things went like they always do but I suspect that there was some mucking about and not sticking to schedules because we didn't get started yesterday until nearly 20 past 11. When I am there running things I normally run a tight ship and have even denied people the ability to participate if they couldn't make it there on time.
While I am not going to get all worked up about it just yet I do think it is a little bit rude when people are aware that the start time is 11 and don't bother to turn up until 10 or 15 minutes past the hour. That's something I will have to address later though.
It was great to be back on the lanes and it was even better than I did something I haven't done in a while which was actually two things: I bowled one game well above my average of 140 or so and also managed to win the turkey.
It was a little bit of a disappointing turnout with only 16 people but it is low season here and a lot of people were out sick. We had 4 people that have fallen ill in the past few days and from what I have been hearing there have been a lot of people getting sick. I just missed all of it I guess because I wasn't in the country. I am not going to complain about that because I am one of those people that rarely gets sick but when I do get sick, I get seriously sick and don't participate in anything.
It hadn't even occurred to me that it was in fact Thanksgiving Day for Americans and that made me getting the turkey even more special once I figured it out. For those of you that don't know a turkey is when you get 3 strikes in a row. I actually had an opportunity to get a turkey earlier on in the same game but after the first 2 strikes I released the ball slightly early in my stride and only knocked down 8 pins. Later on I nailed 3 in a row and blasted the pins down. So in total of the 10 frames I got a strike in 6 of them along with 2 spares. I ended with a score of 186 which was the highest out of everyone that day so yeah, it felt nice to come back and do well for the first time bowling in our league in over a month.
Sadly, I was 5 points shy of breaking the high score for the month of November. I didn't even realize that I was close to breaking it but perhaps that is a good thing because it didn't really bother me when I failed to get a mark in the 10th frame. Thinking back, it really would have been nice if I had done so because this also would have likely pushed me over the 200 mark, which is something that is extremely rare for me and has one been accomplished by anyone in our league 6 times in 2024. Only one of those games was done by me. 2 of them were done by a guy that was our reigning champion for 10 weeks in a row and he got two games over 200 in the same day. That was a truly epic achievement that not even professional bowlers can often claim.
The afterparty took place at an unusual establishment that is actually a minimart that just went crazy with their outdoor seating.
They also had two quite nice pool tables that I am surprised they are in such great working order considering that they are stored outdoors with a questionable ceiling that retracts for when it isn't raining. You have to pay by the hour to use these tables so perhaps that establishment doesn't actually own them and the maintenance is provided by whoever put the tables there.
This was a good place for us to party because although the food offerings were scarce and basically limited to things like chips in a bag, the beers and other drinks were minimart prices so yeah, it was cheap.
I managed to not get too drunk and was home and in bed by 8:30PM, thereby not completely screwing up my nice morning plan that I have going on at the moment.
One final note on the bowling: Because I was gone for so long I was demoted to the bottom tier in my absence. But by getting the highest score in that division I am automatically in the promotion championship next week. It is my objective to win this competition and then hopefully get lucky and get drawn to bowl for the overall championship the following week. If I am able to pull off those two things it will be the 2nd time in our league's history that someone went from last place to first in the fastest time possible which is two weeks. It's only been done one time before and guess who did it then? Yeah, that was also me.