Amanda Takes Off...

While we were in Minnesota, we went bowling.

My mother was given a bowling ball (fitted to her hand) by my grandfather more than 20 years ago. I decided to give it a try. Although my hand span is not the exact same as my mom's, it was pretty similar and I was enjoying the ball.

Until the fourth frame of the first game, when it never came back from the return.

I reported it to the kid on duty and he ran in the back to get my ball.

Several minutes later, the ball return starting...smoking. It smelled like burning rubber and smoke was billowing forth from the return.

Hmm.

Some other guy walked up and the kid and the guy started examining my ball. Finally, he walked over and asked if the damage on the ball had been there before.

The ball had deep, deep grooves and scratches in it. It was so scratched up that I couldn't even hold it because the dinged-up finger holes would've torn my skin. My mother's name had become "TER-scratch-scratch."

Finally, after days of back-and-forth phone calls, I was told they're going to replace the ball.

We'll see.

Yes, I Know That's Not a Bowling Ball Bag

So. Since my last day of work, Good Man and I have gone to the beach for a weekend, visited Newfoundland, gone to my Grandparents' and spent a week with my parents.

I finished knitting a dress in about a month.

Good Man got his license.

Good Man met approximately 50 family members this summer. He hasn't met two cousins (and their spouses), and some of George's side of the family. Other than that, Dad's family is knocked out, and so is Mom's. And he's still alive.

And now summer is done.

Preplanning for the new school year starts tomorrow and I am not ready. Dammit, why can't I have just one more week? Or month? This summer was awesome.

When I was in high school, I became friends with a guy. We were...a very odd pair of friends and most of our friends would say with astonishment, "You're friends with [him/her]?"

He was new to school our freshman year and while I thought we met in science class, he remembers it differently.

"I remember exactly how we met. I was sitting in the library," he said yesterday over brunch, "and you walked straight up to me, sat down, and said, 'You're that guy who thinks he knows everything about God, aren't you?'"

I blushed and laughed, Good Man almost choked on his brunch, and Thinks He Knows' wife laughed and nodded. "I'm so sorry," I said.

"No, no, it's OK," Thinks He Knows said, "That was a pretty good description."

Thinks He Knows and I would sit in science class and passionately debate evolution. In photography class, we work on our projects and debate the existence of God.

Our sophomore year he disappeared (home schooled), but he returned junior year. Somehow we ended up taking Spanish together at the community college (our junior and senior year of school, I went to the community college full time). Thinks He Knows would pick me up in the morning and we'd listen to Christian music while driving to the school.

While he was reading "the endtimes are near" books, I was reading really radical 60s and 70s feminist philosophy "men are evil, let's go live in the woods without them" books. We would passionately talk about our books, the other sort of gritting their teeth to deal with it.

Well, Thinks He Knows and I have both mellowed out a bit since high school. We've changed. We saw each other once, two years after graduation. He had just proposed to a woman who he was...not dating. She's now his wife of eight years and they have a beautiful, happy baby together. While religions (or lack of religion) have not changed for either of us, the forcefulness in which we believe we are absolutely right has mellowed out, and the practice of said beliefs has changed. Political views have changed a bit.

In other words, we've both grown up.

We emailed each other a few times when I was in Korea (he and his wife taught in China for two years). And then we reconnected on Facebook. We weren't able to meet during either of my spring visits to Minnesota and I really wanted to be sure we got to meet on this trip, so we scheduled it early in the trip. Good Man and I were invited to their home for a wonderful brunch. (As a side—I have got to get the French toast recipe his wife used. So delicious!)

And we just fell into conversation as if ten years hadn't gone by at all. It was wonderful.

Over brunch we tried to figure out why we got along so well in high school despite being polar opposites in just about everything. Thinks He Knows said, "I think that we respected how passionate the other was. We might not have agreed with each other, but we just thought almost everyone else was stupid, because they weren't passionate about anything!"

That's probably it, actually.

A Decade Later

You Bought...

Mint Oreos?

Why?

Good Man doesn't like mint. It's not a very common flavor in Korea. He manages mint toothpaste but the rest of it? Not so much.

I guess he didn't realize that the green tinting of the cream indicated "mint."

Last night Good Man and I went bowling again.

Good Man's ball bounced out of the gutter and struck a pin four times last night. I know that if you follow the rules, these pins don't count. But I gave them to him.

The one time my ball bounced out of the gutter, it went between the two pins I needed to get. Dammit.

I am more convinced than ever than the lanes are not very well kept. Last night, after both of our balls were stuck in the return for the third time in as many games (and there were other times we had to bowl with the other person's ball to get our own balls to come back up), I finally asked to be moved. The guy was very friendly about it and moved me, but we lost a lot of time waiting for the poor mechanic to run back to lane 29 to get our balls out of the return.

At our first location, we were stuck next to a group of teens who kept screaming obscenities at each other when they were up. Yeah, kids, you look like idiots.

At the second location, the teenagers next to us (two couples) spent most of the time draped all over each other. Neither of the girls understood bowling etiquette and one scampered up, lobbed her ball with a resounding thud then squealed while watching it go down the lane just as I was about to release my ball, completely throwing me off.

Once I realized what they were doing, I'd wait a good, long time for them to finally bowl. And just when I thought it was safe, one of the girls would untangle herself from her boyfriend, flounce up, lob her ball again, and squeal.

Fortunately, they left after only two games. Unfortunately, those two games took them forever since they were more interesting in rolling around on top of each other in the chairs than in bowling.

No matter, Good Man and I had a good time. I didn't score anything near 139 this time, but I averaged 92 over eight games, with three above-100 games of 111, 106, and 105. Good Man averaged 98 and his above-100s were 103, 132 (!) and 106. He won four games and I won four games.