Steve's adventures in curling.

 I posted before about taking up curling, it's a lot of fun and forces me to get out and socialize. I was doing a lot of filling in for one team and was asked if I would become a permanent player after one team member had to step down. I happily agreed and then entered into a strange rollercoaster of being part of a team to not being part of a team. The final straw came when part of one team was hurt in a car accident. They decided to combine the remaining members of that team which were left, with the original players on my team. I understood, those people paid to join back in the fall and have been doing it for years.

 Losing my spot had become a reoccurring issue, people were getting hurt, some left for vacation, some tried to come back after their injuries, no one's fault really but after New year's, I said thanks but no thanks. I started to enjoy my Sundays to myself.

 This week they created a new team because missing one team was throwing everything off regarding who was playing who.  Two of the other guys had less experience than I do! One guy just tried it for the first time last week. Our skip (like team captain) is an elderly man who had been badly hurt in a car accident. I think I have watched this scenario many times during Walt Disney movies, Bad News Bears or Mighty Ducks. Before we started playing, I made it clear to the team that our strategy was to just have fun, they all laughed and agreed with me, the new guy saying let's just try to keep from embarrassing ourselves too much, I agreed. The game started and as usual, whenever you are having fun, it's two hours later and suddenly everything is over. Keeping with the Disney tradition, we had won!

 As I said last time, there is a small bar at the arena and all the teams meet to go over what went right, what went wrong, what went really wrong and how we can't really do anything about it!

 I started playing back in November and they said it runs until the middle of February. I was thinking that is way off in the future and wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to a winter schedule. Time flies and here we are, January will be half over Tuesday, next thing I know we will all be saying goodbye and to have a good summer. Leaving the arena, I witnessed something great about this time of year however, something that really picked up my spirits, when we walked outside, instead of the usual darkness to greet us, it was still daylight, the sun had just set but "day" hadn't followed it yet. One woman remarked, "this is wonderful, we made it through".