Sunday, October 01, 2023

7-6 plus some bonus material

Hearkening back to one of the original ideas for this blog, which was to chronicle goings on so I'd have a personal record of what happened at various points in time, for future me let me say that yesterday was a good day on the tennis court. Adam was up 5-2 and was serving. In a typical game for us, we went back and forth between deuce and ad a number of times, so Adam had at least a couple of set points. Some of them I foiled, others I parried. I broke him and we went to 3-5, me serving to him.


Often at this point in time I might crumple and fold, thinking somewhere in the back of my mind that 6-3 is a respectable outcome and we'll just start another set. But I stanched that kind of thinking and came back and beat him 7-6 and by a convincing margin in the tiebreaker. I did not psyche myself out or talk myself into accepting a respectable loss. It was a good mental performance and I hit the ball well.

Late in the day yesterday Graham texted that he'd like to come home today to get some warmer clothes. No problem. As it turns out, I got him late in the day so we could get some Thai food together, something that's never hard to sell him on. I remembered that, because of a pillar in the corner, there's a space behind his bed where his pillow keeps falling to the floor and getting dirty. We had been discussing possible remedies with him (maybe a small bookshelf?) but had only been able to get rough measurements ("it's one shoe deep") because he lacked a tape measure, so when I went to pick him up I took one with me so we could get precise measurements. The tape measure showed that the gap was about a foot and I was thinking maybe we could just wedge some bankers boxes in there, when my keen eye espied his laundry hamper at the foot of the bed. Upon closer inspection, it fits quite nicely, as shown below, and will guard against the dusty pillow outcome which is the main enemy here. This, my friends, is why they pay me the big bucks and gave me a PhD.

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