Hot news in several flavors

It hardly seems possible, but there’s been too much going on recently and it’s been keeping me from updating the blog. So here is a summary:

New wheels: Finally, after many, many false starts (going back a ways!) we bought a new car last weekend. The hard part is over now—the price research, figuring out which dealer might be less sleazy than the others, the horror of haggling, the feeling that, despite everyone saying that this is the bestest time to get a fab deal on a car, we paid too much. Now all that’s left is to pick it up later this week (after checking to make sure the VIN is correct and all that paranoid jazz). Once the new toy gets driven home, I’ll post a pic and give more details. Woo, first car bought in twelve years, how crazy is that!

New TV: It seems silly to have a whole paragraph about this, but it’s pretty momentous in Casa Snorklewacker to upgrade the TV. After all, it was only back in 2000 that I replaced the 13-inch TV with a very modest—nay, un-American—20-inch one. Now we’ve got a 32-inch HD display with all the widescreen goodness. And, I must say, Halo 3 looks goddamn good on it. Standard-def cable, not so much. Guess I gotta upgrade that too, hmph.

There is no “I” in team: Last Tuesday, I overheard the pro who runs my tennis clinic telling someone about the local women’s USTA team. It’s something I’ve been curious about, so I wandered over and inserted myself into the conversation. Turns out that the last day of tryouts was the next day, so I figured that I was too late to get in on it. But the pro called the guy who runs the team and basically browbeat him into letting me come in and do some hitting. Mostly this consisted of the pro telling me to just show up, never mind that the coach was saying that there were no slots, etc. So on Wednesday I did just show up, and they did let me hit. The good news: they let me on the team! The bad news: despite how that sounds, it’s pretty much noncompetitive to get on the team, and it doesn’t at all mean that they send you to actual matches. There are far more people on the team than they need, so at a minimum it just means you can come to practices and get a little coaching and drilling. Well, I’m happy with that. What’s kind of schmacky is that after five minutes of hitting the ball around, the coach put me into the 3.0 level, which I doubt I am. I went to the first practice last night and out-hit a lot of the supposed 3.0s—heck, there is one girl there who can’t consistently hit the ball with her racket, which seems pretty crazy to me. Surely I am at a higher NTRP ranking than her?? But anyway. The important thing is that my foot’s in the door, something which wasn’t even on my radar a week ago. And maybe I’ll meet some people. Everybody seems nice, and I did get some good coaching advice last night. And after playing tennis last night for three-odd hours (there was the usual clinic, too!) I can proudly say that I am still able to climb stairs today. I wasn’t sure whether that would be the case!

So there’s the update for now. Hopefully more updates more often from here. I also need to see the Star Trek movie, surely that’ll inspire a post. Stay tuned.