Bowling Has Gotten Expensive

Yowsers, today was a busy day. So grab a drink, settle in and let's get to it. We started out this morning by going to IHOP, usually we can't go there due to it being a bastion of nuts (and since Catherine's allergic to peanuts, that's just not an option). But since Catherine is down in Richmond this weekend visiting Grammy, it meant we could take Quinn there for breakfast. He took full advantage and pigged out on some pancakes.

After that we headed home and waited for Ken and Amanda to come over. Their house is getting painted, so we invited them over to hang out so they wouldn't have to deal with the paint fumes. Everyone played in the basement, but they didn't do a lot of playing together. Amanda played with Catherine's Polly Pocket toys (the Polly Pocket stuff really annoys me since it's such a girly girl toy, but despite my best efforts, that's the stuff Catherine seems to like). And while Amanda played with that, Quinn just played with Thomas the Tank Engine Legos and then switched to playing football.


Just after lunch we all headed out to the bowling alley. Quinn really likes bowling, but Catherine doesn't care for it as much. So again, since Catherine wasn't here, it seemed like a good choice. So we all played one game, then the kids and Ginger played a second game.


I tried taking some pictures, but something really odd seems to be going on with my camera. It seems to be really dragging out the shutter speed even when I use the flash, resulting in this ghosty after effect around a lot of the things in the pictures. It was basically a forward synch flash, but still capturing some image data after the flash has gone off, resulting the data acquired after the flash having a translucent appearance. I even had the film ISO speed set to 800, so I have no clue what was causing the problem. If anyone has any idea what might be going on, let me know, but for now, I'll throw up some of the photos even though they're not so good.

I decided early on I was only going to play one game. The good thing about the alley was that since we went earlier in the day than we did the last time we went, there was no one smoking in the alley (that I could see). The bad thing is the place was overrun with kids and kid's birthday parties. Evidently a lot of people (especially kids, but their parents too) don't understand bowling etiquette. I would be standing there getting ready to make an approach, and the people on the lane next to me would just go anyway. Or they would throw their ball and never get off the lane to allow people next to them to go. I guess I can't expect much considering most of the people there had never been on a league before. And eventually we got to be just as bad when Amanda was up bowling (due to her using the kid's ramp and Quinn and Ken both being up there when she bowled also).


Since we had the kids, we had them put the bumpers up. The bumpers actually negatively affected me at least twice. I typically throw my ball along the right edge and let the spin bring it back to the center. A couple of times the ball actually hit the bumper over on the right just enough to completely throw off the track of the ball (and no, just because it hit the bumper doesn't mean it was going to go into the gutter).


I didn't do so well picking up spares today. In fact, I never managed to get a spare the entire game. Although I sill manage to break 200, so I can't complain too much (I ended up only getting seven on the last ball after the picture above was taken). I seemed to be in some mode where I would either get a strike or a split. I definitely didn't feel as good about my game as I did back when I was playing regularly, but I did okay I suppose. I would have felt better had I gotten at least one spare, but I take some consolation from the fact that I would have had one spare had the bumpers not been up once.


And Quinn is still having some issues rolling the ball down the lane and he basically shot puts it out there now. At one point I honestly thought he was going to pull a Fred Flintstone and throw the ball into the neighboring lane. Near the end of the second game he started doing really well and rolling it along the ground. It's a lot of fun to watch Quinn bowl, he still doesn't quite understand the physics behind it yet, so even though the ball is heading over to the edge and you can tell it's only going to get a couple of pins, he's still convinced he might get a strike out of it and is jumping up and down (or on the floor) watching the ball.




Amanda started getting really tired halfway through the second game. To the point where she would just start laying down everywhere. So we probably pushed it a bit with her playing the second game, strangely enough even though she seemed really tired she did a lot better on her second game than she did on the first and even broke 100.


After bowling Ken took Amanda home, then as we were getting ready to leave, Ginger noticed something odd about the receipt for bowling. Now either they made a mistake, or it seems as if bowling has gotten a lot more expensive than I recall. I went back in and checked they assured me that they didn't actually charge that much to my credit card (I still need to call the credit card company at some point and verify that they didn't charge that much though).

After that we headed to the really big Target up on Rt 50. Evidently when Quinn went down to Richmond last time Catherine got some new toys, so Ginger felt it was only fair that Quinn get some new toys this time. So after a brief visit and buying a couple more NASCARs we finally got home.


Quinn played with his new NASCARs for a while, then decided he wanted to try on his NASCAR driver uniform that he's planning on wearing for Halloween. He even pretended the chair was a NASCAR and he was jumping out of it after his 'victory.'



After Quinn went to bed, Ginger and watched some TV (a couple of episodes of Bones), then I got to watch my shows after Ginger went to bed. I must say, any doubts I had about the new Doctor Who were put to rest this week. I give the new doc a big thumbs up. And the quality of the filming (especially the first scene) was really well done I thought.