Bowling With Ben

I'll just preface this by saying I initially wasn't even going to mention this and was going to conveniently 'forget' this entire incident had even happened, but Ben insisted that this should be captured for my public ridicule.

So after church today we had plans to go bowling with Ben. He needed to get in some practice and Quinn loves any excuse to go bowling. And besides, I haven't actually seen Ben in person for a while and this was a pretty good excuse. And I was thinking it would be a good chance to hear about how his work is going (too bad things were pretty hectic and we never got to that conversation).

Once we got to the lanes it was around three thirty and the place was a madhouse. I've never seen this place as crowded as it was. At first I didn't think we were going to get a lane since it sounded like league was going to be starting at five, but I convinced them that if we took two of the lanes the league would be using we could play two games and be done by four thirty. So we set up Quinn bowling on one lane by himself (so he could have bumper guards) and Ben and I were alternating on the other lane.


From the way I bowled, you would never have known that the last time I was in a league I had a 194 average at the end of the season (for purposes of full disclosure, that was my highest season average ever). I think you can see some of my previous season averages here from where Rob wrote a program back in the day to graph out our games (the values in the graph are the night's total which just adds the three games for that night together). So having said all that, this was not my best day. In fact, I can't remember the last time I bowled this bad. I think Quinn stole all my mojo because he did fantastic (he got more strikes that I did for the day). Quinn's scores were 102, 127 and 103. I, however, scored 106 and 142. I should point out that in the 8th, 9th and 10th frames of my second game, I let Quinn throw my second ball for those frames (which he managed to spare on two of them without bumper guards and the one he didn't spare on was a split). I only mention that because to be quite honest, I'm not sure I would have gotten those spares myself (as I said, he was doing really well today). So my score for that last game could have been a lot lower.


In fact, after we got home Quinn asked me what he had done to my butt. I'll admit, I hadn't been expecting that question and it took me a little off guard. After questioning him about it some I figured out that he overhead me talking to Ben during the first game that at the rate I was going, Quinn was going to kick my butt.