Who would have thought that bowling could be a strenuous activity? We went bowling on Saturday night for the first time in about a decade. Ambitious as we were, we signed up for and completed two full hours. The first evidence of how out of bowling shape we were was the degeneration of our recorded ball speeds toward the end of the second hour.
I didn’t even realize I had a muscle an inch above my wrist (in the direction of my elbow), but it sure was sore yesterday morning, along with my upper leg muscles and selected muscles around my neck and shoulder. I guess if you throw a fourteen-pound ball a hundred or more times in a couple of hours it’s going to require something of your muscles. I did manage to score over 105 once, which was a huge improvement over my score on the first game.
I’m not in bad shape, but I’m apparently not in bowling shape. My sessions on the elliptical trainer don’t do much for those muscles. Of course, yesterday we also had to move around some heavy furnishings, so by the end of the day we were both whipped and this morning I feel almost exactly my age, which is a rare thing for me.
We went to see The Bucket List on Saturday afternoon. We both like Nicholson and Freeman a lot, so we enjoyed the movie. The reviews were lukewarm because of various contrivances, but if you’re willing to overlook the fact that one of the duo is richer than Croesus and both of them were asymptomatic from their terminal illnesses, it’s a great buddy movie. I liked it that, though Nicholson’s character was on a different stratum from Freeman’s, they didn’t have the hackneyed, trite issues over becoming friends that one might have expected from a Hollywood script. They bonded quickly, and Nicholson’s luxury foibles were soon deflated as he ralphed up his designer menu. It was simply a fun film, in spite of all they cancer and dying.
We watched The Nanny Diaries that evening. Laura Linnie does strident, type A better than anyone, but in this movie it was just annoying. She was hateful, and on screen so much that it made the film uncomfortable. And Paul Giamati was a wretch. Irredeemable. Johansson was cute and barely made the film tolerable. It would be nice to think it was a parody or a satire, but I suspect it slices closer to the truth than people would care to admit.
I didn’t work on the novel at all on the weekend, but I did get my Storytellers Unplugged essay written and time-delay posted. It will show up like magic on Thursday morning at 5 a.m. The subject relates to my January 11th post and is called “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.”
This morning, I got back to the novel. Finished Chapter 2 and started Chapter 3. In the first week on the job, I’ve written 7000 words, which is not too bad.
I finished the Peter Falk autobiography and picked up the new novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte: The Painter of Battles. The first book of his in a while that hasn’t been a Captain Alatriste tale. Sounds intriguing from the jacket copy. It’s about a photographer who traveled the world to photograph conflicts who is now painting a mural inside an ancient tower that represents his impressions of wars. Apparently he’s to have a visitor who was once photographed by him and is now out to settle some kind of score. Sounds promising.
