Pool...Recreation for the Recreationally Challenged

If I were to draw up a list of the organized sports that I was reasonably good at, it would look like this:

1.

2.

3.

And this isn't truly accurate.  If it were it wouldn't extend past one, but a list with only entry isn't a list.  Thankfully making lists isn't an organized sport, because that wouldn't be one you'd find on my list either.

But I can play pool.  Pretty well.  I'm no Paul Newman or Tom Cruise, but I can play better than their stunt doubles.  Pool, or "billiards" to the Tom Collins crowd, is a game designed for people like me.  People with hand/eye coordination and a competitive streak that can't play games with the word "ball" in them.  It helps boost our confidence.  It proves that even geeks more prone to Dungeons and Dragons than Monday Night Football can excel at a sport that requires practice, coordination, and strategic thinking.

And pool is one of the few sports where you can actively engage in competition while drinking a beer...or a Tom Collins.  And if you learn to shoot one-handed you can do both simultaneously!  I'd like to see a running back try that.  Or a forward. Or someone double-fisting a Yagerbomb and a baseball bat.  You could be arrested if you tried it in Nascar.

I challenge anyone to name me a better pastime, one that combines the glory of skillful competition, the indoors, climate-control, and adult beverages.

Yeah...I didn't think so.

Basements are the Tops

I enjoy a lot of things about where Kate and I live now.  It's nice being close to most points within the city.  But one thing I really miss is having a basement.  At our old house we had one, and I loved it.  We have one here, but it's occupied by tenants.  I can't wait for the day that I can put in a staircase and reclaim that space.

I'm not sure why, but I feel very at peace in a basement.  The basement in my childhood home was my favorite spot.  As a kid there was plenty of room to play, and a lot of our toys were stored downstairs.  Most of our birthday parties were in the basement, and when friends spent the night, we all crashed downstairs.  Plus there was a pool table, a TV; everything a kid could want.  It was finished, so it was like a big, extended living room, with a toy chest.

And the basement, or rather the flooding of the basement, caused a situation which I remember as being a highlight of my childhood.  The stairwell outside the basement would back up during heavy rains, drenching the carpet, the furniture, everything.  The only way to dry the carpet was to pull it up, and flip it over the pool table.  The resulting folds in the carpet, and the covered space under the pool table created the GREATEST forts and hideouts of all time!  I had a blast!  I couldn't wait for the next flood.  It's funny.  I remember our basement floods as wonderful times full of adventure.  It wasn't until I had a house of my own that I suddenly realized how much differently my parents must have viewed those floods.  Ah, the happy ignorance of youth.

Once I got older my computer was put in the basement, and it became a retreat of sorts.  It felt like my own space, my own small piece of the house, even more so than my room, oddly enough.  I liked the quiet and the solitude.  I liked the separation.

Still do.  I don't have a basement now, but, when and if our tenants move out I have no plans of re-renting it.  I'm going to knock out the floor in the kitchen closet, which used to be the entrance to the basement stairs, but a new staircase in, wall off what is now the entrance to the basement apartment, get a new (used) pool table, and enjoy basement living again.

Sans floods.