Month: March 2025

This weekend was the club spiel at Triangle Curling Club, an internal championship of sorts. This year, the rules required more experienced players to pair with less experienced players in an over-under format. Just like last year I somehow missed the signup email, was late to get on the list of people looking for a team, mentally wrote off the idea of even participating, was contacted right before the event to form a team with the last people left on the list, and then played skip since I was the only one who had played the position before. For the second year in a row, I was the least experienced skip on the least experienced team (we were all “unders” and I didn’t even meet two of my three teammates until just before our first game).

Objectively, things went better than a pundit might have predicted. In our first game on Friday, we were overmatched yet led after four ends before the wheels fell off. In our second game, on Saturday morning, we gave up five in the first end and it was over before it ever got started. This team wasn’t capable of making a big comeback. The third game was the best for my front end players and we steadily built a big lead. Then the same dynamic that I wrote about a few weeks ago played out and I very nearly found a way to choke the game away. My last shot was just good enough, though, and we held on. That surprise win meant that we played a third game on Saturday night. That was a bridge too far for us and I was left trying to play hero shots in almost every end. They didn’t come off and we were soundly beaten, ending our journey.

After our fourth and final game, I helped move some tables and chairs back inside to help close down for the night. One of the organizers of the event and someone I’ve played under during multiple seasons was also moving the tables and leveled with me about my behavior towards my teammates. I had let my frustration show too much and the criticism was merited. They are new curlers and were just trying to enjoy themselves; I enjoy competing and can be very hard on myself when I don’t execute as I intend. They didn’t always understand what I was asking them to do or why I was asking them to do it, resulting in more than one confused situation that led to bad outcomes. I cannot fairly blame the losses on these mishaps as I missed shots that I know I can make, but they didn’t help. I don’t expect that they would ever want to play under me again after this weekend, and that is an area where I’ve got to improve.

After a day off, I returned for my normal Monday league. I focused on staying calm above all else and proceeded to have the best game I’ve ever played both in terms of accuracy and weight control. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, but it’s hard to argue with results.

Daytime high temperatures were unseasonably warm this week. Some of the flowers and trees are already blooming and with the exception of a stormy Sunday the skies have been blue and clear. It is one of my favorite times during the year. On Saturday, I went to a new area to hike in Duke Forest. This was actually my second new trail in the past few weeks, but this one was more enjoyable. I scouted a little online, checked some maps of the roads through the forest, and took off in my car. Had I done a little more research, I would have parked at a different entrance gate that would have trimmed the worse parts of the walk but I didn’t want to let perfect be the enemy of accomplished. For the first quarter mile or so of the hike there was quite a bit of road noise, but beyond that the walk was quiet save the crunch of gravel under my feet and the conversation of the few other hikers I came across. After winding along the gravel track for a while, I descended down a gentle slope to a bridge. I couldn’t resist a detour off of the gravel path and along a rougher trail beside the flowing creek when presented with the opportunity. It wasn’t the route I had originally mapped out, a route that would have taken me on a loop further north, but flowing water is nature therapy in the best way.

There were several bits of the creekside trail that required scrambling over rocks but there was no scree so the footing was always sure once you got through the fallen leaves. It wouldn’t be a walk that everyone could do though. At one point, there was a pair of Mallards foraging in the creek moving in the same direction as I was walking. Such was the terrain that we moved at roughly the same pace, not that I minded given the beauty of what was around me. It was a lovely scene with the creek set below some low rises maybe forty feet above the water on each side, plenty of tree cover, and sunlight sprinkling through to the floor. Overall, it was a very pleasant walk. I just wish I’d worn shorts.

The Durham Performing Arts Center punches well above its weight, both as a venue and as a draw for events and performances. It also helps that I can walk to DPAC, which I did twice in the past week. My first visit was to see Shucked, a touring Boadway musical comedy. My second visit was to listen to a lecture from Dr. Jordan Peterson as part of his current tour.

My Shucked visit was not as originally intended. Illness forced a change in plans as my expected guests were unable to come and my weekend plans were scuttled. In an era of digital tickets, I was still able to go and managed to find a home for one of the others. I knew very little about the show going into it, which was probably for the best. The premise bordered on the ridiculous but that was deliberate and the writers leaned in hard to the corn motif with what is surely the highest concentration of corny jokes in the history of musical theater. One of the minor character’s monologues were the piece de resistance of this corny humor and he got the biggest laugh of the evening with a joke about how politicians are like diapers. I haven’t seen Book of Mormon but a few people said Shucked was like a toned-down version of that show. It had some vulgarity but wasn’t blasphemous. I’m glad I didn’t travel to New York to see it (especially after seeing Hamilton when I was in New York in January), but it was a nice change of pace on a Thursday evening.

Dr. Peterson’s lecture was much more what I anticipated it would be and more impactful. It was a solo trip and the second time I’ve seen him give a lecture. And while I wish he (and everyone else) would refrain from Twitter/X, his writings and his recorded lectures have been of great value to me during the past few years. The lecture focused on conscience through the lens of the stories of Elijah, Jacob, and Jonah and how those Old Testament stories offered a preemptive repost to Nietscheze’s idea that man would be able to reconstruct a value system after the death of God, how the existence of conscience itself points to problems with Nietscheze’s claims. The lecture paralleled the thoughts contained in the prologue to his latest book, which I started reading just this weekend so it was almost like spaced repetition of the ideas as you might study flashcards in order for the content to seep deeper into memory. These two exposures to a particular passage of scripture aren’t even the only ones I’ve had recently as one came up in my church small group as well a few weeks ago. It has all left me thinking about creating still and quiet instead of crowding it out with noise and stimulation at all times since that quiet is where the best things come from.

In my Sunday night curling league, I skip. That means I’m something like the team captain. I am the one who calls the shots for the first three team members and the one who throws the final two rocks of each end. It is still new for me and presents a number of additional mental challenges that are not present when I play any of the other three positions on a team. It is part of my continued growth as a player and I enjoy it, except when I don’t.

In each of the last two weeks, my team has had the lead with the hammer (meaning we throw second each time) into the final end (think of an end like an inning in baseball). Both weeks, the last end has not gone according to plan. Last week, we won in overtime when I threw my tiebreaker stone closer to the button than the other team’s skip. This week, I executed a draw with my last rock and we scored one to win the game. Neither should have been that close.

I’ve decided that the cause is that in both games I changed my approach in the final end. I played defensively and called different types of shots, shots that I’d not asked my teammates to play in earlier ends.  This has caused a few misses and those misses have led to problems. In other words, I went away from what was working in favor of a different approach at the end and nearly cost my team wins both times as a result.

I’ve been thinking about this issue, sticking with what’s working and continuing to do more of that rather than change things, in relation to the law firm this week as well. Shiny object syndrome is a real thing and it’s hard not to chase after every new opportunity, especially after going through lean times like we have in the past few years. That said, we are getting better at sticking to our core strengths. Even this morning we turned down an incorporation-type project that was a regular part of our practice a few years ago to stay focused on what we do best.