Slice

One of the reasons that I didn’t want to play golf in the park was because I can’t hit the ball straight. The course goes in between the homes and has very narrow fairways.

I went out to the driving range with my brother-in-law.  I consistently sliced my shots onto the road.

Barb told her friend’s granddaughter about my problem hitting the ball straight.  She said I needed to shorten my backswing.

I went out again to the driving range with my sister.  I tried using a shorter backswing.  I was amazed when all my shots went straight down the range.

Barb told her friend's granddaughter. She was very happy for me.  She said that now I can enjoy the great game of golf.

That encouraged me to actually try out the park course.  I went out one afternoon with my sister and her husband.

I used my newly shortened backswing and kept the ball on the fairway all afternoon.

Then on the last hole with houses on the right, I thought, "I have to hit the ball straight to not hit the houses".  I took my short backswing and sliced the ball.  There was a big bang when the ball hit a house.  One of the neighbours came out to see what made the noise.  We couldn’t find the ball and the owner of the house that I hit didn’t seem to be home.  I thought the ball had gone right across the street and into a house a long way from the fairway.

On the drive home, we looked for my ball.    We found the ball not too far off the fairway.  The house that I hit had obviously been hit many times because there were dents all over the siding.

I didn’t feel like playing again.

Blue

I did play golf with my sister and her husband once before I left Florida.  Barb decided to come out to watch us when she finished with her stitching group.

She drove around on the golf cart.  She drove past the people who we bought our place from.  They asked where she was going.  She said she was looking for me on the golf course.

They said, "Is that him in the blue shirt?"  Barb said, "Yes that’s him".  They said, “Does he where blue shirts all the time?”

When we got back to Canada, Barb went out and bought me some golf shirts in other colours.

Guessing

Sarah phoned to tell us how hard her bio-chem exam was.  There were 30 multiple choice questions with four possible answers for each.

She asked me to calculate the probability of passing the exam if she guessed at all the questions.

I quickly wrote a simulation.  I simulated 100 exams of 30 questions with a chance of 25% of getting the right answer on any question.

There were no cases in which the results were over 15 correct.

I calculated the number of cases with more than 10 correct answers.  There were 10 cases.  There were 80 cases of more than 5 correct answers.

I realized I could use the binomial probability distribution to calculate the exact values.  The binomial distribution confirmed the results of my simulation.

I developed a graph of the probability of having X of more correct answers in a 30 question exam.

I asked Sarah if she wanted me to email her the graph.  She said, ‘No’.

But she said she didn’t mind me blogging about it.

 

Pay As You Go

When we got back to Canada, Barb realized that we hadn't renewed our pay-as-you-go cellphone.

Barb and I share a cellphone. It is a deal with Rogers that allows us to pay only when you use it.

We almost never use the cellphone.  It is good to have when we are travelling in case of emergency. I also use it in the summer if I have to make calls from the softball diamond.

So Barb phoned Rogers and pleaded with them to renew her cellphone. They let her renew it.

I was at a fastball meeting last week. One of the guys asked me what my cellphone number was. I didn't have the cellphone with me. The guys laughed when I couldn't remember my number.

We were at a bar with wifi. So I got my iPod hooked in and emailed Barb at home. She emailed me back the cellphone number.  So I told the guys.

The next time I left the house I brought the cellphone.

Fun with FORTRAN

The fastball season was coming quickly.  I had to get back into my fastball administration. I found out about the player draft for my fastball league in Glen Cairn.

I had the schedule for the Greater Ottawa Fastball League.

 

I got out the FORTRAN scheduling program that I wrote last year. It tried to minimize the number of conflicts for the Glen Cairn league by working around the GOFL.

Unfortunately, my compiler in Windows didn't work anymore. So I got a FORTRAN compiler for Linux and copied my program over to it.  It was old-fashioned but worked fine.

I revised my FORTRAN program and made it even better than last year. I was able to get a schedule that had just one conflict for each team in Glen Cairn.

My team captain had  asked to play most of his games on Monday. I was able to schedule 10 of the his 17 games on Monday.

Then I ran the FORTRAN program again with my Trend Arlington league. Myself and another guy played in Glen Cairn. So I de-conflicted the Trend Arlington league with Glen Cairn.

As I expected, I had scheduled 10 Monday nights in which I would be playing a game at 6:30 in one league and a 8:30 game in the other league.

Designated Hitter

In the Glen Cairn Men's Fastball League, there is an equalization draft. The captains are allowed to protect 6 players from the previous year. The other players go into the draft. The last place team from the previous year has the first pick in the draft.

I got an email from my team captain. He wanted to tell me that he wasn't protecting me. He was getting a friend into the league who only played first base. So he didn't need me. He said that he appreciated me helping him manage the team. He said that I was one of the most consistent hitters on the team.  But he just didn't have anywhere for me to play because I was only a first baseman.

I said that if I was still available, he could draft me. I would be a designated player who didn't play defence but only batted.

Being on the executive, I was sent the team lists after the draft. I was picked by my last year's team captain. I guess I will be a designated hitter this year.

Getting Settled

Because of the two day drive, Barb was behind on her favourite television shows. One of the first things she tried was taping her shows on Rogers On Demand.

The VCR didn't work. So she tried another VCR. It didn't work either.

When Julia got home from work, she said that Rogers had figured out how to stop people from taping the On Demand channel.

Barb phoned Rogers to see how she could watch television on the internet like she did in Florida. She had to negotiate a new deal to get more bandwidth and a high speed modem.

When it was all straightened out, she was able to watch her shows on her computer in the evenings in the livingroom while I worked on the computer just like in Florida.

Small Consolations

We weren't back long before we noticed a few nice things about our house in Canada.

First, the toilets were more modern. We didn't have to hold the handle down until they had completely flushed. I still did though out of habit. Barb never figured out how to flush the toilets in our Florida place. She was jealous of my mastery of the toilets.

Second, the kitchen tap didn't drip. Our kitchen tap in Florida dripped badly. I had a particularly tough time figuring out how to get it to stop dripping. I would regularly fill up the water jug with the drips. Barb had the touch with the tap. She was able to get it to stop dripping.  She tried to teach me but I didn't have the touch.

Finally, the coffee pot in Canada poured without dripping on the counter. Neither of us could figure out how to pour coffee in Florida without it dripping all over the counter when we poured.

These small consolations made it feel better to be back.

Welcome to Canada

My sister said that she likes to stay in Florida until May.  The weather can still be miserable in Canada in April.

We thought about getting an extension on our medical insurance so we could stay another week or so. However, Barb's friends would be all gone. Barb thought that staying was simply avoiding the inevitable. So we left as scheduled on the 10^th of April.

On the second day of our drive as we were travelling through New York state, we went through a snow storm. It was slushy snow. When the trucks passed, it was hard to see the road.

We drove through the storm. It got nicer as we got into Canada. The rest of the drive was uneventful.

We got in on Thursday afternoon. There was a weather warning on the television. There was supposed to be freezing rain over night and all day Friday.

We were lucky that we weren't travelling on Friday. However, my sister was right. Next year, we will plan to stay until May.

Sketchy

We started planning our drive to Canada. I thought about booking a hotel ahead. I wanted a place that was more than halfway along. However, I wanted to get through West Virginia because I thought it was a little sketchy there.  I didn't end up booking a hotel but I found out the names of the towns about where we might like to stop.

On our route, when we were ready to stop, we looked at GPS "Betsy" to find motels close by. We found a Knights Inn that I thought would be nice but cheap. 

I had stayed in a Knights Inn in Orlando when I went to the fastball tournament.  I thought it was a good deal.

The Knights Inn was right off the highway.

I went in to the office and asked about the price. The man behind the desk said it would be $50. I said I thought it would be more like $40. He asked me if I had a discount card. I said I didn't. I turned to leave. Then he said he would give me the discount anyway. I got the room for $45 dollars.

I asked for a king-size bed. He gave me a key for a room around the back.

When I went back out the car, Barb said she didn't want a room around the back. We drove around back. There was a sketchy couple sitting outside their room smoking and drinking.

Barb didn't want the couple watching us unpack the car. So we went back to the office. I got a room in the front with double beds. Barb thought the room was nice.

We unpacked the car, had a little to eat, checked our email using the wifi and went to sleep.

The next morning we packed up the car.  We went to the lobby for coffee and donuts. Then we got some gas and hit the road.

It wasn't long before I saw a sign saying Welcome to Maryland. I realized that we had stayed overnight in West Virginia. No wonder it was sketchy.

Weird

Barb's best friend at the park had visitors from Indiana for a Spring Break. Her daughter and her granddaughter came for a week. They spent most days lying in the sun trying to get a tan. In the evenings, they invited Barb over for games.

Barb played games with them every night until past midnight. I was an evening bachelor.

They played card games that Barb thought were familiar put had slightly different rules than Barb was used to. Every time they told her an unusual rule, Barb said, “That's just weird”.

This became a habit for Barb after a week. From then on, everything that was unusual was “weird” to Barb.

It amazed me how much stuff was “weird”.

Almost Unstoppable

Barb played in a few Pickleball tournaments in the area. She met some good players from other retirement villages. Before we left for Canada, the people from the different parks decided to hold a little competition among themselves. Barb was the only player from our park.

It turned out that she was the big winner of the day. Everyone who played with her won.  Barb had the highest combined score for both the women and the men.

She got an email from a lady from Ottawa who was also in the tournament. The lady said she wanted to send the tournament scores to the Pickleball players in Ottawa to tell them how well Barb did.

The lady said Barb was almost unstoppable.

Barb's comment to me was what did she mean 'almost'. She was unstoppable.

Later when we got back to Canada, my sister phoned us from Florida.  She told Barb that her name was in the paper for this tournament. She said she mailed it to us, so Barb could show the Ottawa Pickleball players.

To Golf or Not to Golf

My brother-in-law gave me a set of his old golf clubs, some golf balls and tees. My sister took me out to the driving range. She said that I hit the golf too wildly to play on the tight fairways of the golf couse in the park. She wanted to take me to a golf course in town here in Florida. I didn't really want to but she is quite determined.

The next night I had a dream about decision trees. I started thinking about how I could use a decision tree to decide whether I should golf or not.

The first question I asked myself was “What would I like about playing golf?” 

The only thing I could think of was that I would make new friends in the park if I played on Men's day and Canadian's day.

From this, I concluded that if I played golf, it would have to be in the park. So playing on an outside course was of no interest to me.  Therefore, I would need to learn how to control my shots to play on the narrow fairways of the park 's course.

I was stuck with various pros and cons of playing golf in the park. So I decided to do a multi-criteria decision analysis.

I thought of four criteria: Making Friends, Wasting Time, Losing the Ability to Sleep In, the Expense.

Since there were only two options: Play Golf in the Park or Not Play Golf, I only needed to consider the options by the criteria as 0's and 1's.

	Weights	0.50	0.17	0.17	0.17	1
	Options
Criteria		Make Friends	Waste Time	Lost Sleep	Cost	Total
	Play Inside	1	0	0	0	0.50
	Do Not Play	0	1	1	1	0.50

Then I looked at the value of making friends compared to the costs of wasting time, losing sleep and paying fees. I figured that the three costs were equally valued. Then the value of making friends would have to be equal to the value of the sum of the costs for the options to be equally desirable.

Thus, to make playing golf worthwhile, making friends would need to be:

a.  more than three times as valuable as saving time, 

b.  more than three times as valuable as sleeping in, and 

c.  more than three times as valuable as saving money.

I don't know if this helps.

I know I like to sleep in. I have a lot of other things that I would rather spend my time doing than playing golf. Also, golf is very expensive compared to my other hobbies.

So how much would I like to make new friends?