Not Exactly As Planned

While interesting, this weekend didn’t exactly go as planned. What weekend does, amiright?

So What Did I Do?
On Friday night I hung out and home and randomly watched One Wall: Kings Of Coney Island, a movie about one-wall handball. I watched it on my iPad! As a kid in New York I played both one-wall handball and paddleball, sports which I never saw again after moving to Florida. For me watching the movie was a throwback to my youth in Queens. If you have no connection to handball watching this movie it will be ninety minutes of your life wasted, however if you do have history with the sport I can highly recommend watching it.

After sleeping late and bumming around on Saturday I finally walked up to the village for the East Atlanta Strut around 3pm. I’d like to say that I sat around and watch Florida beat Tennessee, which looked promising at the half; I’m glad that I can say that I didn’t watch Florida’s collapse either. Nearly immediately after arriving at the Strut I found a cadre of hashers. We hung out together, drinking (surprise!), listening to some music, and hearing some comedy. At some point I texted Betsy, who I heard was also in the village, to find out she was sitting at SoBa so I wandered over there to see her. We hung out for a few hours before trying to, but failing, to get her home. It’s too long of a story to recount here, but suffice to say she made it home thanks to another hasher.

At Strut I also saw a few reformed hashers in the form of Martha and Jerry, and Ashley and Jim. In fact perhaps the only people I didn’t see who I figured that I’d run into were ITP-Reader Jenka and Kevin.

I was going to ride on Sunday (“going to” but not “going” is the new standard for my riding these days) but that didn’t happen. Around 10am I went out with the new string trimmer and cleaned up the curbside, then I managed to lug some fallen limbs to the cleaned-off curb, and then mowed the lawn; holy shit, it was nearly 1pm by the time I completed these tasks and showered and sat down to watch a little football. The afternoon plan was to head to Streets Alive and wander the closed-off streets, but an emergency occurred and I had to drive someone to a doc-in-a-box to get some stitches after losing a battle with a can. My reward for being available to help was a trip to Oz Pizza in East Point.

It was at Oz’s bar counter that I experienced one of the strangest acts of passive aggressiveness I have ever seen. To get a better view of the football games we stepped up to the bar, which had three chairs, one occupied by a man and another by his briefcase. I asked the very well dressed man if I could “steal” the chair in which his briefcase sat. I should interject that there was plenty of room for him to place his precious bag on the floor by his chair, or even on the bar. Instead, he looked at me and said nothing, rather sneering at me as if I asked him to place an infant on the floor. We grabbed a fourth chair and started to make due with less than half of the bar space when the man got up, and moved with his bag from the bar to a table. WTF? I was obviously bothered by this man’s actions, and kept trying to convince myself that it was his problem instead of mine. I even considered getting up and confronting the guy at his new table, but figured it would be best to let the situation drop.

No ITP Flickr Pic
Hmmm, not shooting again. Bad Paulie.

Speaking Of Situations
On Friday I received an email from Woodspur Lodge in Winter Park, Colorado (where the Colorado Invihash was held) informing me that they were charging me $76 for damage I caused to the rug in my room. I asked if I could get a photo of the damage, but they said that they were unable to do so, and described the damage as “alcohol spilled on the rug”. This seems plausible, so I begrudgingly agreed to pay.

A few hours later I received an email from one of the hash organizers asking me about the situation. She informed me that Woodspur tried to charge another hasher $75 to clean a ketchup spill, and that the hash was charged $210 for a water spill that occurred in one of the common spaces. Yesterday Woodspur charged my credit card and the hash has told me that they will reimburse me. I just now need to figure out if my PayPal account is set up to receive payments.

The whole incident left a really bad taste in my mouth for Woodspur. Not that I was ever planning to return to Winter Park, but if I ever do you can bet your bottom dollar that I won’t be staying at Woodspur ever again.

Well Look Who Won This Week!
Woot! I have won the Yahoo! Pick’em Pool side bet this week. $5 coming back to me!

Because I Can
I’ve been negligent mentioning birthdays in this space but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that two ITP-Readers turn officially “old” this week.

Welcome to your fifties, ITP-Reader Debbie and ITP-Reader Randy!

😛

In fact I will be returning to Raleigh on Friday to help Randy celebrate, and to teach him how to avoid breaking a hip.

Goodbye Arnie
At 51 I am too young (not a phrase I get to say often enough these days) to have seen Arnold Palmer in his prime. And when I was starting to be introduced to golf it was Jack Nicklaus’s world.

At 87 Arnold Palmer died yesterday, creating a huge hole in the history of the PGA.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]