Two and a Half Months Isn't Long in the Grand Scheme of Things...

Okay, so it has been two and a half months, but, if I recall, I mentioned something about my lack of focus and follow through on such endeavors, thus this is to be expected.

Reilly is now 8 months old. She is on the verge of crawling, which means my wife and I are on the verge of crawling. Doors, cabinets, and likely the cat will need to be Reilly-proofed. This shouldn't take along at first glance but, as I assume all babies are apt to do, she is able to find the one sharp/rock hard/potentially lethal item in an otherwise perfectly secure room and begin to chew on it. I know this is a never ending project, but it helps to believe that I might actually find a way to secure the house to some degree. Way it goes. She should learn after a while, right? Maybe not.
As yet another sign of AARP membership dues being seemingly right around the corner ... I believe the whole world wasn't as protected when we were kids. You always hear members of the so called Greatest Generation and the Babyboomers saying things like this, but I think Gen. X is there as well. I personally know three people who actually stuck forks, paperclips, et al in light sockets and actually LIVED to tell about it. Now, if you believe the books, magazines, etc., all of these sockets must be covered and everything plugged into these sockets must have some sort of shock guard on the plug. Is this really that big of a problem? How many people are actually killed versus a bit shocked? Does this not teach us the lesson that electricity is not to be trifled with? Hell, I knew those three guys and it still took an ill-gotten plan in a high school physics class for me to learn the simple lessons of electric currents. Everything has to be bigger and better now, which I assume means potentially more deadly.

How are we better as a society for hiding these little "lessons"? You might have to try harder to hurt yourself, and thus learn, but the danger seems to be greater because we have taken away the small things. Is this not like leaving a loaded shotgun, with the safety on, on the floor while you are locking up the Red Rider BB gun because it's dangerous? We all know teens have an acute sense for danger and finding ways around the safeguards we instill, so this would seem to be counter productive, unless of course we are taking these actions to insure the future success of the so-called Darwin Awards. I prefer a world were I can take a BB in the chest (after I missed the GI Joe in my fireplace and the BB richocheted back at me) and say, "Won't do that again! Well, maybe once more ... to prove scientifically that this is a stupid idea ..." But we lived, welts and all, to tell our friends of the misadventures, and sometimes how to perform these experiments themselves. This taught me not only lessons in pain, but also geometry. But I digress ...

The real of point of today's entry is to say that Reilly is getting bigger and more mobile, and I need to start baby-proofing the place, but I still found the desire and call to action to put a driving range in my house. I have been playing golf for years and, on a recent February outing to the course, I noticed that my short game goes to hell during the generally cold Colorado winters. When I lived in Arizona we sometimes had the opposite problem - but we faced the heat by opening the freezer and working our chip shots into the ice-box ("Two points if you stick it in the ice tray, 1 point if it just stays in the freezer.") This cured two problems, both the heat and the loss of "touch." Anyway, for the last couple of winters since my return to Colorado my hallways have become putting greens and my living rooms chipping areas. This works for about half-an-hour on the particularly cold days, but then you are left with nothing but a dented wall and some tournament from the '80s playing on the Golf Channel. And then it hit me ... I now live in a place where I can do something more!

We moved into a house in December that is far bigger than anything we really need at this point in our lives, but the opportunity presented itself and we jumped on it. We have about 60% of the house in use and we had three bedrooms set up as guest bedrooms. Like a bolt of lightning, and blinding avoidance of common sense, it hit me that one of the guestrooms had vaulted ceilings ... now all I had to worry about was convincing Annie that this was indeed a "good" idea ... and making sure a swing wouldn't make those ball-size dents in my previous aprtment's walls look like child's play.

I talked to Annie, ever cautious about using just the right words to make this sound like I was truly gaining something athletic out of this ("I can practice indoors on the coldest days and thus will be working out! No excuses!" I finished my argument, laid all the cards on the table, and waited for the disection of this hairball plan. And then it came, "Sounds like a good idea!" What?! Really?! DONE! I rushed downstairs and got online to figure out what this would cost me and how fast I could get it, because this opinion surely wouldn't last long. The next day I was off to our local golf merchant and by evening I had set up a 10 foot tall driving range in what had been a guestroom with a view a scant 30 minutes before. Our neighbors must wonder, but that's okay - boring neighbors are no fun. Anyway, I now have yet another toy I wished I had as a kid, and have created yet another room that needs to be baby proofed, lest an errant golf shot come flying out the door. More on this later, but my short game could start looking up ...