Remember my earlier quote from this book Don’t Squat With Yer Spurs On? Here are a couple more gems.
Don’t never interfere with something that ain’t botherin’ you none.
This one may be limited but I think you can apply it to many situations.
Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
One Last thought from Mr Bender
Every quarrel is a Private one. Outsiders are never welcome.
We’ll have some more of these nuggets in future posts. Stay tuned.
As it gained popularity and spread to the U.S., the advances in production of rubber balls by Charles Goodyear set Americans to bouncing balls over nets on their croquet lawns. Shrubbery shielded the surge in popularity of women playing with men. A lighter form of “lawn tennis,” followed, called badminton, because it required less space and ball-catching shrubbery or fences.
Today, with all the online and techno temptations for families to dive into, taking it outside means connecting more than competing.
nedwards@salisburypost.com If you had closed your eyes and walked into South Rowan High School’s stadium on Saturday morning, aside from falling down the stairs, you might have thought you were in the middle of a basketball or baseball game. Or at least a rousing round of tug-o-war. You would have been wrong. The stadium actually played host to a cornhole toss Saturday. Cornhole, as in that game they set up in a carnival midway that involves throwing bean bags at a board with a hole in it. Sixteen teams competed ferociously with one another for the $100 prize. Competitors cheered on their partners with phrases such as “Keep it up,” “Calm down,” and “We got ‘em right where we want ‘em.” They trash talked, making references to people’s mothers. They strategized and calculated, meticulously kept score and charted it with brackets, refreshed themselves with bottles of water and wiped sweat from their foreheads. Pretty intense for a lawn game. The competition was emblematic of a growing cornhole-playing population. A Google search turns up rules, competitions, associations, terminology pages and news. One Facebook group for cornhole — there are several — has more than 104,500 members, and another has nearly 80,000. Official cornhole rules determine that opposing boards must be 27 feet away from each other. Each bean bag that lands in the hole scores three points. Each one to land on the board scores one point. After a player from each team has tossed four bags, the teams — made of two players — count their own points and subtract the higher number from the lower, and that’s the point total of that round, going to the team with the higher points, of course. And it goes on like that until one team scores 21. Teams play for charity sometimes or just pool their money and award the winner the take. Saturday’s tournament raised money for the South Rowan Public School Bible Teaching Association — basically to fund a Bible history elective at South Rowan High School. Each team paid $20 to compete, plus concessions, of which they were strongly encouraged to partake. Bennett Hester, chairman of the association’s board, hoped the organization would walk away with a couple thousand dollars from the day. Pretty good, considering that only a few months prior most of the members of the board had never even heard of cornhole. The idea for the tournament was pastor and board member Steve Sprinkle’s. People in his church play, and he suggested it as a supplement to the organization’s annual golf tournament, held this year on Oct. 24. Pete Kluttz from the association made 10 boards, Sprinkle put them together and painted them a solid color, and his wife, Ann Sprinkle, painted logos of sports teams and the Bible Teaching Association. Just the painting took four or five hours per board, Ann Sprinkle said. Daisy Rodgers, the mother of the group’s treasurer, made the bags for the tournament and extra bags to sell. Hester said he hopes to see more people come if they hold the event again next year, but for the first year he was happy to have so many serious competitors. “It just kind of surprised me,” Hester said. “I’ve been around a long time and I never heard of it.” Tim Pate, who’s been playing about six years, heard of it from his boss, an Ohio native. He said he thinks it’s more of a Midwest game. “Now the Southerners own it,” said Jeff Royston, Pate’s teammate. Several competitors at Saturday’s event were veterans of the sport. Bubba Renken and Mugsy Helms, both of China Grove, came in third place in this year’s state cornhole championship and fourth the year before. “It’s good competition for 30-year-old men,” Renken said. “It’s something you can do in your backyard and your wife won’t fuss at you.” Renken and Helms were topped in state championship play by two other men competing on Saturday. Andy Huffman of China Grove and Richard Yates of Salisbury are the reigning state champions of cornhole, and have been for two years. Apparently they have a knack because they hadn’t really played much before. Yates was driving through Raleigh and heard an announcement on the radio about the state championship tournament and thought it would be fun. And it was. It didn’t hurt that he and Huffman walked away with custom cornhole sets, which sell for $200 or more, after beating 63 teams in 2008 and 95 teams this year.no cash prize for that contest. Saturday’s tournament made them each $50 richer though; they won their way through the bracket, beating the final team in a back-to-back matchup, and became that competition’s champion team as well. Don’t think it was an easy victory, though. A few teams, including the one that came in second place, were made of people from a cornhole troop, of sorts. The Kannapolis Regulators get together and travel the region — as close as their own houses and as far as South Carolina — playing cornhole. They hold tournaments for restaurants that want to drum up business. “We play every Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday,” said Don Mackling, who bills himself their president. “We do it for charity. Plus to help us win money,” said Jason Van Buren. The Kannapolis Regulators had eight people in Saturday’s tournament. They played Friday night until late and were hoping to finish in China Grove early enough to enter a tournament in Charlotte later on Saturday. (For the record, the China Grove contest went long into the afternoon, and the Regulators were fairly involved in the competition, not to mention the cheering and trash talking.) “Where else can you play a sport that you can do it with a beer in your hand?” said Van Buren. So it’s not the NFL. But between the sweating and the spitting, evaluating which boards to play on and which bags to toss — all the bags are a pound, but the players preferred larger and looser ones to those stuffed tightly — and the “ohhhh”-ing and color commentary from spectators, Saturday’s five-hour competition had the tense moments and frequent victories of more traditional sporting games. “You wouldn’t think there’d be this much drama,” Roxanne Johnson, South Rowan Bible teacher, said. “It gets worse when it’s not a church function,” Helms said. Several versions of this game can be found at: http://tinyurl.com/l9u7ex |
No-cost activities like playing on tire swings and jungle gyms are just a couple of things that not only encourage kids to exercise but also won’t increase the family deficit. With all the headlines being about balancing budgets – here are five old fashioned ideas that will keep your family in the black.
1. Red Light Green Light – It stands a good distance off from the rest of the kids, with their back. It calls, “Green Light!” and the children run toward them until they say, “Red Light”. It turns around and tries to catch anyone who is moving. If they see someone moving, they must go back to the start line. Play continues until someone runs up and tags It.
2. Red Rover Red Rover – Kids line up in two lines, each line holding hands and facing the other. The two lines should be some distance apart for running back and forth. The first line chooses a runner from the other line to call, saying “Red Rover, Red Rover, Let [chosen child] come over.” That child runs to the other line, trying to break through the hands of two children. If the runner breaks through, he chooses someone from that line and takes them back to his line. If he doesn’t break through, he joins that line. The game ends when all children are in one line.
3. Hula Hoop Contest – Great for a small group of children. Play music to make it more fun. At the ‘Go’ signal, players begin ‘hula hooping’ as long as they can. If the hula hoop drops or players touch it with their hands, they’re out!
4. Outdoor Scavenger Hunt - Give players or teams the printed list of nature items to find. The first player or team to report back with all of their items wins the prize.
5. Jump Rope Relay Race – Form two teams and set the boundaries of the race. At the ‘Go’ signal, the first two players race to the goal and back, jumping rope. The next player goes, and so on, until the winning team is declared.
Families that have fallen into the trap of high budget fun are forgetting that a family is about spending time together, not about spending money together. What you kids what from you the most is your time. By spending time pushing them on tire swings and playing outdoor games – you’re not only saving money, you’re investing in a strong relationship with your kids. Invest in your family’s future and decrease the family deficit with time together in the backyard.
Next time you have a bad day at work, think of this guy. Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which was sponsoring a “worst job experience” contest. Needless to say, she won.
“Hi Sue, Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all. “Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this:
We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I realized what had happened. “The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. “His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut. So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. “Now repeat to yourself, “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.” And whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself: is this a “jellyfish bad day?”
Sometimes we need to get out of the back yard. I found this site where you can find something to do wherever you are or may wish to go as an RV’r or on vacation. Check out the link and watch the movie of explanation.
“Dad… I’m bored!”. “There’s nothing to do!” How many times have you heard those in your life? How many times have you said it yourself? I remember in college, I went to a small school in a small town, we’d sit in our dorm rooms and complain about not having anything to do.
The Goby website has brought Web 2.0 to choosing your own adventure.
The interface is simple to use, you just put in a keyword of what you want to do, where you want to do it and when you’d like it to happen. Clicking on “Search” then provides you a list of opportunities in your area to take advantage of your request.
The display you receive is a nicely arranged and organized list of possible matches, and from my own search, very accurate matches of my desired results. Provided with a map of the area used in your request and links to more information and the source website.
So, the next time you’re bored and looking for something to do in your city, or perhaps if you’re visiting a new city and looking for an event or activity to fill some time between business meetings or other responsibilities. Go uncover something to do with Goby.
Uncover some fun for your and your family with the Goby website
