⛳ Spring 2022: Is there anything more fun than golf?
It’s late spring, but the PNW has been slow to warm up. I’ve been playing muddy golf in raincoats and a parka. I can tell I genuinely like golf because I like it even when it’s not supposed to be good — similar to tea for me, I like fancy tea more, but I enjoy Lipton tea microwaved in a mug.
JP and I started to whack golf balls at the driving range last year a few weeks after Froggy was born. JP was a natural, and I managed to make contact, maybe 1 in 10 balls. Since then, I’ve progressed to playing the children’s par-three nine-hole, and we’re now we’re smacking airborne balls all around the municipal courts. Golf is everything I ever wanted in a hobby! Golf is:
An outdoor activity that is not too strenuous or physically unpleasant but long in duration to unwind. I like hiking but wished the food and drink were better, and we didn’t have to go up so many hills. Golf is like hiking with all the hard parts taken away!!
Small group socialization with just enough structure to provide comfort to new or introverted friends but not so much structure that it hides the ability to connect with another human. Boardgames are great at giving a comfortable, structured experience, but they’re so structured I always leave feeling like I didn’t connect or learn anything deeper about the other players.
You play a single-player game by yourself, against yourself, but as part of a group. I desire to socialize but strongly prefer solitary activities.
Interestingly, JP is the inverse of me - he’s introverted but enjoys hobbies with other people.
Software engineering pre-pandemic was also A+ for this balancing act in the same way. It’s this great solitary activity, but anytime you want, you can pop over to the common area to socialize with many people doing the same activity! It is the golf of jobs! Or is golf the software engineering of hobbies? [0]
Of course, some things are better than golf! Froggy is now regularly sleeping through the night!!!! 9 pm to 8 am. WAHOOO.
Froggy has picked up a whole roster of new nicknames. I like to greet him in the morning with his full title: Froggy Handsome Pooh Bear, his Italian grandpa calls him Tesoro (sweetheart), and JP calls him Munchkin.
Froggy loves planes and birds. He has spidery plane senses. Anytime we are walking around, and a plane flies over us, he’ll be the first to notice it and point it out to us. Birds are 80% as exciting to him as planes - I suspect he understands a bit more how birds work since he sees them take off. We’re thinking of taking him to an airfield to watch some planes take off, but we’re not sure if he can link the concept that the aircraft taking off is what he sees in the sky.
He’s learned to walk, and his primary indoor interest is figuring out how things work around the house. He’s mastered sliding doors. Recently, he’s been into buttons - anything with a circle on it, he’ll press to see if anything happens. Some hits, he can turn JP’s computer and most of the kitchen appliances on and off. Some misses; he’s been pressing all the bolts on the outside of our car to no effect.
He figured out how to ride down the giant kid slide, which didn’t impress JP. I was like, damn, this kid is brilliant. Froggy can climb stairs, so he went up to the top of the playground, but there was seemingly no safe way to ride down alone. There was a gap at the bottom for older kids to stand up and walk away. Froggy stayed at the top for a while thinking, turned 180 degrees, backed into the slide, and rode down backward on his tummy.
Froggy is an adventure toddler now! We’ve taken him kayaking a few times - very good for bird and plane watching. I’ve been training his little walking legs so he can go hiking with us soon too.
Between Froggy hitting toddlerhood and much of the world re-opening, it feels like we’ve been everywhere doing everything. A hodgepodge of updates:
We went on a Florida/Mexico cruise with two other couples, one of my favorite vacations. I was curious about cruises as a theoretical subject because the person who owned our house before us worked for a cruise line. Cruises are very highly segmented: some for oldies who are retired, others are spring break party cruises, and we found Celebrity which has Cirque du Soleil style shows, all you can eat food in the form factor of beautifully plated pasta served on Heath ceramics, and a martini bar with live singers crooning out Backstreet Boy remixes. Totally solid wifi too. I’d previously thought cruises were not good because I thought it was an inauthentic way of experiencing a destination, but I now think the purpose of a cruise is to authentically experience the ship, which is its own unique world, and the ports are extensions of the cruise experience.
I feel the same about Las Vegas. You can look down on Vegas and say, ah, the Venetian is but a shallow imposer of the Venice, or you can say Las Vegas is a first-class experience precisely because it has this totally extra Venice recreation compound (where the water is cleaner and the top dog restaurant serves Peking Duck)
I’ve somewhat learned to juggle! A teammate told me you could learn in 10 min and be doing it with some consistency within an hour, and I was like, huh, that can’t be true...but it was!
I left Stripe and started a company called Aqueduct with my friend Abdul.
I went on a medical odyssey to deal with lower back and shoulder pain. It all started after a marathon 3-day working bender. Definitely not healthy, but sometimes I’d done before, and some good sleep and maybe a nice massage would always sort it out pronto. Except I was still actively distracted by the discomfort a week later this time.
I tried everything: Running, stretching, weightlifting, rock climbing, the chiropractor, the physical therapist, medical massages, Chinese massages, sleeping 8 hours a day, and clocking in 10k of steps per day. I even cut out golf because it takes so much time to be so healthy every day.
The lower back pain went away quickly (I’ll primarily credit the chiro for that), but nothing worked for the shoulder pain. One night I’m off on my youtube rabbit hole researching exotic shoulder stretches when I see a physical therapist say shoulder tension often responds well to dry needling (where they stick a needle in the tight muscle), which seems somewhat plausible. I’m thinking acupuncturists do much more work with needles than physical therapists, so I decide to book an appointment with an acupuncturist and ask them to do the dry needling instead.
I get there. The acupuncturist holds my wrist, gives me a long spiel about my Qi energy being low which will make acupuncture a tiring healing process for me, and then sticks a bunch of tiny needles in my feet. I lay there for 20 minutes with the needles and leave convinced this is total quackery. That evening I’m hanging out with Felix at the park. BAM, out of nowhere, I’m so tired, I can’t keep my eyes open. We rush home, I barely manage to crawl into bed, sleep for 12 hours, and when I wake up, the shoulder pain is gone and has been gone since!! [1]
I’ve thrilled to be experiencing this moment because it hums with possibilities and the adventure of the unknown. Shoulder cured, I have a world of golf courses left to explore. Froggy is growing into his own person. I’m off to explore new professional frontiers (as is JP who transitioned to engineering management). We’re impossibly busy but never bored.
[0] There’s one other great thing about this software engineer as a job business. I always got into trouble in school for being too fidgety and talking too much. I’d be told that this is for your own good as this is practice for having a REAL job. I finally get my first internship at a tech start-up, and on the first day, I chipperly ask my mentor when I’m allowed to talk to other coworkers, how often I’m allowed to use the restroom, and whether I need approval from him!! Poor guy was probably terrified that I would actually ask for permission every time I needed to use the loo.
[1] I’m not sure what the learning is here besides exercise is good and no more marathon working benders in my old age.
Initially, I thought chiropractors seemed quacky and was spooked when my chiropractor showed me a video about subluxations and how lack of spine alignment causes everything from diabetes to allergies. However, the actual treatment was reasonable: you have lower back and neck pain from slouching too much; here are some x-ray videos showing you that; we want to adjust your spine and have you strengthen some muscles. I’m now going through their 12-week program. In practice, they fixed the lower back pain in like the 2nd session, and I haven’t noticed a huge difference. After treatment, when I move my neck around, I feel it more cracking/rattling - which I’ll optimistically take it that they did get some misaligned stuff unstuck.
My physical therapist does a lot of stretching and targeted exercises with me. She is the most strict personal trainer I’ve had. I’ve learned that I used to be stretching at like 2/10 intensity. When she stretches me at like 8/10 intensity, I’m way more flexible the next day.
I’m slightly more of a massage skeptic for my set of issues. Used to ad hoc get massages after a flight or a big hike or w/e, and it was pretty good at relieving 2/10 discomfort. It seemed less effective than stretching for more significant amounts of discomfort, and I was often sore the next day after a massage but not after stretching. One exception is that I did find massage pretty good for neck soreness — perhaps because there are limited ways to stretch all the nooks in the neck.
I’m torn on this acupuncture thing. On the one hand, I’m “cured” now and find the Qi explanation challenging to accept. The actual treatment is bit boring as the needles take 2 min to stick in but then you have to lay in the dark for 30 min and focus on “moving” your Qi. On the other hand, it’s 100% the MVP that saved the day. The actual recommendation for restoring my Qi is reasonable (I need to be asleep from 11 pm to 3 am), and I should do more of the thing that worked. I was willing to get past my skepticism about the chiro subluxations, so maybe acupuncture Qi should be the same?