Rocking it at the Curling Rink

Here is one of my personal updates that's unrelated to either anime or manga.

A good throw (the blue stone, my team) and a very good throw (the red stone), neither of which are placed there by me, but I took them both out with my stone soon after.

As some of you might know, I'm currently working full-time as a co-op at a tech company doing some hardware-related development work. Recently I went to one of those company-sponsored team-building events, and this time the event is playing curling. For those of you who don't know what curling is, curling is a winter sport similar to lawn bowling (what the heck is lawn bowling?) , but instead of playing with balls on a lawn, you play curling on a sheet of ice with heavy and polished pieces of granite. Basically, curling is a sport that puts more emphasis on control and strategy rather than pure athleticism, which is good news for me since I'm anything but athletic. This is the first time I played curling and it's only the second winter sports I've tried after ice skating (shoveling snow doesn't really constitute as a sport, but it is a good workout). I don't ski, snowboard, and I suck at skating which rules out ice hockey, so really curling is the only winter sport where I can have fun without falling over 200 times in the process.

After arriving at the local curling club, we were split up into teams of four and teams were matched up in pairs so we can start playing. The people at the curling club gave us a basic overview of the rules and taught us the newbie technique so that we can throw (proper curling term, but the action is "slide" since nobody can hurl a 40lb piece of granite that far) the curling stone/rock down to the opposite end. We are also given grippers so we don't take a spill, and curling brooms so we can look pretend to be pros, but nobody is expecting us to sweep anyways. Most of the guys who went were first or second-time curlers, and it was quickly evident that none of the eight people in my group (including me) really knew how to curl, so I wasn't at much of a disadvantage. Funny enough, I actually did quite well compared to everyone I was playing with. I scored or at least played a role in 3 of the 5 points that my team got and we won (or were leading) 5-3 after six ends (curling term for a round) before time ran out. Like pretty much everybody there, I didn't know how to control the distance since the strength difference between throwing too far and not far enough is actually quite small, but at least I knew how to keep my rocks going in a straight line. Placing the rocks inside the target circles depended a lot on luck, but I had no problem taking out rocks that were already in the circle. Takeouts are the best part of curling anyways, so at least I got that part right to a reasonable degree. Other than throwing rocks, I also actively swept using the broom, but whether or not the sweeping had any effect is up in the air.

Overall my first curling experience was quite enjoyable. Curling might not be much of a spectator sport, but playing it was pretty fun, especially since my team won thanks to my heroics lol. Having played curling, I can now proclaim that I'm a true resident of the Great White North, and I'm glad to have found a winter sport that I don't suck really bad at.

As for my co-op life outside of curling, I've been working on the same project every since I started at the company. I spend the majority of my time doing some feature implementation to Python scripts and FPGA firmware. It's a reasonably challenging and interesting job, much better than doing straight quality assurance. Time sure passes pretty fast when I'm working co-op, but there are still five more months to go before school starts for me again. In this five months I'll try to get my GRE scores, narrow down my list of graduate schools to apply to, and pick my final year courses. Definitely a lot of stuff to do, and here I am wasting time writing on this blog. Well, it's not called “A Product of Wasted Time” for nothing.