My Husband and I Are Not...

the equivalents of Andre Agassi and Anna Kournikova when we hit the tennis courts. For starters, I'm neither blond nor Russian and Darr's neither bald nor American. But that's not where the differences end. We just don't have that primal instinct for guiding the ball via our racket to go where we want it too. I'm a lobber, meaning I consistently hit the ball in a high arc (but, funny enough, also means "to move heavily or clumsily" - I looked it up). And Darr, well, I guess you'd describe him as a shorter. His ball, at least when he serves, moves purposefully to the net...and then it hits the net and falls to the ground on his side. Believe me, our skill levels are the same, we just have different skills. This, of course, makes it considerably more incredible that we're able to volley the ball back and forth at all, which we were able to do by the end of our 45-50 minute session this morning at the courts at Sellwood Park. Beauty the wonder dog was sort of miffed that we tied her to the bench on the sidelines as she clearly saw the bouncing fuzzy balls as her play toys and was distressed that we were playing and she was not included in the game. We hope a short shift of hard play at the park before tomorrow's game will help alleviate some of her anxiety over our game. Although, it's totally possible I'm simply misreading her and that she is actually distressed because we clearly suck so bad at tennis. It's difficult to say for sure.

Side note: Let's talk about "scope creep". Now, those of you involved with projects that have set goals (this is the "scope") are familiar with the fun that can result when goals are "shifted" to allow for extra items to be added (and this is the "creep") to the project. Darr and I experienced a little scope creep last night. Our goal (or the scope) for our project - to purchase a tennis racket and extra tennis balls so we could play tennis in the morning before work. The creep happened when we arrived at G.I. Joe's to find some clearance racks. Um, how do you fight those? You can't. You jump in to the scope creep pool and start swimming. Our scope creep cost us about $120 more than expected, but to be fair we did find some truly great deals. I got two tee-shirts, a sweater, and a hat for my dad, Darr got an Adidas jacket, a biking jersey, and a tee-shirt, and Beauty the wonder dog got an Oregon Ducks dog collar.