Tell us a little about yourself.
- Thread starter Psalm 1 guy
- Start date
Thanks for the shoutout @Psalm 1 guy .
The details of my life are quite inconsequential.... Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize; he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament... My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon... luge lessons... In the spring, we'd make meat helmets... When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds — pretty standard, really......oops, that was meant for my group therapy session.
If you have come this far, maybe you are willing to go a little farther...
I have only ever wrestled with my conscience. My athletic background is in swimming. So, if anyone wants to end a disagreement by showing they have better wrestling credentials than I do...well, you all win. After my own children were done competing in sports, I became interested in wrestling from following nephews who wrestled. I have a philosophy that I want to watch people who are better at something than I will ever be at anything. Between my nephews and my niece, who is a ballerina, I got to do that a lot.
But alongside my philosophy, I have a problem. I interact best with the world through numbers. It means I spend way too much time analyzing, and attempting to explain, data sets. Usually I get paid for the privilege. But here it is volunteer work. I have spent a fair amount of time building data sets around college wrestling. And I have been fortunate enough to have others who share the passion, share their data sets with me. I also like to come up with ways to visualize the data (without getting too carried away).
As mentioned on another thread, I have lurked on this board for something like 7 years without setting up an account, until recently. I was content to post my ramblings on Intermat, but recently there has been a change to the ad software over there, making the user experience brutal. So, I thought I would experiment with inundating you guys with my long winded posts. If it helps, I always use paragraphs.
Let's see how that goes.
The details of my life are quite inconsequential.... Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low-grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15-year-old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize; he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes, he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament... My childhood was typical: summers in Rangoon... luge lessons... In the spring, we'd make meat helmets... When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds — pretty standard, really......oops, that was meant for my group therapy session.
If you have come this far, maybe you are willing to go a little farther...
I have only ever wrestled with my conscience. My athletic background is in swimming. So, if anyone wants to end a disagreement by showing they have better wrestling credentials than I do...well, you all win. After my own children were done competing in sports, I became interested in wrestling from following nephews who wrestled. I have a philosophy that I want to watch people who are better at something than I will ever be at anything. Between my nephews and my niece, who is a ballerina, I got to do that a lot.
But alongside my philosophy, I have a problem. I interact best with the world through numbers. It means I spend way too much time analyzing, and attempting to explain, data sets. Usually I get paid for the privilege. But here it is volunteer work. I have spent a fair amount of time building data sets around college wrestling. And I have been fortunate enough to have others who share the passion, share their data sets with me. I also like to come up with ways to visualize the data (without getting too carried away).
As mentioned on another thread, I have lurked on this board for something like 7 years without setting up an account, until recently. I was content to post my ramblings on Intermat, but recently there has been a change to the ad software over there, making the user experience brutal. So, I thought I would experiment with inundating you guys with my long winded posts. If it helps, I always use paragraphs.
Let's see how that goes.
That opening paragraph promised a kindred soul. When you went to numbers, I really was hooked. Welcome to our weird world. My wife and I recently rescued a toy rat terrier. He had to be neutered. We bought him toys and vests. One had dinosaurs on it. That reminded me of a good friend who had cards he would hand out that included "dinosaurs neutered." We now tell people that our pup, Ziggy, takes his protection duties seriously. His claim to fame is that he neuters dinosaurs. The proof is obvious. No one has seen a dinosaur on our block since he moved in. He sneaks up behind them, jumps up and bites off their nuts.
Time for a new paragraph. At 78 I start each day with a killer sudoku. Once I solve it I can check the obits. If I don't find mine, I get up. Later this morning I will make an omelet and tell Ziggy I'm using the last of the pterodactyl eggs and give him a taste. For a late lunch I'll defrost a hunk of beef and cook up a brontosaurus steak for him. Not sure he understands a word beyond treat, but he sure gets excited. He wore a Penn State wrestling shirt to watch their football team win last night and will wear similar gear while sitting on my lap and watching every wrestling match I can see this season.
Our training is going slowly, but he has accepted us as staff and is gracious enough to let us live in his home. As long as we cater to his whims, pay the bills. shop, clean, take him everywhere and provide weekly play dates with neighborhood dogs, he seems happy. We're slow in picking up his version of doglish, so when he really needs to have us listen closely, he jumps on one of us when we're lying down and stares. If he's been fed recently and his dish has water, then he wants to go out. Hope you enjoy this board.
Rich
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Was your father really the Pain de campagne you portray?
Seriously, that was good, especially the part about accusing chestnuts of sloth and about the funniest thing I've seen this week.
Alas, I cannot take credit for the genius of Mike Myers.
Stu retired my sophomore year of high school. Moved to Florida. See him once a year at a golf tournament. Believe it or not he still plays softball. Mansfield U. hall of Famer
Update: I'm 60 now, and moved to Lexington, VA this summer, while continuing to work out of DC 2-3 days a week and from home. Live in an updated place built in 1884, where I'll probably eventually die from a fall due to the floors being a little caddy-wumpus. We have a carriage house with a finished suite upstairs if you're ever looking to visit the town. Kids are now "officially" out of the house, with jr. working on his aerospace Ph.D. at UVA in hypersonics and my daughter working at Home Depot corporate and dating a fine young man in Georgia.
Let me just say that it's shocking how much friendlier people are than in DC, and how much easier it is to "eat local" (even though I don't obsess about that sort of thing). Mrs. A and I are loving the ability to ride our bikes (visit Goshen pass if you have the chance) and hike (BRP/AT) in the mountains, catch a lecture at W&L or VMI, or just chew the fat with neighbors over the town history. (Funny story -- our neighbor, two doors down, turned out to be a woman my father taught in Camp Hill high school in 1962.) Better yet, I love the fact that if I walk outside and smell a skunk, it is actually a skunk that I smell. When I sit on my back porch in the evening, I have become, in the words of Dan Tyminski, a slow sun sinking, good time thinking, whiskey drinking man.
Really looking forward to the idea that, this winter, I can walk 5-10 minutes from my house to VMI to catch some D1 wrestling.
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we should hook up at a uva match sometime... I make it to my place in Hightown a few times a month - overlooking the blue grass valley - so I know what you are referring to. Enjoy the scenery!
uva wrestles at vmi on 12/7, along with Edinboro and King University (alma mater of sarah hildebrandt)
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will have to look into that... I stated UVa as it is in the directly line between Hightown and Henrico
The Shenandoah Valley is a great place for retirement and cycling. I've done several Bike Virginia tours down there (many years ago). Lived in Winchester for a couple years.
yes the Mountain Mamma ride, starting in Monterey and going through WVa, is a great and kick-butt ride! 1st Sat in August
I'm 53. I grew up in Berks County. My family were Penn State sports fans, and I went to football games and wrestling matches in the 80s. I wrestled in high school. I didn't think I was particularly good, but I was recruited by the coach at the D3 school I eventually went to. When I got to college, I realized that drinking beer was more important at that point in my life than cutting weight, so I never went out for the team. Apparently, there were at least 3 or 4 others like me in my recruiting class and the program folded in my junior year. A couple of the guys who really wanted to wrestle in college took the initiative to start the program back up as a club sport in my senior year with the intention to get back to a varsity sport if there was enough interest, so (feeling a little bad that I was partially at fault for the program going away in the first place), I went out for the club team to make sure they had a full lineup. I hadn't wrestled in 4 year at that point and was 25 pounds up from my high school weight, but I went out there and tried (to stall). I didn't win a match, but I wasn't pinned or tech'd at all and I got at least one stalling warning in every match. Those must have been some thrilling, edge of your seat spectator matches, LOL. We had a full lineup for every match, though, and the program was reinstated the next year. I live in Bucks County now and work for the man as a VP for a multinational finance company with $60b of revenues worldwide. It pays the bills, I guess, which is good because I have two kids in college.
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