While traveling through Oregon, we stayed at the spectacular Sun River Resort. I never in my life thought I’d reach a point where I could stay in such a high-end place with so many amenities that I would be tempted not to leave the grounds, but here I was, suffering from some major imposter syndrome, but having a blast nonetheless.
Without leaving the resort, we could have golfed, swam, bicycled, dined, grocery shopped, hot tubbed, and played pickleball. Oh yeah, I could get used to this. Yes, indeed.
But wait a minute. Pickleball? What on earth is pickleball? I have very mixed emotions when I discover that there’s this whole thing out there that I had no idea about. It’s equal parts not knowing (bad) and learning something new (awesome).
Shortly after seeing the sign for pickleball, we passed the pickleball court, which kind of looked like a half-sized tennis court. And when we reached our room and scrolled through the 600 cable channels available to us, we came upon a pickleball tournament, which I found rather fascinating. And when we got back home, I saw signs encouraging people to join a pickleball team.
One day I was pickleball-ignorant, and the next I couldn’t get away from it. This has happened to me before, with tilapia, and with credit card swipe machines. It’s like I have jumped over a massive information hurdle that I didn’t even know I was climbing.
Dear husband assures me that that means my reticular activator is functioning properly. Well, shoot! That’s another thing I didn’t know about! According to this website,
“THE RETICULAR ACTIVATOR is a part of the brain the stays on alert. It’s (sic) job is to make you notice some things and ignore other things (if you noticed everything, you’d be too distracted to function). When you buy a new VW, it seems like the whole world has bought VWs, because you notice them everywhere. That’s the reticular activator at work.”
Anyway, if, like me, you’ve been residing in the pickleball dark, I will whet your appetite for it by telling you that according to Wikipedia, it’s kind of a cross between badminton, tennis, and table tennis. I also suggest that you hop on over to Youtube and do a search for videos, because they are too numerous to mention here. It does look like fun.
I just like the fact that I can now add the word pickleball to my vocabulary. “Sorry, I can’t do lunch with you today, Mable, dear. I have a pickleball tournament to attend. They need me. I’m the cheerleader.”
OK, Barb, I am glad you finally heard of pickleball as it is a native Pacific Northwest game! Invented by a very fine man, state legislator Joel Pritchard. I knew him and worked on his election campaigns. Every time I go to do research at the property archives building, which he caused to come into being, I am thankful for the life of Joel Pritchard. https://www.usapa.org/history-of-the-game/
My goodness, but I’ve been out of the loop. Thanks, Valarie!