One thousand games

This morning before the Wednesday afternoon tennis struggle, I went to look at the Mississippi and how the flood of 2011 was progressing. It's past its crest, but still running well above its normal summer time water level.

This is a view of the Mississippi flood plain from the West Side of St Paul in the Cherokee Park neighborhood. The well named Water Street runs between the Mississippi River on the right and Pickerel Lake on the left.  They merge at about where the electric lines stand, at Water Street. Water Street is under water. And closed to traffic.

The difficulty in keeping statistics is that sometimes you have to sum them up and see what they tell you. I've been logging my tennis games and sets since the first of the year, and now with three months worth of statistics, I had a look and crunched some numbers. According to the log, I have, as of today, played 1000 games of tennis in 2011. In the first quarter, I played 85 complete sets and 31 partials - a total of 923 games, or about 8 games per set or partial set. Most of this is pretty meaningless, but it keeps me entertained and that's a good thing. But that's a lot of tennis.

The geezers and I played most of two sets today at Fort Snelling, then Dennis H. had to leave early to umpire a college team tennis match at Hamline. Since I used to play there in the 60's, I went over to watch some of the action. The Pipers were playing St Johns, and they seemed to be doing ok. It's hard to know who's winning a team match without a scorecard or access to a member of the coaching staff, so I don't know who won, but the guys on the court knew what they were doing and I'm pretty sure they could beat an old guy like me without much trouble. But 46 years ago was the last time Hamline won the conference title, and I was on that team. Since then the Gusties have won about 98% of the tennis conference titles - a not insignificant streak.