23 of 25: Curling with Jenny

362 days ago when I told the world of my plan to learn 25 new things from 25 different people in my life, the very first person to set a date with me was my mother-in-law Jenny.  It also turned out that it was a date almost one full year away! Over the past few years she has taken up the hobby of curling, and she is getting really good at it! Her curling club does a ‘family curling day’ each year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so she had me book the 27th of December as our curling day wayyyy back in January. It seemed like Dec. 27 was a lifetime away, but here we are! I really lucked out with how wonderful and fun my in-laws are, and I have been looking forward to spending this day with Jenny, learning about something she loves and having some fun together.

Some pre-bonspiel tea and instruction with Jenny.

Because it was a family day at the curling club, and not everyone who was playing knew how to curl, the club offered a mini-lesson before we had our first game. Not many took advantage of this opportunity so we had a nice small group and got lots of practice in before hand.

Here was the instructor helping me learn how to actually ‘curl’ the stone.

Because it was a fun bonspiel, there were challenges for each end of our first game. We were given instructions like ‘play regularly, except you can only curl the stone in one direction’, or ‘the winning team at this point can’t use any sweepers this end’ – fun stuff like that which took a bit of pressure off of us newbies. ALSO – there was a large, wooden pig cut out put in the middle of the ice sheet and its tail was a horn. If you threw a ‘hog’ (it comes up very short of the rings) you had to go and honk the tail and take a bow, while all 50 people on the ice would then stop to applaud you. I don’t embarrass easily, but man, as a first time curler it was hard to go up there and honk that horn. Also, being the very first one to have to do it is a little tough. After the rock I hogged, I’m pretty sure I threw the next 3 so hard they went off the back and out of play. Still useless to our scoring, but better than having to go and honk that horn!

It looks like no one is there, but there are 50 curlers on the sheet of ice listening to me honk the pigs tail. A little embarrassing!

We had fun curling and I made a few very few good shots. But that’s what happens when you are a newbie curler. One thing I learned that day was CURLING IS NOT AS EASY AS IT LOOKS! Whenever I watched the Olympics, I always thought curling was my last chance at being an Olympian because usually the curling athletes are quite a bit older than the other sports. It was the final bastion of hope for me making the Olympics, but after this brief foray into curling, there is no way I will ever, ever be a curling champion! Here is one of the reasons why:

Yup. This happened. Somehow my father-in-law managed to snap a photo of it. The worst part is everyone from the other team thinks the reason you fell was because somehow you hurt yourself, so they all rush over to ask if you are okay. I just fell because I stink at curling, not because I’m hurt!

In between our two games we went upstairs, and the winning team buys the losing team a drink. This is a very big tradition in curling – you always sit down with the other team and the winners buy the losers a drink. We lost both of our games, so it was very conducive to us literally drowning our (curling) sorrows. Both of the teams we played were very nice. We had a great time chatting it up with the first team we played, and because we had to kill some time while another group of curlers used the ice sheet, they had us play a game called left, right, centre with some dice and tokens. It was a lot of fun and our table got pretty loud and animated during the game. The skip from the other team ended up winning the prize, but he is probably the nicest guy you could ever meet, so no one was sad.

Gambling on Left, Right, Centre

After the game, our drinks, and a nice homemade meal, we were back on the ice for our second game. This team was very good. I was glad we had Jenny on our team or else it would have been ugly! Jenny has really taken to curling and you can see her hard work and practice has paid off. She kept us in the game, and thankfully the points were calculated in strange ways again or else the score may have been a landslide! I got promoted to vice skip just for fun, so I got to help with some of the strategy. To be honest for the 3 of us who hadn’t seriously curled before, our strategy was ‘put the rock on the rings somewhere,’ but Jenny had more finesse and could do some of the more technical shots helping to keep us in the game.

Looking like I know what to do, but really just thinking, hit all the yellow stones out!

This shot makes it look like i know what I’m doing – don’t be fooled.

It was a great day. I learned some new things about myself – like how hard it is to take instruction from your skip when you don’t agree with them. You really have to trust them in the game or else it can be frustrating and you can become slightly mutinous. I also learned as I mentioned previously that curling is much harder than it looks, but that it can also be a lot of fun! I’m so thankful for the fun day, and that Jenny was willing to share her passion for curling with me!

Thanks for the great day at the Curling Club!