Ping Pong

We have a ping pong table in our basement! Jeff’s parents gave it to us for Christmas. I noticed a smokin’ sale on Death Thursday (aka Thanksgiving evening) and gave Leslie a not-so-anonymous tip about it. Even though it’s not exactly what you’d call professional-quality, it’s blue and it has a line down the middle and a net across it, and now we can “ping it up” any time we want.

We have this giant empty room in our basement. It’s the play room, and now the grown-ups have a toy in there too. Yay! Actually the room feels rather small once we unfold the ping pong table. At least we don’ t have to go far to find lost balls.

On New Year’s Eve, we had 3 people over and the 5 of us played around the world ping pong. That’s my favorite way to play—running wildly around the table trying to whack a tiny flying ball in the right direction is great.

The two halves are a little on the uneven side…

…ok, make that a lot uneven. But when we clamp the net on, it helps pull the two levels closer to the same plane. Well, you can only expect so much from Walmart after all.

A lot of the time we’re laughing too hard to hit the ball straight, not that that’s much of a change from when we aren’t laughing (at least for me). Jeff is WAY better than me at ping pong. In the Student Union back at SVU, my thing was foosball, and Jeff’s thing was ping pong. We took turns playing each other in each game, thereby keeping the wins and losses relatively equal. If we ever find an affordable foosball table, that balance will once again be restored. But for now we crack up over our cracked ping pong table.

Now that’s what I call intensity.

To take these pictures, I set my camera on the window sill and put it on the handy “wink” setting. It waits till you wink at it and then takes a series of 3 pictures.

We spend a lot of time chasing stray balls, but we’re getting a little bit better at ping ponging…sort of.

We’ve been playing ping pong most nights after the kids are in bed: games to 11 points, best of 3 games. Due to our prodigious lack of skill, these games go pretty quick. It’s nice to have a sillier, less-mentally-taxing, more action-packed game than Scrabble, even if I am often a tad reluctant to go dashing around after flying ping pong balls after a long day of dashing around after children. When we’re done, we just fold ‘n roll so Jay and Rose can use the playroom again.