In like a foghorn

Chicago is not, I suppose, known for having the most consistent weather this time of year, but recently it's been kind of ridiculous. A few weeks ago I wore my new Cubs light jacket in the morning because it was in the 60s; by evening it was 32 and hailing. Sunday and Monday were gorgeous, the latter getting up to almost 80 - today it was in the low 70s until noon, when the temperature suddenly plummeted. By 4pm it was 40 degrees and the fog had rolled in. I'm sorry, I didn't realize I'd moved to San Francisco! Frigid walk home, then, on a day when I already was feeling like I had walking flu - now I ache all over and I'm running a low fever. Wonderful. Part of it is the bad sleep schedule I've been on - six hours on a weeknight if I'm lucky - so I think that will have to change for a while, at least until the shift in seasons stops jerking me around.

Probably this is my punishment for getting so excited for the impending start of mini golf season. The first courses open the beginning of April - that's this weekend, if you weren't aware - weather permitting. I probably won't be out there in the next couple of weeks - not least because the 10-day forecast shows no temperature above high 50s between now and next Thursday - but last year our "opening day" was April 10, so we may still meet that.

That's assuming I can convince anyone to go with me, of course, since whenever I start talking about mini golf I have that sense of people mentally edging away from me. Not that I necessarily blame them; I'm more than slightly aware that my mini golf jones is one that few casual players possess, and one that probably gets overwhelming at times. Alma seems mostly to quietly tolerate my behavior, and Drew likes mini golf enough to humor some of my wilder ventures - see, in particular, our evening trip to Mountain View Mine in Des Plaines last July and our Bolingbrook excursion a mere nine days later. Of course, he backed out of the Mini Golf Odyssey, but given how Alma and I felt at the end of it that's probably one of his wiser mini-golf-related decisions to date.

Anyway, I've been thinking about what exactly leads to, in particular, my desire to drive all over the Chicagoland area to courses 45 minutes to an hour away, in addition to just playing more nearby courses - Diversey, Novelty Golf, Par King - on a regular basis. (For example, between April 10 and September 4 last year - a span of 140 days or so - I played 26 rounds of mini golf on 19 different courses. That may not sound like a lot just saying it, but aside from normal, quotidian activities, how often do you do something 26 times in less than five months? That's almost once every five days, and even though it was bolstered hugely by a 16-round, 15-day period in July [including the one-day, eight-round odyssey], it still seems like an awful lot. And frankly, I probably would have played more were Alma not a calming influence in the relationship when it comes to my various obsessions.)

So why do I like and play mini golf so much, and why am I all too willing to make special trips for no other purpose? I've come up with a few reasons which probably get at the root of my problem:

1. Obsession with stats
I think I covered this in my initial defense of the mini golf page, but I do have something of an obsession with sports statistics. Mostly this comes from baseball, of course, but in general I always like to know, and keep, the score of any scored activity in which I indulge. You're lucky our Yahtzee records aren't online. This can't possibly be unique to me, of course - relatively early in the mini golf page's history, some guy I don't know e-mailed me to inform me that he had played most of the courses listed and recorded better scores than I had.

2. Obsession with fake sporting legend
This, again, was mentioned in the earlier post. I was never anything of an athlete, failing even to make a fourth grade soccer team after playing on a third grade team that was routinely pounded and allegedly won its only game of the year the day I wasn't there. (I say allegedly because the result, compared to our earlier game against the same team, has long struck me as dubious, and I feel like they may just have been pulling my chain.) I aligned myself with the high school soccer team as cameraman, worked at WNUR - I wanted to be around sports and somehow bask in their glory vicariously, even as I could never earn real glory myself. Of course, mini golf stats aren't real glory either - but they give me a "sport"-like activity at which I am actually somewhat competitive (possibly not on a bigger stage than "with my friends," but I plan to try and play the Par King tournament this year, so I guess we'll see), and even beyond that, I can shoot for my own records and feel a sense of purpose, to a minimal and kind of lame degree, each time out.

3. I like driving
I like being behind the wheel of a car, and trying out a lot of new and far-flung courses gives me an excuse.

4. I love geography
As you probably know, I have long been an enormous geography dork, reading the atlas before I could read anything else, internalizing the capital of every country and numerous other generally useless bits of knowledge, and in general having a strange affinity for maps and directions that even I am at a loss to explain. Driving around to different suburbs gives me this odd geographic sense of accomplishment, I think - and again, I'm not sure why that should be, except that I like traveling to new places and on my modest budget the Fox Valley is a little more accessible than New Zealand.

5. I'm something of a completist
I know this sounds odd, since I have a hard time finishing what I start in a lot of ways, but when it comes to seeking out things I enjoy, I don't want to stop once I start. Witness Drew and I compiling more than 20 new brands of root beer even after our initial 15-brand test (which reminds me, I really need to post the results for the second test at some point), and witness me playing 19 different courses last year and subsequently making a list of 14 more courses that I have not yet played and which are relatively accessible to Chicago, some number of which I will effort to hit this season.

So, I freely admit that I'm kind of on the obsessive end of the spectrum where miniature golf is concerned, but I'm not sure that's going to slow me down too much (barring an intervention from Alma and/or Drew, which may yet happen depending on how things shake out this summer). I mean, it's only mini golf, right? On the list of things a person can want to do all the time, this is probably among the least harmful; if it's between mini golf and a meth addiction or compulsive gambling or something, I think I'm doing okay with the mini golf. And yes, I did buy my own putter this year, but that's mostly for practice at home, as Alma bought me an automatic-return cup to putt into. (See, she's my enabler, sometimes!) And remember, people, if you're in town when the weather's nice and you have an interest in playing, I'm pretty much always game.