Hello Captains and welcome back. Today’s topic has absolutely nothing to do with flight sim or video gaming at all. As some of you may know from reading my posts last year as my wife and I prepared to move from Colorado back to Texas. We moved into a 55+ community in Georgetown. In addition to three championship golf courses, numerous pickle ball and tennis courts, multiple swimming pools and state of the art workout facilities, we also have a very nice billiards facility. The pool hall features 8 nine foot tables, with TV’s, stereo system in a climate controlled environment. It’s a really nice facility which is only available for residents of the community.
My wife and I both recently visited the billiards facility a few weeks ago and shot our first game of pool in over 30 years. Together, my wife and I had never played pool but had each played prior to meeting. For my wife, she was a pub manager in England about 30 years ago and would play fairly frequently. For me, well when I was about 10 years old we had a used 8 foot table in our game room where I first learned to play. The pool table also doubled as a railroad layout as from time to time I would lay down a 4×8 sheet of plywood and build out my train layout. But when I wasn’t playing with the trains, I played pool and really enjoyed it. Back then and even into my mid to late 20’s I was pretty good.
Fast forward 30 years later and back to the story of our new neighborhood billiards facility, our first game pretty much stunk. But after another 2-3 rounds, our muscle memory kicked in and we saw vast improvement. We returned the very next day and shot another 3-4 rounds with similar improvements. We improved so much that we decided to join the billiards club. While not completely necessary, being club members ($15.00 per year) gains us extra privileges including 24 hour access, free lessons and the opportunity to join our neighborhood league which we may do at a later date.
While the house cues available in the facility are better than any other house cues I’ve used in other pool halls, we decided to purchase our own cue sticks. When I played 30 years ago, I had always used my own cue stick and there is something to be said about using the same stick each and every time versus a house cue. Needless to say, the choice of cue sticks today is far superior to what was both available and affordable 30+ years ago.
So like we do with any other thing in today’s world, I researched cue sticks to have a better understanding of what is available. Of course I was somewhat shocked at the wide differences not only with cost but also with available material types. When I played pool 30 years ago I’d never heard of carbon fiber pool shafts. This is not to say that CF wasn’t being used as my research shows me that CF cues were available in the 80’s, but where I was playing pool (even in my 20’s) in various pool halls around Central Texas, no one used them. In any event, I did my comparison shopping and research. While I would love to perhaps own a nice carbon fiber shaft, I opted to stick with wood for now. My new cue stick will arrive just before my birthday and will be a present from my wife to me.
As this is completely off-topic I’ll close this post out. I may choose to do a few additional posts on the subject of billiards or pool as it’s called around here at a later date to perhaps include some of the things I’ve learned about the various types of shafts and such. If any of my readers are avid pool players I would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment.
Until next time….
Happy Flying!!!
Jerry