Wednesday, Jun. 12, 2002 – 6:14 p.m.
2002-06-12 6:14
Tribute Paid to the Archery Gods
Yesterday evening, I headed down to Steafan’s house near Angier to shoot targets at the weekly Nimenefeld archery practice. They have been getting good turnout (there were probably a dozen+ folk there yesterday). Since my arrows had been in the car all day, I decided to take a proactive approach and tested each tip before starting to shoot. Good thing too! All but one of the tips were loose. Nothing the tube of Superglue in my box wouldn’t fix! So, there I was with a full compliment of arrows and a fresh bowstring on my bow.
At the point I stepped up to the line, several folk were starting to shoot a timed round at 20 yds for Royal Round scores. Although I was just warming up, I went ahead and shot like I was being timed and I mananged to get all 7 of the arrows in my quiver off in the 30 seconds! Hey, the practice is paying off! Then it was time to retrieve my arrows… One of the things about shooting a timed round is you don’t wait to see where the arrow went, you shoot the arrow and reach for the next one… Therefore, when it came time to retrieve arrows, I discovered that not all of them were in the target (or around the target in this case) so I must have shot over the target… not hard to do when shooting with a 45# bow at 20 yards.
So there I was, trudging through the “rough” behind the target looking for arrrows. I had been able to retrieve 5 out of the 7 from the target bases and found the 6th in the “rough” but try as I might, I was unable to come up with the 7th. Ok, look for it later… we need to continue the shoot. I was also disinclined to search the tall grass more thoroughly by the presence of poison ivy and briars in the grass, not to mention that it stuck me as prime snake habitat. Don’t get me wrong, I am not afraid of snakes… I think they are facinating creatures and feel they play a vital role in our ecosystems. However, being down on my hands and knees, running my hands through tall grass, and coming face to face with a copperhead or other poisonous snake seem like a BAD idea. Ok, tribute #1 to the Archery Gods.
So now I have 6 arrows in my hand and since there would be no more speed rounds until after we shot at 30 and 40 yards, I was fine.
The rounds at 30 and 40 yards went fine (well, I at least hit the target or was able to find the arrows that missed) and I took each opportunity to look again through the tall grass for my missing arrow, without success. After finishing at the 40 yard mark, I retrieve 2 additional arrows from my box and return to the 20 yard mark to finish my round with 2 untimed and 2 timed rounds. Alas, while I shot pretty well, I again paid a tribute to the Archery Gods with the sacrifice of another arrow to the “tall grass”. I did, however, get a good score on one of my rounds so my Royal Round average should be going up.
Back Roads at Sundown
We finished shooting at about 8:30pm and I headed out to the Lowes in Clayton to see if they had the Neem Concentrate I am looking for. Rather than take hwy 55 up to hwy 42 and across to Clayton, I opted to cut the corner and take the back roads to get to hwy 42. What I didn’t reallize was that they have changed the names of some of the roads from what showed on my map. I should have trusted my directional sense and turned around at the point that I noticed that the sky was brighter to my right. This is a bad sign when it is sunset and you want to be heading north and east from where you started. Oh, I wasn’t worried about being lost… go far enough west and I would run back into hwy 55, far enough north and I would find Hwy 42 (what I was looking for), to the south was Angier and Hwy 210 and go far enough east and I would run into I-40. So I wandered around on the secondary roads in eastern Wake county for a while and eventually made it to Hwy 42 by way of Old Stage Rd (called Old Federal Road on my map). So there I was at 9:08pm at Lowes…. they closed at 9pm…[sigh].
Homeward bound by way of I-40 (with a stop at Lowes Foods on Walnut St. for groceries). Unpack and put away the groceries and it was time for bed so I went upstairs and climbed into bed with my new “Perl & XML” book by O’Reilly. Yes, I know, “Geek!”
Rose Books
As I was walking back from the other side of campus yesterday, I took the opportunity to stroll through the campus bookstore. They have a pretty good computer book section (what a surprise….NCSU is an engineering school…) and not a half bad gardening section (also an ag school…). I found several books on roses that I want to add to my library of rose books. One of them is a book that I haved checked out but I want to get my own copy of some day and another is a book by a noted expert on roses (Graham Stuart Thomas) that is a compilation of several of his other books and articles. I did buy one (Taylor’s Guide to Roses… it is not one the following list…) but the others are going on my wish list:
Gardening with Roses Patrick Taylor Timber press, inc ISBN 0-88192-286-2 $17.95 @ ncsu bookstore The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Roses Mary Moody, gen. Editor Timber press inc ISBN 0-88192-271-4 $39.95 @ ncsu bookstore The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book Graham Stuart Thomas Sagapress/Timber press ISBN 0-88192-280-3 $49.95 @ ncsu bookstore Old Rose Adventurer Brent Dickerson $69.95 @ ncsu bookstore
I noticed that they also have a copy of Botanica’s Roses in paperback but I already have that one.
Well I am off to try the Lowes in Clayton again….