Wow. So up and about by Monday, eh? Not the best prediction, thanks Doc. It’s now Thursday evening, and today’s the first time since last Friday that I could swallow without pain. The penicillin worked, albiet waiting until the last three tablets to do so, and the swelling is going down and I’ll be back to work next week, but that’s now three weeks without training. Gah. There is an informal match in Wilkinstown this weeked because the UCD open was postponed for two weeks (the Open got scheduled on top of the UCD midterm break… *sigh*. Gotta love the admin, you really do. Otherwise, you’d wind up being a contrary so-and-so who criticised stuff like that all the time…). I might make it to that to humiliate myself, but I don’t know for sure – given that I can’t walk upstairs without needing a sit-down right now, a 105-minute standing match sounds a tad ambitious. We’ll see…

Annnnyway, some good news on the air pistol front, we seem to have found a possible source for a Baikal IZH-46 air pistol. Nice basic model that would take you to World Cup level if you were good enough – sortof like the Feinwerkbau 600 series of the air pistol world, which may make as much sense to the non-air-rifle shooters amongst you as a Dutch translation of Homer’s Illiad. Put it this way: it’s Russian; it’s very rough in the non-essential areas; it’s a beginner’s pistol with a lot of potential; it’s cheap; and it’s very popular with those that want to hit the ten instead of having the flashest pistol on the range 😀

‘cept it isn’t ‘flu. It’s tonsilitis. Thought it might be, given the amusing red-and-yellow colour of my tonsils and their somewhat large and uneven shapes in the mirror this morning. So now I’m on penicillin tablets (which I thought I was allergic to – the Doc says that my reaction to them as a toddler was probably something I grew out of. If, however, I turn purple from the tablets, I’m supposed to stop taking them. Nice to have the Doctor’s Orders on that one 😀 ).

So the upside is, I should be okay by Monday. The downside is, there’s no way I’ll be training on Sunday. That’s two weeks without training. Not good. Not good at all. Hardly an example to be setting.

So up far too early on a Sunday morning and an hour’s drive to Wilkinstown for the AGM. Bit of a wake-up adrenaline jolt when I opened the wrong door in the hall and walked in on a class of korean sword-fighting. You find the oddest things out in the middle of the countryside these days…

Anyways, first two hours were a run-down on the events since the last AGM. Most of it good, some of it not so good, lots of it scraps with the NTSA. No-one was unduly worried by the latter, happily. There was a fair bit of discussion on training and how we’re going to progress it, the basic plan is to get the seniors and developmental shooters to take a slot each week and train together. Myself and Richard Stapleton Jr. are already signed up for it; others on the list for the seniors include Susan Cunningham, Liam Spillane, and a few other well-known names. This is definitely going to drive up my game 😀

There was much chatter about the Bisley trip. Last year was an excellent success, with medals taken home and PBs shot on the range, though personally I was very disappointed with my score, which was dire. This year, I will be shooting a 575 or higher, so I won’t be feeling so bad afterwards, but last year still rankles. Anyway, last year we had a 19-person team including shooters and support staff and we were pretty sure that that was about as big as it would ever get. *ahem* Whoops. So far, this year, we’re at 27 people and we may still increase on that. Plus, most of the big names are signed up to go, so those medals are coming home with us this time 🙂

As to the rest of the AGM, Matt and Geoff are still in the spots where they do most good (Chairman and Secretary), we’ve a vice-Chair elected to stand in if Matt needs a deputy, our Treasurer, vice-Treasurer, PRO (no, not me, I’m not local so I asked not to be asked – though I’ll be doing the WTSC website and generally helping out with resources and information), the fundraising committee (who are bloody important and are why we are able to look at problems and say “this, this and this, we solve just by buying new gear”, thus leaving us with the core problem to address of how to train people 🙂 Thing is, I don’t understand why we seem to be unique in this. We don’t do anything special, we don’t have some lotto-winner benefactor or something, we do table quizzes and act as car park attendants and pack bags in shopping centres and just do the stuff that GAA clubs and the like do; they don’t bring in nice big cheques for fifty thousand euro or whatever, but add it all together, a hundred euro there, a few euro here, and pretty soon everything’s paid for. There’s no rocket science involved, just hard work. In return, parents see their kids training with the best gear we can get them, they go to international competitions on decent ranges and stay in decent conditions, you see decent prizes at competitions (okay, so we’ve been remiss at the presentation side for a few competitions thanks to manpower shortages, but they’re sitting there awaiting distribution, and the next competition is coming up so they’re going out then), and generally things move along.

There’s a lesson in there, y’know…

Other things, the membership fee was upped from €70 to €120; but the per-use range fee of €3 was abolished. So if you were shooting once a week, you just saved €100; and if you only shot there once or twice a year, you’re now subsidising those that train all the time. (BTW, that €120 includes your insurance which costs €60 seperately normally, so it’s still one of the best deals you’ll see outside the college clubs).

There’s a new rule that says that a serving member of the committee can’t serve on a committee in any other shooting group/body/club/whatever. Idea’s simple; you do one thing at a time and do it well. Plus, this way, you never get a case of a legal conflict of interest (say you’re on the NTSA committee and up comes a decision which benefits everyone greatly except your club, where you’re the secretary or whatever – do you obey your NTSA fiduciary duty to vote for it; or your club’s fiduciary duty to vote against it? Legally, both have equal claim on you).

Geoff was given a presentation then, of a photo of the team that went to Bisley, in recognition of the back-breaking he and Matt and Leslie did on that trip; it goes up on the wall in the pub along with the rest of the club’s history for comment unto the ages 😀

And that was it. No training for me today, I was only able to get through the AGM with the aid of Lemsip again, but by next weekend I hope this flu will be gone and I’ll be training properly again. Several of the others were down in the range as I was leaving, mind, so it’s still full steam ahead on the training plans for the British Open in Febuary 🙂

Bugger. Hate ‘flu. Hate it I tell’s ye…

Was at the DURC Safety Briefing last night, and the post-briefing party. The Briefing is basicly a quick talk given to as many new DURC members as can be squeezed into a lecture theatre to lay out the basics of the sport for people, give them a quick demo of the rifles and the positions they’re shot in, to quickly go through the basic rules of the club, and then to take them to the range (where the firearms have been all locked away!) for a beer or two. It doesn’t do a huge amount for safety other than to point out to them that we actually do worry about it; which is why every new member who comes down to shoot is given a full safety drill when they start by the range officer.

What the briefing does do is to ensure that new members get to meet the range officers and the club committee in a very informal atmosphere and to make a connection with the club. That’s absolutely vital for the health of the club, especially since the next year’s committee and ROs get picked from today’s new shooters. Well. Not quite [i]next year’s[/i], we tend to give them two years in the club before tapping them for ROs unless they’ve had previous training (we’ve a fair few RDF members in the club this year, for example, they would make good ROs once they’ve gotten used to the club and shown some enthuasiasm for it).

But the point is that unlike other clubs, DURC has a high turnover of people at all levels from ordinary members to range officers to committee members. So we have to keep in mind at all times that whomever is in office right now is only there for a short time, so you have to constantly keep the next guy in mind. So we keep notes on how we do our jobs, on what the next guy has to watch for, and so on. And it’s a surprising thing, but in the good years, DURC is probably the most professionally-run rifle club in the country; and not one of the people running it will be over 25. There’s a lesson in there to be learnt I think, and it’s that fresh blood in a club is always a good thing.

There are the bad years, of course; we’ve seen years where the entire committee and most of the ROs all graduated and left college simultaenously. When I joined the committee first, several years ago now, we’d just been gutted like that, and it took years to recover. But for the most part, the good heavily outweighs the bad. You do tend to notice better results when postgrads are on committee, purely because they have more time to dedicate to the club; but the undergrads do a pretty decent job regardless. So you need fresh blood in the club; but you also need the knowlegebase of the old guard as well. The trick is finding the balance; fresh blood tends to try stuff that hasn’t worked in the past and sometimes fails but sometimes succeeds. The old guard tried it once twenty years ago so obviously it’d be a waste of effort to ever try it again! 😀 On the other hand, the old guard knows the importance of getting important stuff right, because they remember the club’s smallbore shooting being shut off for a year because of a paperwork glitch…

Anyways, this year looks like it’ll be a recovery year for DURC; there have been paperwork hassles all last year that prevented the smallbore side of the club from taking off like it did in past years. Hopefully this year will see that fixed. There are certainly enough alumni members volunteering to help out as much as they can towards this; I’m volunteering to coach, so is John Keeney (a past National Champion in smallbore shooting), so are several others. From last night’s membership attendance, it looks like we’ve a few candidates for Trainee Range Officers already, though we’ll hold off on tapping them for a while. We’ll start looking for colors team candidates pretty much immediately, but the squad itself won’t get picked and start training for a month to six weeks. Fingers crossed, this should be a good year.

So, tomorrow we have the RO meeting, where we do a recap of basic safety procedures and coaching for the ROs to get them back into the game; I’ve gone and volunteered to do the air rifle section of that and John’s doing the smallbore section. I’d like to see us stealing a few ideas from Wilkinstown for the air rifle, so we’ll look at that tomorrow.

Now if this blasted fresher’s flu would bugger off and leave me be, I’d be sorted…