Gosh, who’d have thought a job, a social life, helping run a club, helping run the NTSA and coding up a side project would take any time at all? Yeesh.
Anyways, the swimming continues apace. I haven’t drowned yet, in fact my form is improving somewhat, though frankly I think I’d still make someone who actually knows how to swim cringe and I still feel out of place in the slow lane; this is all thanks to herself, even though she hasn’t gotten out of the habit of swimming two lengths for every one of mine, probably just to show off. The weight refuses to fall off, however, though the shape is somewhat trimmer. Nowhere near where I wish it to be however. I sense a dietary plan in the works. At probably the worst time of year for that sort of thing as well.
The shooting front is not seeing anything like the same degree of success, and frankly Bisley is now in serious question for Feburary. By this time last year I was already well into the training programme: right now, I haven’t trained in months and it shows. Unless there’s a major change in circumstances, I don’t see how I can be even close to being ready in time. If the weight came off, that might compensate for the lack of technical training, but it’d be iffy at best. I did get to shoot a pistol match in WTSC – and even that was down on my PB by 15 points.
The NTSA front is going far better, thankfully. We’re still not meeting briefly and often enough to my mind, but we’re better than we were two years ago. We’ve also started formal meetings with NTSA shooters to see where they want the association to go; a marked improvement, it will be felt – I hope. The main task for the past few weeks though has been the calendar and that’s been as difficult as it always has. The draft for the next 18 months (from Jan2007 that is) has been sent out by email to all the clubs already, and the print version is about to hit the post, several days late thanks to technical hitches. Two weeks have to be allowed for the clubs to go over this draft and then we can post it as the official calendar. The idea is that the first six months will be set in stone so people can plan with confidence as to what weekends they’re at competitions (for the social shooters) and what matches they’ll use in their training plans (for the more competitive shooters); the next six months will be more flexible, but we would discourage people to change stuff willy-nilly; and the final six months are basicly a work in progress. And every six months, we’ll release another six months of the calendar and that way there’s always at least 12 months on the official calendar out ahead of us, which gives incoming committees a bit of shelter from having to immediately sort out a full year’s calendar on taking office.
The website is also getting some spring cleaning, and as soon as the november competitions end, I’m going to update it’s software and tidy up the look of the website and start adding things to it. Right now, that wouldn’t be such a great idea because I tried updating one thing, broke the entire site, and had to restore it from the nightly backups. Whoops. So we’ll wait a while before doing anything that drastic for a while. We may need to sort out more disk space though – the photos alone were way past the amount of disk space that was sane, and I’ve had to take the entire gallery down in order to try to tidy up the rest.
*sigh*
Of course, with all this spare time I thought I’d just do the PRO’s job as well as the Secretary’s this year. Well, sod it, I’ve been sent on the courses, it’d be a shame to waste that and the contacts I made. And there are a list of things we need to have the PRO do anyway, so someone has to do them. The thing now is just to get the routine down so that I actually get them done.
And in a week or two, the DURC squad training starts up again. I’m hoping the seniors will be breaking into the 550-570 region easily enough, and one or two might, if they stop worrying about it so much, actually break out of that region. Either way, it looks good for the air rifle section of the club for the coming year.
And lastly, I’m finally getting some traction on the RCMS project for DURC. The thing with DURC is, they actually do paperwork. Seriously, no joke. The members sign up for a half-hour detail each week on one sheet; the first range officer (there are two) on that night copies these names into the range officer report along with things like how much ammunition was signed out of security, how much float was in the petty cash box, and so on; and then for each and every detail we note who showed up, how many rounds of ammunition were bought and how many were actually fired, what scores were hit, if any of the equipment went wobbly, and so on. Every week the CRO has to go through these RO reports and report to the committee; the A&E officer has to watch the equipment problems and the ammunition levels; and so on and so forth. There’s a lot of work involved, and the system has been positively screaming to be computerised for the past decade. I’ve actually had the system designed for a year and a half, and I’ve even bought some hardware to make it run more simply in practise (a card reader so the members just use their college ID card to swipe in when they come down). All told, it’s an interesting and actually practical project, and I’m enjoying writing it more than I usually do, but it is taking time to get done, and there’s not much of that to go round these days.
Thing is, I continually feel like if I could only sort out my daily routine, I’d be fine, that the time is actually there – and the new job certainly doesn’t make insane demands on my time like the last one did. Now, if they’d just let me do some air rifle training during lunch hour…
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