Set me High and Tight: Attitude

Okay I waited for a few years to try this blogging thing, I was hoping they'd change the name to something less mushy-sounding, but it looks like this one is going to stay. And by now I guess I'm feeling full of it, enough to give it a try anyway. That and I'm tired of sitting on the publishing fence...

So why the name Set High and Tight? While perusing all the jack-of-all-trade types of activities in my life, I went back to a repeated theme in sports, work, home, and in life. It's a stance, approach, context, attitude that gets its name from my years of being a volleyball gypsy in South Carolina.

Permit me the time to explain.

When you asked for your sets, you could have them low and fast, high and slow. You could also have them isolated off the net or tight on top of the tape. I always seemed to prefer my sets high and tight, which did a couple of things. It gave me time to approach and meet the ball at the top of my jump, and gave me access to wicked angles. But it also gave the blocker time to cover, and the chance to cover more completely. It was a challenge. Besides, it gave me that spark of competitive adrenaline to get the hops going and get up there and crush that swat-melon in ways that made the guys in the back row feel like gymnasts. Or (most likely) I was just too lazy to "jump high like mountain" for sets off the net.

So back to this blog.

I hope that the following rants and ramblings will span the decades in both directions. I suspect they will cover a plethora of points, most likely covering (in no particular order (but in parenthetical retrospect in order of relevance to the 2009 here and now)) being a husband, father, time-gymnast, riding a bike, triathlons, (triathloning? triathlonage? triathlonation?), hoops, volleyball, handy-man stuff, web programming, family IT man,Unix, Python, Ruby, Perl let's cut the list short right there, it could go on forever.

Needless to say it will reflect the richness and variety with which I am blessed today in the year 2009 in a way that I couldn't ask for. Actually, I guess I could ask for it, and if I did I imagine it would go something like "Set me high and tight".

Q