Good news! RC is on an upswing...we bought a pool table from a neighbor who is moving and doesn't want to take it with them. H and I both enjoy shooting pool.

So we got it set up yesterday, and problems commenced! First of all, my H was acting like a know-it-all, and on our very first game he 'corrected' the way I racked the balls. Not in a nice way, either. I'd finished racking and he cued up, then sighed, put down his stick and said, "That's not the way to rack the balls, they go like this, see, striped, solid, striped, solid, get it?" and proceeded to rearrange my rack. I said, "There was nothing wrong with my rack." Oh yes there was! He thought I knew how to shoot pool, how could I shoot pool and not know how to rack balls??? Well, he was wrong...I would not have corrected his rack unless it was something egregious like putting the 8 ball in the top, but the lighting into me about mine, the unnecessary criticism, had me consulting the rule book, which I showed him to defend my knowledge of how to rack a freaking set of balls. His method puts two stripes in the bottom corners of the rack, which is against regulation. But we shot that game his way.

There were more 'rules' he proceeded to 'teach' me throughout the evening, and again and again he was WRONG. I could totally take it if he said something like, "I think the rule is blah-blah-blah, what's the book say?" instead of telling me I was wrong when I wasn't. To me, it was simply a friendly game of pool, I wasn't watching his every move to see if he was doing it right. Boy, he was watching me and ready to pounce on every perceived misstep, which drove me nutz.

And then there was the pool stick issue. He brought out his mother's pool stick, and in the bag was his pool stick, which he proceeded to go on and on about how he'd had it since he was a teenager, the places he'd shot with it, etc and so on...and it hurt. It hurt because I HAD a pool stick that I'd had since I was a teenager that I'd shot a lot places and had a lot of memories attached to it etc and so on and LOST it when HE traded in my car without my knowledge and it was in the trunk of it. It was his car, as in his name only, but he'd given it to me for my daily driver when we got married and 'borrowed' it that day 'just to get an estimate on trade-in value'. I'd asked him if he'd at least gotten my stuff out of it, he said there wasn't anything in it. Yes, there was, I wanted him to get my stick. He'd traded it in where he worked, so I said, get it for me tomorrow when you go in. Problem! The car was already sold.

He never did anything to make up for that, didn't even try contacting the buyer about it, I'm still sore about it nine years later and him going on and on about his teenage-years stick that he STILL HAS ticked me off because I thought it was insensitive and told him so. On the upside, his stick is actually broken so it's really no better off than the situation with mine--neither of us can play with them any longer. lol.

Well, we ended up playing for a while, and I think we reached an understanding that any questions of rules will be referred to the very good guide we have, and if he starts arguing with me instead of doing so, game over. And leave the broken stick in the bag or throw it out, I don't want to see it or be reminded of the fate of my own at his hands.