Where's Tommy?

That’s the question that many of my readers have asked as I have not made a blog post since November 2008. Reports of my demise are largely rumor. Three things are going on that have impacted my availability.

There is, of course the economy, and getting my own little sand box in order has taken up a lot more time than I wanted to give it. I can’t imagine that some of my readers were not similarly distracted. I hope that is behind me for a lifetime.

I have also been suffering with a very painful case of bursitis. There are many bursae located throughout the body, little fluid sacks located near major joints. The ones that are troubling me are located near the Greater Trochanter (otherwise known as the hip bone) which have become inflamed. This is usually caused by some overuse problem, and will only get better when the overuse is corrected. In my case the irritant is sitting for any prolonged period of time. In order to get ahead of this problem I have had to give up most of my desk and computer time and severely limit my bridge and driving. With therapy and rest I have just started to feel some relief, and hope I will have it behind me soon. In the meantime, it is nice to be making some positive headway. It took a long time.

Last, but not least, I got an e-mail last September asking me if I would learn and play the Precision system of bridge. My challenges are not always wisely undertaken, and in this one I bit off a bunch. I have two partners in this venture with me so that together we play about 10 games a month. Since the Precision System is a stand alone system not based on any other major bidding system, it has been pretty much going back to square one. We all decided to base our play on a style used by David Berkowitz and Larry Cohen and outlined in a book entitled Precision Today of which Berkowitz is a co-author. The nice thing is that we are all on the same page with a given source of reference. The worst thing is that we often do not know what page we are on and often seem lost in the index.

We try to take our lumps in style and remember why we did it in the first place—intellectual curiosity. After about 6 months we are just getting our heads above water. Perhaps in a future post I will outline what we feel are the systemic advantages. At the moment, I doubt that Meckstroth and Rodwell are feeling the earth tremors. My next post will go up soon entitled “Double the Pleasure with Double Finesses.” Thanks for waiting around for me.