Monday, July 14, 2014

I'm not a "joiner"

I had a fun day yesterday at the Frisco Gun Club.  I thought the Dallas Gun Club was nice (that's where I took shooting lessons once from the guy who was the "hunt master" (?) on the estate of The Earl of Something-Or-Other in Scotland), but I think this place could give it a run for it's money.



Ahh....nothing like "Hard Liquor and Handgun Night" at the club with the family.

I remember after a day of shooting sporting clays at the Dallas Gun Club a few years ago I was impressed enough I thought I would join.  I went online and filled out the membership application, then was instructed to send it in along with $5,000 and they would see if my nose was stuck sufficiently high enough into the stratosphere to warrant them talking to me any further.  

POP!  *the sound of my bubble bursting*

I seem to have a knack for taking my thinly papered wallet to places that require a personal financial statement be submitted prior to entry. 


When I was still in high school researching which colleges I wanted to go to I decided on the University of Hawaii.  At the time they didn't have any out-of-state tuition, so it sounded affordable.  

Then my dad asked how I was going to get to Hawaii, and then home again for the summer?  I said, "No prob....I'll just fly."  He asked, "On who's dime?"

Umm....  it was about then that Texas Tech, located in beautiful picturesque West Texas, rose to the top of my list....



That's "Diamond Head on the Plains" on the horizon, left.

Then when I was in college I saw a story in Life magazine (?) about an experiment at Vassar College in NY whereby they would begin admitting a few males to the previously all-girls school.   I wanted to be one of those select few.

  
Go Vassar!

I went so far as to write them and ask for an application and a catalogue.  They sent the application, but said I would have to fill it out and send it back with a $50 application fee (times were simpler then) before they would send me the catalogue.  I'm guessing I wasn't the only guy making that same request.

As it would have been challenging for me to scrape together $5 at the time, much less $50, my experience at Vassar was brief....and all in my head.  :)

Now that I think about it, I'm just gonna pay per visit to the Frisco Gun Club....no membership for me.  Groucho Marx might have been on to something when he said, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."  

I do have my standards, you know.  :)

S

8 comments:

  1. I never really considered going out of state (I never even took the SAT) but I did get brochures from Oxford, which was pretty cool, though how the hell I'd have gotten to England (I didn't even have a passport!) was a big problem. That and probably the hundreds of thousands of dollars it'd have cost.

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  2. I heard at least 4 "DOH's!!" in this post.

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  3. Love that Grouch line. As far as education goes, wherever you went, you ended up an intelligent, educated fellow, in my humble opinion.

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  4. Ditto on the Grouch line. That all girls school might have been worth not learning anything. Fun Post.

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  5. Virgin Galactic has a bargain for you: for a mere 200,000 (deposit, of course) you can book a 20 minute flight into low-space.

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  6. It's tough having champagne taste and a beer budget, isn't it?

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  7. That Hawaiian view is pretty much worth any amount of tuition. The mountains and water are nice, too.

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  8. I didn't want to go to college so far away that I couldn't come home & have my mom do my laundry :)

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