On Disc Golf

My home course is Becker . I try to play there at least twice a week. I record my scores (usually about 7 or 8 over par) and frequencies of good/bad drives/midranges/putts. I work (very occasionally) on my putts with my practice basket. I have hoped that disc golf would be a sport I could play well into my sixties or even seventies--my knees are bad, and I need activities that don't stress them too much. I take disc golf semi-seriously, but how seriously should I take it? Or, to put it differently, I've reached a plateau in my level of play, and so raising that level would take more time and more focused effort. Is that effort worth it?

In a larger sense, this is a question of priorities. Disc golf, cooking, reading--these are my primary hobbies. But there are secondary hobbies, like surfing the net, writing little essays about the books I read, and photography. Getting better at disc golf, or cooking, would require more time on those hobbies, and so less time on other things.

This is tied to the idea of a learning curve, although I've never been clear on the axes of a learning curve. If time is on the vertical axis and knowledge on the horizontal, then the steep part of the learning curve is there is little reward for much time, and so people quit when the learning curve gets steep. But if time is on the horizontal axis and knowledge on the vertical, then the steep part is much reward for little time, and is the easiest part. The idea of a plateau, as I mentioned above, works with time on the horizontal and knowledge on the vertical, so I'll go with that conception of a learning curve--knowledge approaches 100 percent along a horizontal asymptote.

And so, I'm at a height where a little knowledge in disc golf or cooking costs a lot of time. And where should that time come from? My life may have so much slack in it that I can find the time without cutting out too many other things I like to do, but I think not. SCSU has gone through a round of firings of tenured faculty, and my seniority is not so great that I feel bulletproof. I have to spend much more time on research than I have in the past, because I need to be able to get a job if I get fired. And that means picking up on mathematical research, not math history. But I need to publish the math history projects I'm working on, too.
So I have these sorts of priorities for work: research, teaching, service. Luckily for me, my chair has given me large lecture classes, which really cuts down on teaching time. And then for outside of work, there's K and then hobbies, like disc golf, cooking, reading, writing, photography. Intensive web surfing will have to go, which is a pity, because I liked being `the well-informed guy'.

And now I have over 500 words, which will have to be enough for this entry.