What follows is, I hope, my only political post of the season.
I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat. Will Rogers I’ve always thought Republicans were better at coming together as a single party than Democrats. Sure, Republicans have plenty of problems within their party, but come Election Day, the anti-tax millionaires from the big cities and the Bible thumping farmers from the county have a much easier time voting for the same candidates than the various wings of the Democratic party.
Taking a few minutes off from tracking Sandy to catch up on the weekend.
With a deep sigh after a couple very busy weeks, things can start getting back to normal around here.
Last week was parent-teacher conferences/Fall Break at St. P’s. S. attended the sessions with M.’s and C.’s teachers and learned both are doing very well and are delights to have in class but tend to talk too much and not listen when they are instructed to rein in the verbal offerings.
I am a horrible parent. Last night, as the Indiana Fever closed out the WNBA championship series, I let my girls sleep. Years from now, when classmates ask them where they were on that glorious night, they’ll dip their heads and mumble, “My dad didn’t wake me up to watch the game or celebrate.”
A terrific weekend, other than that notable failure. One of my 86 sisters-in-law got married, so we had the entire extended clan in town.
Shall we kick off the week by catching up on odds and ends that have accumulated? I think we shall.
M. took another step towards big-girlhood a week ago when she got her ears pierced. Our rule has always been there will be no piercings until the girls can take care of them themselves. M. seemed ready for that and after a month of earning them through good behavior, she finally got them.
I finished my latest book over a week ago but hadn’t found the time to write about it yet. I sat down to do it this morning, not yet looking at the calendar. When I was at the bank later at saw the date, I realized there was some part of me that had intentionally held off on writing this entry until today. My mom was born on October 10, 1951.
Some game at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday. First there was the result, a fantastic Colts comeback - they trailed 21-3 at halftime and looked awful in the first half - that ended on a missed Green Bay field goal that secured the 30-27 win. There was Reggie Wayne’s epic performance, catching every ball that was anywhere near him. There was Andrew Luck engineering a fantastic drive for the winning touchdown.
I’ve always loved the final day of the baseball season.1 Anyone can go to Opening Day, but it takes a real fan to go to Closing Day when your team is 25 games out and has been since Father’s Day.
When the end of the season rolls around, I often think of a year in the late 90s, probably 1998, when a group of us planned to go to the Royals' final home game.
Birthday time in our home again. Today L. leaves the easy ways of three-year-oldom behind for the hard-knocks world that is being four.
She’s pretty excited.
So who is little L. today? She’s a piece of work, I tell you. She has always had a spark about her that delights pretty much everyone she runs into. There’s a glimmer in her eye, an ease with adults, a desire to report on what’s happening around her, and her ever-present grin that seem to endear her to everyone.
Sometimes the most important questions do not get asked. Or at least they’re asked by the wrong people, never get answered, and fade away.
Yesterday, as I knocked out dishes and laundry, I listened to the American Top 40 rerun of the week. It was from September 1985. Good times for me, back then. In my first month of high school, the Royals had just caught and passed the Angels and were on their way to two more comebacks in October.
Bond is back! After a long, long break, I finally dove into Pierce Brosnan’s first turn as Bond, GoldenEye, Tuesday night. Strangely, as I got deeper and deeper into the flick, I realized that I had never seen the entire movie. I’ve seen the beginning many times, and parts of the rest, but there were parts I’m sure I never saw. Weird, because I remember being pretty excited about the new era of Bond back in 1995.
First, quickly, yes I am kicking myself for staying up and watching Sunday Night’s game rather than Monday’s. I only made it about halfway into the third quarter last night, thus missed the replacement ref fiasco I had been hoping for. I say we keep it going! Don’t stop now, Goodell, owners, and referee union. Let’s drag this thing out as long as possible and see just how many ways we can screw up the season!
It isn’t often anymore that I stay up and watch an entire Sunday or Monday Night Football game. Last night was an exception. And it wasn’t just because the game between New England and Baltimore was tremendously important, with the loser taking on a second loss just three weeks into the season.
It wasn’t just because, early on, the replacement referees showed they would not be able to keep control of the game.
Two years ago, when M. was learning to read and write, we came across a notebook with some “Direy” entries in it. My favorite entry read:
Dear Direy, C. hit me. Love, M. Now that C. is going through the same learning process, we’re finding fun little notes from her. Like this one that was lying on the floor this morning. Translated for universal comprehension, it reads:
by C.
After two weeks, I’ll follow the lead of pretty much every other football commentator and make broad assertions based on limited data. Therefore, 2012 will be the Wacky Year. One week teams and players will look great, the next totally lost. See the Cowboys, who went from Super Bowl favorites to Same Old Cowboys in 10 days' time. And Peyton Manning who went from, Back to Normal to ‘Weak Arm, Bad Decisions, Was It A Mistake To Come Back?
It’s been nearly eight months since I watched a Bond movie. I need to get back on that. Perhaps this article, coming with the 50th anniversary of the franchise, will get me motivated again. It tells the story of all the elements that had to come together the get the first movie made. While Bond seems old hat these days, once he was the face of a bright, space age future.
I’ve hit a wall. I’ve abandoned two books in a row. The first, which got good reviews on Amazon, was so horribly written that I gave up after two chapters. The second, a piece of alternative-history fiction, I gave 100 pages. But I was sure I would get more annoyed and less entertained as I continued. I’m going to start over tomorrow. Here is a book I did finish, though, a couple weeks ago.
Thursday. All three girls in school. Which means I can sit down, scan the headlines, and pick out something to write about.
So…
Jim Calhoun retires from UConn
I’ll throw this out: no coach has had as much success as Calhoun with as little respect. Seriously, when was the last time someone drew up a Best Coach in the Game list and he was in the Top 5? He has three titles, for crying out loud!
Four weeks of high school football in the books here in Indiana. My last two weeks have been very interesting, for very different reasons. I shall share.
A week ago, I had the one Catholic school we cover, RHS, which was ranked #5 in 4A, against one of their two biggest rivals, BCHS, which was ranked #1 in 3A. Despite the class difference, BCHS has dominated the series in the last decade, as they’ve dominated pretty much everyone over that span.
It promises to be a strange year for NFL fans here in Indianapolis. Most Colts fans were able to deal with the wreckage of last season, knowing that Andrew Luck would be the reward. Based on early returns, Luck seems to be the real deal. But a good quarterback does not alone rebuild a crumbling franchise. The Colts still have lots of work to do to get back in the playoff mix, let alone become a Super Bowl contender again.
When you really think about it, there are three different days when summer ends. If you have kids in school, there’s the first day of school. There’s the really-real end of summer, which is the date of the autumnal equinox. And then there’s today, the day after Labor Day, which has long been the traditional end of summer.
There’s an added bonus in our house today as L. goes off to her first day of 3’s class.
To continue my recent music nostalgia jag, the fifth anniversary of me posting my favorite albums of all time list just passed. Seems like a good time to revisit the list and see if anything has changed.
As a quick refresher, here were the Top 5, Honorable Mentions, and Super Honorable Mention from August 2007.
1a - London Calling - The Clash 1b - OK Computer - Radiohead 3 - It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back - Public Enemy 4 - Revolver - The Beatles 5 - Achtung Baby - U2
On occasion a memory from the past will trigger something in my brain and I’ll fall into a deeper hole of nostalgia. That’s been the case recently concerning summer music from the 1980s.
The trigger, this time, was two separate American Top 40s I listened to on recent Sundays.1 One was from 1984, and was loaded with Prince, Bruce, Tina, Cyndi and the Footloose soundtrack. That was one of the truly great summers ever, between some epic pop artists and the LA Olympics.
Some notes from the weekend.
First football game of the season Friday night. I covered Good Ol’ ECHS who had won their season opener. Friday they were facing a team that easily beat them twice last season. ECHS had a 7-6 lead at halftime, and after turning a fumble into a scoring drive, were up 25-24 early in the fourth quarter. They promptly gave up a 58-yard TD run and ended up losing 36-25.
I’ve gotten way behind on updating my Reading page, the little summaries of books that I finish. When I switched over to Squarespace 6, the formatting of that page got jacked up, meaning I have to redesign it.
In the interest of killing two birds with one stone, I’m going to wipe out the existing Reading page and begin posting my summaries here on the main page. Rather than completely catch up, I’ll start with two small books I’ve read over the past week.
I’ve been promising this post for nearly two months. Time to share it, I guess.
As promised, here is my accounting of how I would evaluate each major league franchise were the Royals ever contracted/moved away from Kansas City and I was in the market for a new team.
There are several factors that would go into selecting a new team. The team would need to be competitive. Not necessarily a shoe-in for the post-season, but at least in the running for a division title more often than not.
More firsts over the weekend. M. and C. each caught their first fish. Both snagged a blue gill off a dock with a little help from a friend of ours. I didn’t have my camera or phone with me, but I can assure you they were thiiiiiiiiis big! Actually, they were quite small but that didn’t make their joy any smaller. They were both about as excited as could be. L.
First, yes, another visual change to the blog.
If you’ve been checking in during the late evenings over the past week, you may have noticed various changes on each visit. I continued to tweak my initial choice of theme on Squarespace 6. Instead of getting more pleased with my choices, I liked it less and less. So I explored the other options available. Eventually I settled on what you are now looking at, which I will likely/probably/perhaps stick with for a while.
The alarm went off at 6:20. Ten minutes later I was up and rousing the girls. They stumbled downstairs, shoveled some breakfast in, and made their lunch requests. We brushed teeth, put on uniforms, and fixed hair. We loaded backpacks and grabbed bags of school supplies. And then we were off.
The 2012-13 school year has begun.
The morning went surprisingly well. C. was quick to get out of bed, which is often a problem for her, and seemed full of energy and excited.
Finally, a tribute to some real American heroes: the men who stay home with their children.
“I sort of take things upon myself,” said Mr. Griffioen, whose family has added a son and moved to Detroit. “I don’t go to the store to buy my kids toys. I make them toys. I do woodworking, leatherworking. I learned all sorts of manly skills that I never would have had time to learn if I were sitting in an office 28 stories above San Francisco.
Another summer Olympics has come-and-gone. These were good ones, I think, although if you’re a loyal reader of the blog and this was your only connection to the games, you wouldn’t know it. In both 2004 and 2008, I wrote extensively throughout the games. This time around, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t do any immediate posts after important events. Instead, I kept a running file where I jotted down little notes as they occurred to me.