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.
A quick note about the new look. No major changes for you, the loyal reader, to worry about. Squarespace, the service I’ve been on since early this year, just released the newest version of their platform. Version 6 brings in a bunch of new technologies, most of which can be lumped under the term ‘responsive web design’. Basically what that means is a site should look the same whether you’re reading it on a 30' display, an iPad, or a smartphone.
This is a frightening story. Mat Honan, a technology writer, had his iCloud, Google, Twitter, and Amazon accounts hijacked, and in turn, his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook remotely wiped, destroying years of data he had not backed up. He was lucky, though, in that the hackers were only interested in having some fun rather than running amok with his financial data. All of the big technology companies are pushing us towards exclusive use of their cloud-based systems.
From the time I left my house Friday morning until I returned very late Sunday night, I spent approximately 67 hours in, or traveling to-and-from, Kansas City. The obligatory run down of the weekend’s events. I landed at 7:30 Friday morning. Having been up since 4:45 Eastern, I drove straight to The Roasterie to grab some coffee and enjoy the easy-going ambiance of Brookside. I followed that up with a few laps of the Plaza.
I couldn’t wait any longer, so last night I cracked open my first bottle of my first batch of beer. While I found it lacking in a few areas, I am reasonably pleased with how the B. Brewery’s first beer, Naismith Nut Brown Ale, turned out. My first concern, as I mentioned last week, was that I had presented too much oxygen in the bottling process and there might be some off odors/flavors present.
Another entry into the list of things the girls did for the first time in the summer of 2012: tubing on a lake. Thanks to some friends, the girls got to go out on a boat over the weekend. M. and C. both got a couple turns on the tube behind the boat. Both had great times. M. was the first up. I was a little surprised at how eager she was to get out on the water given her cautious nature.
Two weeks down, two to go. Yesterday I racked and bottled my first batch of beer. Racking is the process in which the beer is moved from the fermenter into a temporary container, where it is mixed with sugar which will kick off the carbonation process once bottled. Everything appeared well with my nut brown ale. When I popped the top of the fermenter, I was greeted by the pleasant smell of a healthy, growing brown ale.
Today is M.’s eighth birthday. The kid is growing up and beginning to leave the trappings of early childhood behind. Over the weekend, we were in the vicinity of a group of girls I will guess were in the 12-14 range. M. kind of drifted away from the rest of the family and just stared at the party for the longest time, taking in everything the girls were doing and saying.
We’ve reached the time of the year when the Royals completely fall apart, before their inevitable signs of life in September that we will cling to over the off season in hopes it was a sign that the team’s fortunes are finally changing. I’ll call it now: Eric Hosmer is going to start hitting again in mid-August. Luke Hochevar will do his annual ‘pitch solidly when no one is watching' thing.
The NCAA has spoken and now Penn State gets to deal with another part of the rebuilding process after the Sandusky Affair. A $60 million fine. A four-year bowl ban. The loss of ten scholarships per year for four years. And vacating all wins from 1998 to 2011. That fine is not insignificant. Neither is the loss of bowl games in four straight years, nor the longer term effects reducing scholarships will carry.
Four days in Denver. Sounds like a bad political thriller from the 1970s, no? Our weekend in the Mile High City was far from bad movie from my childhood. The highlights: The girls travelled very well on the way out. S. sat in a row with C. and L., while M. and I sat a row up. We were lucky enough to share our row with a pilot from another airline who was all-too-happy to share information about flying without being asked.
For a crappy game, the 2012 All Star Game will certainly go down as one of the more memorable All Star weeks in recent memory. Thanks to the mini-controversy of Yankee Robinson Cano not selecting Royal Billy Butler for the Home Run Derby, the event turned into an opportunity for Kansas City baseball fans to unload 25 years of frustration on the best player on the best team in the league.