Summer 2016: Day 33

The 7 a.m. starts because of the boys' swim practices that were such a novelty last week are losing their appeal. I was tired all day and am yawning now as I type this. The routine was similar today -- Ben had swim practice, Michael had basketball, Ben had basketball, and Michael had swim, but today, the swim was a meet. He swam great -- maybe the best meet he's ever had. Last week he said he was tired, and his times showed that. Today, he was a torpedo. He's not swimming faster times than Ben, but he got a lot closer to them at this meet.

Oh, we have a pickup a couple days while our RAV is in the shop. Kind of a new experience for me -- I'm definitely not a pickup person. Still, it had more room than the Corolla we originally had reserved. I bought Cafe Rio for dinner while we were at the meet at Life Center -- our old health club and the place both boys learned to swim. I couldn't help but picture them in the corner of the pool where their lessons took place. Too fast ...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Seems like yesterday, but it was long ago

One of my favorite songs is Bob Seger's "Against the Wind." Being somewhat overly nostalgic, it's always resonated with me, even when I was a teenager. In 1984, we were on a weekend trip at a resort in Wisconsin (a longer story for another post), and I was incredibly bored and listened to the only tape I brought for my Walkman over and over, just songs taped off the radio. One of the songs was "Against the Wind" and somehow, only at 13, I recognized the reflection the lyrics invoke, of being young and taking life head on, growing up in a blink of an eye and being wiser yet a little sad. Of course, just about every Bog Seger song is about that same theme ("Beautiful Loser," "Like a Rock", "Night Moves", "Roll Me Away," you can even make a case for "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll"), but this one always stuck with me. Another reason I like "Against the Wind" so much — the line: "Those drifter days...
Read more

Nobody did it better

After Lori recorded it on our DVR, I finally got around to watching A Football Life: Walter Payton (link shows a clip from the show) that aired on NFL Network. It brought back some good memories. In 1977, as a second-grader, I started watching football for the first time. I collected football cards. I remember not only watching the Bears in the early game, but watching late games, usually on NBC, after the sun had gone down that dark November and December. My first lesson in my NFL education was an amazing one: Witnessing Walter Payton's incredible 1977 season in which he rushed for 1,852 yards (in 14 games) and helped the Bears to the playoffs. CBS gushed over Payton all season, setting his runs captured by NFL Films to song: Carly Simon's "Nobody Does It Better." I hear that and still think back to that late fall and winter. I don't know how much local radio played the song (and this was a memorable winter for music), but CBS was all over it. I remembered many ...
Read more

Batting averages, part 3

Image
Thirty-two years ago, I was playing my first season of non-T-ball . I was reading about basebal l. And I wanted to buy a table-top board game that replicated the baseball experience . I almost tried APBA , but my father said I should try Strat-o-Matic . I had seen ads for Strat-o-Matic in baseball magazines (including the one I was engrossed in that spring), but it never struck me as something that absolutely looked cool. My father's suggestion came from a personal place: He played Strat-o-Matic in his youth. Dad had access to the then current game through some of his friends, and one night, he brought it home. It wasn't the whole set -- just a few times, a red binder that scoresheets, and two charts the game uses. Three dice were easy to find, and for split cards (Strat sometimes needs to generate a random number between 1 and 20; back then, the game used little pink cards with the numbers on them, but today, it uses a 20-sided die), he used a deck of cards, taking out the ...
Read more