Summer 2020: Days 10-11

I'm blogging from an unusual place tonight -- a grassy patch in the parking lot of the sports complex where Michael is practicing, way out on the industrial west side of Salt Lake City.

The city enacted a curfew from 8 p.m.-6 a.m. through next Monday, and though driving to a business and driving home are allowed under the terms of the curfew, I didn't want Michael to deal with worrying about it. I would hate for his first time being pulled over to occur during all this. His team doesn't want parents inside the facility for basketball practice, so I'm camped outside here on a patch of grass, on a gorgeous evening, enjoying the relative quiet of an industrial neighborhood.

I walked the dog this morning so I won't have to do more than take her around the block when I get home. Yesterday, I just took her around the block a couple times. I'm sure I'd be OK walking her on a leash after curfew in our sleepy neighborhood, but I'm fine to do my part to try to make the chaos a little less chaotic.

I ran yesterday morning, which felt great again, and needed to buy a hose at Home Depot after ours exploded. I'm so ready to not do much away from the house this week. I took Ben to swim practice today and I'm writing here from the west west side, which I don't mind (though my phone overheated while I was trying to work in the JCC parking lot), but if I avoided stores the rest of the week, I wouldn't mind. Eventually, we'll need to go grocery shopping, but that can wait until the weekend.

The rollercoaster of emotions from the unrest and anger our country is experiencing is cutting into my work productivity. A little surprisingly, I worrying less about the virus and more about the riots. I vacillate between the situation is calming down and believing we're in for a long, ugly, sad summer. I may not come to a place of solace on that anytime soon, but at least for tonight, I can enjoy the sunset, watch cars on I-215 pass by, and hope.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Summer, Day 8

Today was Memorial Day, and as far as Memorial Days go, this one seemed somewhat anticlimactic. The sun came out after three less-than-stellar days, perhaps preventing the weekend from being a total bust. I worked late last night but was awake earlier than I wanted to be this morning. I fell back asleep and woke up around 10:30 to a thumping sound outside. Michael, Lori and my father-in-law got the rest of the sand in the base of the new basketball hoop, and Michael and his friend from across the street were shooting around. This was Lori's parents' last day in Utah, so we treated them to The Cheesecake Factory at the new City Creek mall downtown. I had the macaroni and cheese burger and most of a piece of Oreo cheesecake (no matter how much I pushed on my sons -- they wanted to share Lori's banana cream cheesecake). The boys and I wandered City Creek a little and came home. The afternoon wasn't much more eventful. Michael and I took Popcorn to the park for about
Read more

Vacation finale

Image
As expected, the last three days of vacation were much less eventful than the first 12. This happens every year -- we get back from Wisconsin for at least one day before leaving for Utah, and it's just wind-down time. And that's OK -- going nonstop for two weeks isn't easy, especially with kids. And vacation is supposed to be a time to relax, and for the past three days, that's what we did. The past few days weren't that relaxing, however. Monday, we met my mom, who is in Chicago this week, for lunch and then to Old Orchard Mall. That night, we met some friends at the new Superdawg (my favorite Chicago hot dog restaurant) in Wheeling. Tuesday, after pondering going downtown, we ended up just seeing the Smurfs movie with my dad. Last night, we went to dinner at a nice little Italian restaurant here in Edgebrook. Wednesday was mostly devoted to getting ready for our return trip Thursday morning. The heat and thunderstorms finally subsided -- this might have been the m
Read more

The Little Red Machine

Image
After blogging about Eldest's baseball experience (as well as mine as an assistant coach), I decided to write about my five years playing organized baseball as a kid. Long ago (the mid-1990s), I wrote about two of these seasons, so I will dig those up and transcribe/edit/add/revise when I post on those two seasons. This post will be about my first season, in 1978 on the Reds. We had moved into our new house in 1977, and my new friends, especially Marc, loved baseball and collected baseball cards. Even before we had moved that spring, I was started to become interested in baseball, so my interest exploded that summer. I had played basketball for two seasons at Norwood Park, so my father signed me up for t-ball in the spring of 1978 and bought me a glove (mass-autographed by Mickey Rivers!). I was placed on the Reds. The team was coached by a couple teenagers, including the older brother of one of my teammates. I don't remember many of my other teammates, except we had a bi
Read more