Today Cal Ripken enters Cooperstown as a member of baseball's Hall of Fame. When I was in Baltimore over the Fourth of July, I picked up a shirt that read:
Listen to your father/coach
Practice hard every day
Play for your hometown team
Never take a day off
Collect 3000 hits
End up in Cooperstown on July 29th 2007
While it pertains to Cal Ripken and his extraordinary career, I always think that it applies to the kids I coach and the way I go about my life. It's not about glory, it's about honor, commitment, and pride in what you do.
We were in Western New York earlier this month. While some of the families made the drive, I didn't make it to Coopertown. I'll wait for the Iron Man. As a part-time resident of Maryland, I could relate to the families in this article, but two trips to NY in a summer would have been a bit much: http://www2.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2007/07_29-56/TOP
Amazing.
Thirteen years after the "E"arthquake that changed lives, I finally missed the anniversary of the event. The Northridge Earthquake occured January 17, 1994. This is probably the first year I really forgot it.
I remember seeing the timelines that Michael and his classmates would create in their early elementary grades and they inevitably had the earthquake on it even though they were three and four when it happened. Plenty of people referred to various anniversaries as either before the Northridge quake or after the quake. We bought our house from a person who decided to move out of the area after the damage was pretty severe. The aftershocks lasted for months. Some bowling centers closed for months and others closed permanently. I actually have an earthquake kit--something I put together after the multiple aftershocks that first Friday after the main quake. I think there were four 5.0+ shakers in a row. That's all it took. I still restock the earthquake kit once a year, so I guess I have to do that this weekend or next.
We seem to get a really good shaker every twenty years, so I guess we're closer to the next one than we are away from Northridge quake. But I will optimistically accept the idea that I will sleep through the night January 16th from now on.
Gotta split,
Angel
This year, Michael is doing his farewell tour to his hair--it has grown down his back well down between his shoulder blades. So my son is going to his high school on Tuesday as Jesus. The hair will be gone before water polo starts on the 6th--donated to Locks of Love--so this his last hurrah as a longhair for quite awhile. So for school, he'll be blessing the lost souls of Tujunga, but removing the costume before we head to Anaheim.
Zoe, despite every creative and unique idea we could come up with, insists on being Tinker Bell. So I gave up, and let her be what she wanted. No slot machine costumes, no costumes that coordinate with Michael (which is when we let him pick Jesus), a simple commercial costume. The countless Tinker Bells we'll encounter at Disneyland on Tuesday night will hopefully get Zoe to reconsider for next year. Even last year, she wanted to be an astronaut, which rocked. But this year, I'll have a little imp floating a little taller than usual--happy as can be--looking like every third girl running around. But she's happy, so I can live if she doesn't want to be original--for this year.
We're off to celebrate the entire weekend, so Happy Halloween!
Gotta split,
Ang
There's probably a reason I would never have lasted in the sports department of a local television news station, and this week exemplified the incongruencies beyond a shadow of a doubt. In the 2-1/2 years since 9/11, it was easy to forget the sacrifices of an NFL player named Pat Tillman. He gave no interviews after his decision, he simply quit, and left to defend our country. There wasn't a sound bite to be edited. And since then, without granting interviews, there wasn't a lot the news media could do to create interest in a nonstory--a man defending his country by choice.
Fast forward to this week, and suddenly the NFL draft is upon us. My husband is now semi-retired, and we fight for control of the car radio on the way to pick up our son after school each afternoon. He's a fan of sports talk radio, while I prefer my Larry Elder. On the way home, my son chirps up from the back seat something about how I'll love this guy, Eli Manning, they're talking about, and my husband concedes "he's pulling a John Elway."
OK, I spent my summers in Maryland, so unlike most residents of the San Fernando Valley, Elway's antics at his potential drafting by the Colts (and how he'd defect to baseball) are still open wounds. To hear that another player is flat-out whining to the media about the prospect of being drafted by a team that "doesn't want to win" just makes me want to barf. If the draft had been held two weeks ago, I would have thought he was a selfish whiner, but that he was still acting like an ass just days after the death of Pat Tillman lacked class, it lacked integrity, and it just proves to me that some people Tillman was protecting might do better out there on the front lines for a few days, a few weeks or a few months just to get their priorities straight.
I'm disappointed that San Diego or that any team drafted such a moron. I'm disappointed that after drafting said moron that San Diego traded him. If football is truly the All-American sport, then maybe some all-American fans can tell Mr. Manning that his priorities are beyond pathetic. In the bigger scope of life over sports, Eli Manning hasn't even mastered the concept that sports are just a game. Maybe idiots like this could be introduced to a different kind of draft. Then playing a game for the big bucks would be put back into perspective.
It's been an incredible week of watching and waiting--and feeling my heart beat out of my chest. San Fernando is completely concrete and asphalt, and while the hills are visible from every direction, we're (thankfully) on the sidelines of the drama playing out in SoCal. However, we're not immune from the smoke, the freeway closures, or the concerns about friends.
My son's school was only a mile or two from one of the fronts, and the center is less than a mile south of that. We kept him home for two days not because his school was in danger, but because of the difficulty of getting to the school from our area and with the freeway closure, that it could take several hours to go around alternate ways to retrieve him. We would have to drive right along the freeway where they were fighting the fire, and they kept closing portions of it, including parts we needed. On top of that, was there any real reason to send the kids in to breathe that crap?
The parking lot of the center has ash swirling around like little funnel clouds. I touch it and it dissolves on my finger, but I have to wonder how much we're not seeing, that we're breathing in.
I'll know on Saturday how many of the kids were affected, and how many were evacuated, because I honestly don't know the names of all the developments and enclaves in our area.
Halloween is tomorrow night, and only some of the shopping centers are doing Trick or Treat. But I'll definitely be at one of them. No way are the kids gonna come home with lungs as black as Zoe's costume. Oh yeah, Zoe wants to be a bumble bee. And for that, Michael will be a beekeeper.
To everyone in Southern California, I'm thinking of you. This too shall pass. Let's just hope it passes without any more losses of lives, homes, or sanity.
Ack. Halloween is now only 9 days away and we're still trying to come up with the perfect costume for the kidlings. I take pride in the notion that the kids don't purchase cheesy store bought costumes, but at this point, if I can get Michael to agree on anything, I am willing to settle.
In past years, Michael has been:
A lion (yes, store bought, but babies are cute)
A dinosaur (ditto)
Alvin (from Alvin and the Chipmunks)
Elvis (thankyouverymuch)
A slot machine (one armed bandit complete with moving tumblers)
The Headless Horseman (complete with cackling pumpkin head)
A ghoul (rolled around in the dirt in a salvage store suit, and dragged one leg through the mall...my ham)
The bus driver from Southpark (complete with bird and nest in hair...What did you say?! Sit Down!)
Jack (from Jack in the box--suspenders, power shirt, and giant Jack head)
Emeril (Bam!)
And then with Zoe,
The Jolly Green Giant and a pea pod
Football player and cheerleader (because anything in pony tails and bobby socks is cute)
Which brings me to THIS year. Peter Pan and Tinkerbell would be a great idea, but Michael's already done his stint in tights. We talked about him being a barista and Zoe a bag of coffee, but she keeps mentioning Dora, but that leaves Michael to be either Boots or Swiper, and neither is something he wants to do. Unfortunately, we're running out of time, so maybe tomorrow, we'll sit down and settle this. He says this is his last year, so we'll have to go out with a bang.
June gloom has socked in SoCal pretty well. We get drizzle and cold temps, and occasionally the sun breaks through by late afternoon. But it's the first two weeks in June, and what does that mean to me? Jacaranda time. Those beautiful, albeit messy, trees that are everywhere, with a shock of purple where green leaves once were.
They're from South America, and there honestly seem to be more each year--in new shopping centers and in front of people's homes. We have two of them, and they are truly the reason I bought my home. They must have been planted when the house was built, which makes them old enough to collect social security by now. The entire front yard is carpetted in purple flowers right now. From certain areas, you can see our trees blocks away. Our next door neighbor has a smaller one that confettis our driveway. I have climbing rose vines, but the pink flowers can't hold a candle to the jacarandas.
The purple sprouts out over the rest of the canopy (not like SoCal has THAT many trees, anyway), but its always so dramatic. Drive down some streets, and it's a virtual sea of purple blossoms. Sepulveda has blocks of them, and we were on Parthenia and there was a block of the trees that had to be 30 or 40 feet high.
The only sad part this year is that the trees are blooming alone. My son and I always called them Laker trees because they seemed to bloom as the Lakers would win the playoffs.
