OK, so it's feast or famine around here. What else is new. Here's some dang pictures:
T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.
She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.
Here's another:
This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.
That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:
He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.
Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:
And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:
Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.
Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.
Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".
Dude! Where in blue blazes does the time go?! Well, I can actually show you where a lot of it has gone. It's gone here:
That took up a couple of weekends and the evenings during the week. We filmed it in our basement - Brad borrowed the camera and the microphone from Williams, we worked up a script, recorded it, and started filming. I did most of the filming, actually - that was probably the most efficient way to do it. And then the editing of the film. There are things I'd like to improve on it, but now that I have a little experience with stop-motion, the next one will be a lot better. Not necessarily higher-tech - I kind of like the low-tech charm it has. (As my left forearm will tell you.) It was cool to do - a lot of fun, and it made me feel much more legitimately like a board member.
Makes me feel like there are other home movies out there that I've made recently that I could toss up here and regain some goodwill with you, my faithful reader(s...?), but looking at my hard drive where I keep them, it looks like no. Not really. There's one that's more than 10 minutes - though I suppose I could break it up. OK, I'll do that quick:
...though "quick" might be optimistic. This is getting to be one creaky computer. Wish I knew more about them so I could make it not so - the most I ever manage to do is throw out old stuff and clear up space on the hard drive. But that isn't really getting me anywhere anymore - it's to the point where even Youtube videos are all herky-jerky. Probably have to upgrade before too terribly long.
So we filmed a lot of T's baseball parade, which I will get into edited format sometime mid-2019. I've still got films from the summer fair at Cummington from last year to do...All kinds of them. It's a wonder I get anything done at all around here.
(This is where Janneke inserts a one-liner that leaves me sliced from navel to sternum on the floor.)
Big news? Not so much lately. T is playing baseball, although mostly, T is having fun in the dugout. That, I think, is the most attractive aspect of it for her. She's not really much of a hitter yet, and fielding rarely happens - though she did stop a couple of ground balls and throw them toward 2nd base the other day, all in a reasonably facsimile of appropriate hurry. What the heck, she has fun. And she's the youngest kid out there. I heard from another parent at a birthday party the other day that there's a tee-ball league in North Adams, and that a lot of parents schlep over there so the kids won't have this looooong game where 90% of the time the coaches are lobbing rainbow balls to kids who can't hit but every twentieth one. And as a two-inning game currently takes two hours in T's rookie league, I have come to think that perhaps that was the way to go with our six-year-old. But then again, it's over in North Adams, the same place that "organized" the "soccer" "league" that Q played in a few weeks ago. So they probably play in parking lots using burnt-out lightbulbs for balls and passed-out crackheads for bases.
(Ha! Perhaps it won't take so long after all - the video loaded into iMovie, and I'm currently exporting the first half of the "Julius Caesar" video. Shouldn't be long!)
Yeah - Julius Caesar. Phenomenal. I can not say enough about Shakespeare & Company, the outfit that our local elementary school hired to come in and teach the kids the play. Those darn kids did the whole play, and I only recall one kid ever calling for a line. (If you sit through the whole thing once it's up, you'll see it. I don't think there are any legal issues with putting the video up - you really can't see much of anyone's face, and I don't give any names. On the online version. The version I have here, I have rolling credits at the end.) Q was living and breathing Shakespeare by the time that unit ended, and he understood that play inside and out - the motivation of so many of the characters, the simple fact that the real star of the play is not Caesar but Brutus...Excellent work all round. I wrote a letter of thanks to the company, and have it here on the computer, but somehow never got 'round to sending it. And thus is it ever further made clear just how different Janneke and I are. She'd never have let the letter languish like that.
Q's playing spring soccer, as a U-12. He's currently 9, and still has two months before he's 10. But it's good for them to play against the older kids - the game is definitely faster than they're used to, and they're coming to grips with that. Q is still more timid than I would like, but I've really matured as a person and rarely say anything during games. And nothing after. Let his coaches do it.
Been running a lot! I read "Born to Run" (which I highly recommend), which has me re-thinking completely the way I run, and it has been like a miracle. Yesterday I ran between 6 and 8 miles, and today I did another 4.5, and I'll rest tomorrow, then do 2 more days on. It's suddenly feeling like there's no reason on Earth why I couldn't run a marathon. Aaaaall the structural damage that I used to think I had in my feet, knees, ankles, etc. turns out to be a result of the weakening of my joints do to their (a) being encased in shoes that encourage me to run on my heels, and (b) being jostled about and shocked by all that heel-running. It's brilliant: Take your shoes off, and walk. There - you are walking the way your feet are designed to walk. Same with running. At the end of both runs, yesterday and today, I felt like I could have gone five more miles. My friend Bridget - Don the Farmer's wife - read the book, and she just ran a half-marathon where she cut TWENTY MINUTES off the time she had run when she was...Well, ten or eleven years ago. She asked me if I was going to run in the half marathon in Lenox, the town where I teach, at the end of the month. And I said, "Why not?" And I mean it! Why the hell not?
I bought myself some running shoes that I don't think were designed for that - they're called the "Retro", by Champion. They look like this:
...Dang! I can't find a picture of them! OK, I'll take one:
But anyway, yeah, like I was sayin': These shoes seemed like a miracle. Because the book says you should run in thin shoes that don't protect your heel, so that if you do run heel-toe, it will hurt. So you don't. You run up on the balls and edges of your feet, as God intended. All these injuries that people get from running - the plantar fasciitis that I've been struggling with these recent years, shin splints, bad knees, bad hips - all these injuries started happening after the invention of the running shoe by the founder of Nike! It seemed perfectly logical at the time that lots of padding and support would make running safer, but it's exactly the opposite. The padding encourages you to run heel-toe, which jars your knees, and all the "support" encases your feet in a coffin in which they vegetate and become weak and susceptible to injury.
So I knew all this, and then I found myself in Target, in the shoe section, and I saw these shoes. They had only one pair - a men's 8 1/2. Exactly my size. I snapped them up, thinking it must be fate.
It's been a week, and oh my goodness! These shoes are so thin that I can feel every rock in the road (though not so much that it hurts), and my feet! My FEET! They feel tougher by the day, flexible, alive, stimulated by the road and the world. My calves are now made of iron, used to running this way as they are, and I can just go forever. It's a great feeling. Read that book, my friends. It might change your life.
Dude! Here's Part 1 of Julius Caesar, wherein T gets her face painted:
And here's part 2:
And that's plenty to keep you entertained for tonight. It's 11:01 PM, and I have a lot of working to fake tomorrow. So I'll hit the hay. Hasta la pasta...
By popular demand: Here is the spiral staircase I built for Skittles, originally to come up to our bed, but now moved to enable her to access T's bed, the foot of which can be seen to the right of the feline elevation apparatus:
And here are T and Q, just after Q's performance in "Julius Caesar", about which I hope to tell you a great deal presently:
And here are T and several of her friends, at her birthday party, held at the North Adams YMCA, about which, again, I hope to tell you many a fine thing:
Hey, man! Long, long time, no see. How to explain it? I don't know - A sort of general evening funk seems to have settled about me like a colossal bank of damp fart. come eight, nine o'clock these days, it seems I'm always about to do something, but mostly spend the time until I go to bed not quite doing anything. Not playing the guitar as much these days, not doing this...I think part of it might be Facebook. Seems I'm always checking in on what the various people I know are doing. And it turns out, 90% of it is not really worth knowing. Shocking, I know: "Most people's lives aren't very different or much more exciting than the one you're living right now." Painful lesson, slowly learned. I may be doing a facebook hiatus soon.
But, regardless the cause, tonight I found myself about to go to bed, having done nothing, nothing at all, since the kids went down, and I thought, "This is unacceptable. I must do a thing. Be that thing insignificant, be it a cosmic nothing, I must do it. Else, I'll have frittered away another night, and so by extension my life."
So I'll herewith get to explaining to you the ways in which I am not frittering away my life. Like this way right here:
That's T, this past Saturday night, having just lost her very first tooth! And that's the glory of digital photography, too: This is probably the fourth or fifth shot I got of her. A couple where she holds up the tooth, a couple where she's just smiling to show me the gap. And then this one, where she did whatever the hell she wanted to, and thank goodness she did. This was the night before Easter, so the Tooth Mouse and the Easter Bunny probably met up and had a smoke as they checked their watches and rubbed at their bleary eyes in the predawn gloaming outside our house.
Easter morning was a hoot - we did the eggs in the back yard this year, which, we thought, would be a departure from previous years. But it must not have been, because T found an egg from at least a year ago. It was pristine - Dirty, yes, but totally uncracked. Brilliantly colored still - it must have been out of the rain and out of the sun. But the inside was a dessicated little ball that rattled around inside the shell with a rubbery sound. I was curious about it and kind of wanted to crack it open and see what it looked like in there, but that somehow never happened. It disappeared into the garbage, I suppose, and was lost to science forever.
Like the raccoon my Dad told me about - he'd hunted it as a younger man with a buddy in the middle of the night, and since they were serious hunters then, bagging many in a night and wanting to take home as little weight as possible, they'd skun it right there in the darkness. (Men were men in those days, by cracky.) And after they'd peeled the hide off, he and his buddy saw that there was something embedded in the muscle of one leg that glowed. It glowed! "What the hell is that?", they said, pondering and peering. The dogs, however, were rapidly disappearing beyond earshot, and they hung the carcass up in a tree and determined to come back and get it during the daylight, bring the specimen in to the glaring beam of modern science, and see just what this queer little metallic body turned out to be. But when they returned, lo!, the carcass had gone, and with it all evidence of their discovery. Just as has now done my mummified egg.
That story may have been altered somewhat in my head over the years. But I'm sure any changes are for the better.
Anyhoo, in other news, Q has been playing a lot of soccer. He had been playing in this North Adams YMCA indoor soccer league for kids 10 and under, but it turned out he was the only kid there with any soccer experience at all. I mean, AT ALL. North Adams isn't quite the bastion of liberal, educated, non-football-type folks that Williamstown is. (And anyone out there who's bristling at the description, please know, as most of you must, that there is a great deal of irony in what I just said. For I am of those great unwashed masses of non-soccer types. Started at RB and CB, ran back kicks and punts, gunned on kickoff and blocked on special teams for the North Crawford Trojans back in the day. Wore #20. Cried as the seconds ticked off my final game as a senior.) So Q just destroyed all opposition there. He enjoyed it, don't get me wrong - he actually played a lot harder in this league than I usually see him play in the tougher fall 5-on-5 league. But it really wasn't worth doing - Nobody even brought a whistle to the games. The "coaches" were local parents who volunteered to run teams - there were only three - and bless 'em for doing it, but not a man-jack of them knew the first thing about soccer. It was also a little depressing - North Adams is a pretty down-on-its-luck town, and there were a lot of chain-smoking, gap-toothed grandmas barely keeping tabs on multiple toddlers as they tottered out into the field of play, sucking away on a sippy cup filled with Pepsi, to be ushered back out of the danger zone by players or other parents, myself among them...Coaches who come out to lead the youth in athletic development but can't be bothered to change out of their pajamas and are wearing shower flip-flops...It's ironic and hip to dress that way when you're 20 and going to college, I guess, but when you're 40? And are in some kind of position of leadership...? Time to put the pants on, Chewbacca.
So that was the league where Q would pound five goals and then sit back. But now we've stopped going to that because the Greylock soccer team is putting on a series of clinics on Saturday mornings. 9:00 to 10:30 is U-10s, and 10:30 to noon is U-12s. But Q and a bunch of his friends were invited to participate in the U-12 scrimmages as well, since the U-12 numbers weren't strong. So he gets 3 solid hours of soccer in on Saturdays, ending at noon, and the YMCA thing starts at noon. So he just stopped going to that. And y'know what? The YMCA thing cost more. Bizarre. Somehow I feel guilty about it - the way Q was so obviously the best player there, merely by knowing anything at all about the game, and then just stopped going. There would be 40 people in the gym each week, and you just know that by now, 2 weeks in, they're at least wondering where he went. And possibly arriving at all kinds of conclusions. Some generous, some not. "I bet he thinks he's better that us," I imagine them grumbling through cigarette smoke and Pepsi. "Bet they think it's not even worth coming to our dumpy little town."
Well, on the second one, at least...yeah. Kinda.
Spring soccer has started for Q now too - the official, practice-twice-a-week-and-games-on-Saturdays league, with uniforms and everything. And he and his entire cadre of skilled pals is going to be playing up at the U-12 level, owing again to the paucity of older players. Had their first practice Tuesday, another tomorrow.
T, meanwhile, due to our negligence and sexism, was not signed up for T-ball. But all is not lost, because it ocurred to Janneke that we should ask her if she wants to play, and she enthusiastically said that she does. So she's signed up! Turns out you have to be 6 to play - and guess what? Somebody turned 6.
TODAY!
WAHAA!!! Happy birthday, Peanut! I have her on film reading her birthday cards form far-flung friends and family. Don't believe me? Don't think she can pull it off? Well, wait right there, mister guy. I'll just upload them. There - Once they're uploaded, I'll quick make a film, which I'll quick upload to Youtube, and then we'll see who's laughing. Think I won't? There - Uploading now. You just wait, missy.
And T has become very interested in a sport that is bound to end in ruin. That's right: Horses. Now, some of you will recall the glee I felt when Q took it up, and might well ask yourselves, "Why isn't he as thrilled with T wanting to do the same thing?" And it's a legitimate question. On the one hand, I am thrilled - I love that she's into something that I myself was very interested in as a lad. I love that she and I are going to be able to bond over this noble pastime, with its intrinsic connection to and affinity for an animal that, whenever Q asks me to name my favorite species, I simply cannot avoid ranking as #1. And there is indeed a reason why I express trepidation with T, where I didn't with Q. The reasons are simply these:
1) T is a girl. And: 2) She is more focused and tougher than Q was at this age. Therefore: 3) She is going to stick with this. Ergo: 4) It is going to cost us.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and it's all going to be money well spent. And it won't necessarily be completely over the top cost-wise - In fact, the first couple of installments will have been free: Ronadh took T up for her first lesson (video forthcoming), and has offered to take her up again, just the two of them, on Sunday morning. Those two definitely have deep, deep crushes on one another - tonight T and I were out taking a bike ride on the Burley Picolo, and she insisted on stopping over to say hello. Which is when the invitation to take her out Sunday was first proffered.
(Videos are about 70% uploaded now, smartass. Get ready to eat some crow.)
In other animal news, Skittles' spiral staircase, with which she had been able to climb up onto our bed, has been moved to the side of T's bed. We had kind of had enough of her climbing up at all hours of the night and waking us up by walking across our faces. Let the kids deal with that - they'd be thrilled. And shortly after realizing that it worked to get her up to T's bed, Skittles realized that she didn't even need a ladder to get up to Q's bed. So between the two of them, Skittles doesn't miss our bed at all, and all three are happier. I have begun to suspect that Skittles was making me allergic, but I'm less convinced of that now. The allergic reactions are fading, as whatever came out in the spring air must also be petering out. Perhaps it isn't the cat after all. A big relief, because burying my nose in that fur has become my daily ritual upon arriving home or climbing out of bed. She's just the best damn cat ever.
(Videos transferring to iMovie. Get ready to be humiliated, Doubting Thomases.)
Been saving money hand over fist in anticipation of going abroad in a year and a half or so. Still not sure where, or exactly how - essentially, at this point, we'd take a Fulbright Teacher Exchange appointment to anywhere on our list of Countries We're Interested In Living In For A Year (Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Ecuador). But last year, the only country on the list at all was Mexico. So if that's still the case, we'd just up and go to the number one destination on our little hit parade: Uruguay. And if I can scratch some kind of living together while there, fantastic. If not, I'll find a guitar teacher and improve myself as a human being. And keep the house really, really clean.
A big part of us is still veeeery attracted by the idea of going to Puerto Rico again, this time for longer. Love, love, loved that place. But if we're really going to go away, we feel like we should make it a place that's downright completely foreign. Have the kids go on a truly grand adventure, become truly native in the language. And it'd be fun to explore somewhere new. Have I told you this before...?
(Videos still transferring to iMovie. This is going to take longer than I thought. But you're still not starving me out. Forget it. I'm in this til the bitter end. Never mind that I'll have to do rudimentary editing, then sharing of the file, then uploading it, then linking to it. It's worth it. Your eventual debasement is worth it. My inevitable victory will be the light at the end of the tunnel that will see me through...Probably.)
Here:
...Damn. That might not have been worth it...Ah well. We'll know soon enough. Off to bed.
