Post #95

A more prolific blogger would have far more than a mere 95 blog posts by now. What seems to be my trouble?

Not much to say.

Here's everything that comes to mind in the next five minutes. Buckle your safety belts, kids...

1. The Master's golf tournament is a little bit full of itself.
2. As much as I love watching major league baseball on tv, sometimes, I must confess, I watch women's college softball instead simply because I enjoy seeing slap-hitting by lightning fast left handed batters, and because I want to keep learning how to do that better than I have.
3. I rolled my lawn the other day, but I'm not sure if that really does anything of any great value.
4. We went to an easter egg hunt, puppet show, and mini-petting zoo today at church. Sydney said she liked petting the bunnies, goats, and ducks best of all.
5. Four weeks until my first fastpitch softball tournament.
6. We bought a new washer and dryer. Yikes.
7. A whole bunch of people from my mom's church came to her house yesterday and did a ton of work in the yard. They got more done in half a day than we could have in a summer worth of weekends.
8. I gotta get me one them tomato trees.
9. The Cubs are 2-2, but could just as easily be 4-0.
10. Tonight we're going to cook hot dogs and marshmallows over a bonfire at my mom's house.
11. I like "Forensic Files" on TruTV.
12. I plugged in the sprinkler system the other day. Apparantly it remembered the program I had set up last year, because when I woke up this morning, my lawn was being watered. It was cold enough that some of the water froze on the blades of grass. I didn't really mean to start watering the lawn yet, but I just left it go.
13. I'm glad Bishop D'Arcy told people not to demonstrate.
14. Randall Terry strikes me as a complete lunatic. So do the following: Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, most university professors, Bill Maher, Laura Schessinger, Sean Hannity, and that dude from Roseland.
15. We got bomb pops from the ice cream man the other day. Summer's coming.
16. I can't see a single cloud today.
17. I take glucosomine. Apparantly this stuff is good for your joints. My joints hurt less since I've been taking it.
18. The barber uses a #4 and a #2 clipper guide when he cuts my hair.
19. Sydney is talking about the ice cream man and elephants. In fact, she just said that he's a dinasaur elephant. I don't know why.
20. Maybe post #96 will be more interesting than this one.
21. Maybe not.

summer reading group 2009

Possible readings:

1. A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest Gaines
2. Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories by Raymond Carver
3. Home by Marilynne Robinson
4. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
5. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Anyone interested?

spring

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

• Margaret Atwood
  

Opening day

Today is a day of hope for Cub fans everywhere—thinking this, at last, is the year.

Of course it may not be, but you can't tell us that today. All we cling to this day is the dream that what lies ahead are the one hundred sixty-two opportunities, one hundred sixty-two days of hope—of hope that one hundred years of failure can be redeemed, day by day, inning by inning.

Best of all, for me, it starts six (and I hope seven) months of singing these words--"so it's root, root, root for the CUBBIES. If they don't win it's a shame"—every day, with the sweetest little blond Cub fan that ever graced the earth.

One day last fall, after the season had ended, as we lay in bed flipping channels, she said, "Papa, I wanna watch baseball." I almost cried, and thought to myself, "next year, baby; next year."