Okay, not really fishing. I'm off to visit my best friend and see his kids play baseball and softball, respectively, so there'll be nothing new until tomorrow at least.
More like this
To make up for last month's long delay in posting, I'll knock out this month's recap of Forbes blog posts really quickly. Also, I still have Vacation Brain, so writing anything really new isn't in the cards...
Once again, I've let a very long time pass without posting photos. It's been a crazy stretch for us, starting with SteelyKid getting yet another case of strep throat, then DAMOP, then a trip to my parents' for Memorial Day weekend, then trying to recover from the previous.
My best friend just called to tell me that his daughter Kara, who I went and saw play softball a few weeks ago, just won the state all star team championship and, in the process, pitched a no-hitter with 10 strikeouts in 4 innings (they won 19-0, so the game was called due to a mercy rule).
I've skipped a few weeks of cute-kid updates, largely because I was at DAMOP for a week, and then catching on stuff I missed while I was at DAMOP for a week.
Ah, the smell of the field, the ping of the aluminum bats. Truly rites of summer. Loompa ballgames are a real source of entertainment. Our oldest is now 12; around here, they've been playing kid-pitch now for two or three years. The kids, for the most part, have not yet developed the motor skills needed to deliver the ball consistently through the strike zone. They just rear back and throw as hard as they can. The result, as often as not, is a bean-ball walkfest. We lost a game this week 11-0, and 9 of the other team's 11 runs came from walks and hit batters. Ouch. Spencer has become quite good a ducking, though. I've also noticed that most of the kids, like a fair number of big leaguers, simply cannot lay off the high stuff.
We bring pizza and plenty of coldpacks, and its big fun for the whole family.
Dan-
I feel really sorry for the catchers, who are forever having to jump up and run to get the ball that went over their head or bounced in the dirt and got by them. And no one can really make a good throw to get a runner out, so everyone who makes it on base just steals second and third automatically. Having said that, it wasn't true when my godchild Kara was pitching. This kid is unreal. She's 9 years old and her pitches have been clocked at 47 mph already, and she rarely misses. In about 10 games, she's given up a total of 2 hits. And I was blown away by her demeanor on the mound. This is a really happy go lucky kid, basically a 9 year old gigglefest 24 hours a day. But when she's pitching? She's like the terminator - deadly serious, with this huge intimidating windup and a look on her face like she wants to take your head off with the pitch. This is the first time I've gotten to see her play and now I know why Rick says she's such a prodigy. And her twin brother Kevin leads his little league in batting with a .736 average. It was a lot of fun to watch. If only they'd put in air conditioning at the ballfields!
But when she's pitching? She's like the terminator - deadly serious, with this huge intimidating windup and a look on her face like she wants to take your head off with the pitch. This is the first time I've gotten to see her play and now I know why Rick says she's such a prodigy. And her twin brother Kevin leads his little league in batting with a .736 average.
I see college scholarships in these kids' futures. Wish I could say the same, but it'll never happen unless colleges start giving out scholarships for Playstation and GameBoy excellence!