Entry 726: Touching Grass

On the whole, I'm happy that Biden dropped out and Harris is doing so well right now in the polls, but one bad thing is that it has made me care about things like polls again. When Biden started floundering, I kinda checked out and resigned myself to the fact that Trump would be president again. That wasn't a pleasant thought, but it was actually quite nice to be kinda checked out. I was looking forward to not following the horse race aspect of this election -- it doesn't do any good, anyway -- but now with Kamala taking a slight lead in most polls, I can't help but take an interest in it again. I don't necessarily want to, but if I see a Nate Silver post on Substack about how to weigh the post-convention bump against RFK Jr.'s resignation, I'm going to click on it. I just am.

But not today. Today was a day to "touch grass," as they say -- or artificial turf, in this case. I had a coaching clinic for Lil' S2's flag football team this afternoon, and they just put down some new fake grass on the field it was at. I noticed it didn't have those black rubber pellets on it, but instead something that looked like funfetti. I'm kinda regretting agreeing to coach Lil' S2's team again. We had the option to pay extra and get a league coach, but another dad and I decided we would do it, and now I'm wishing we made the other choice. He's getting to the age where coaching is a decent amount of work and consternation, and I don't need any more work and consternation in my life at the moment (or ever, really). You can't just let the kids run around and everybody is happy. You actually have to, like, come up with offensive and defensive schemes and run real plays. I played very little formal football* growing up, so I don't know a lot of the basic concepts. But, whatever, it will be fine. They're still not that old, and I'll make this my last year, for sure.

*Flag wasn't a big thing when I was a kid, and my parents didn't want me to play tackle until junior high. Then I got cut from the junior high JV team in 8th grade, which was total bullshit, but then I made the varsity squad in 9th grade and quickly realized I didn't really like playing football that much. For some reason, I could never find a helmet that fit correctly, and I would get these awful headaches even when I was just standing on the sidelines. But I played again in 10th grade, until I got a minor back injury, which I used as an excuse to quit for good. The coach asked me to play again my senior year, but I said no, and then my high school won the state championship. So, too bad I didn't play -- I coulda had some good Al Bundy and Uncle Rico stories.

I rode my bike to the field, about 11 miles round-trip. It was a solid little workout. It was the first time I had ridden an actual bike in -- I don't know -- two years, maybe. I wasn't completely out of riding shape because I've been using the stationary cycle quite a bit, but still it's a lot harder when you have to go up actual hills and are in the blazing sun, not an air conditioned gym. I'm contemplating become a bicycle guy -- you know, getting a really nice bike and wearing spandex and riding just far enough away from the shoulder so that drivers can't easily pass me -- but I haven't fully committed yet. I might not ever do it, but biking is definitely going to become my main form of cardio. I far prefer running, but my right knee has gotten old fast, and biking is so much easier on it than running. I foresee a stationary bike in our basement in the near future.* I already ran it by S. It was a tough sell given the treadmill debacle, but she agreed. I mean, it's a totally different piece of equipment. Would you forgo buying a TV because you once had a computer break?

*I can (and do) use the one in the gym of my sister-in-law's apartment complex, but I usually want to go after my last meeting, around 4:30, and even though it's only a mile away, traffic gets kinda bad, and then I always have to park in a lot and walk a bit, so it can take me over 20 minutes to get there, door-to-door. Saving 40 minutes every time I want to work out is worth the price of a stationary bike to me -- probably, I still have to look into exactly how much they cost.

There are a lot of nice areas for biking outdoors in my neighborhood when the weather is sunny, like it was today -- lots of wooded paths along Rock Creek and its offshoots. Since I've been reading Lonesome Dove, I imagined I was on a horse "riding hard" through the old west, looking for bandits. That book has gotten really good, but it's also so damn long. I'm reading it on a Kindle, but I saw it once at a bookstore, and it had to be close to 1,000 pages. I'll put in like a half-hour, and it will tick up 1%. I'm over halfway, though, and I shouldn't complain because I'm going to be sad and empty when it's done. I'm sure I'll end up reading a bunch of other stuff from the author, hoping to recapture the feeling, and I won't be able to do it. That's how it often goes.

Until next time...      

Entry 725: Sunday Afternoon Lightning Round

• S left last night so it's another week of single-dadding it for me. Although, I have my sister-in-law around to help me, which is huge. She took the kids out this afternoon -- it was supposed to be for Lil' S2's birthday, but Lil' S1 somehow got in on it too -- and then she's coming over a few days this week to watch the kids. I have to go into the office, and the kids are done with camps for the summer. It's a pretty sweet deal we have with S's sister: She watches our kids; we watch her dog. From our perspective it's like, two kids for one dog? Heck yeah, sign us up. From her perspective it's like, I get free dogsitting for hanging out with my nephews? Count me in.
  
  
• Put me down for a ticket on the Kamala hype train. As somebody who was tepidly in favor of Biden staying in the race until pretty late in the game, I couldn't be happier with how the switch has gone. Kamala is now a slight favorite, according to the polls, as opposed to being a massive underdog, like Biden. I don't expect Trump to retake the lead. It could happen of course, but it also could happen that Harris widens the gap, and we get to a 2020-type race. She definitely has some weaknesses, but a) I don't know that people care; b) I don't think that Trump can exploit them. On the latter, Trump just cannot refrain from the weird personal attacks that so many normies find confusing and distasteful. I mean, so far he's gone after Kamala for not identifying as Black until recently (she went to an HBCU as an undergrad and was president of the Black Law Students Association in law school), for being stupid (her law school was Cal Berkeley), and for nobody knowing her last name (what?). These are just not things that resonate with swing voters. On the former, I think so many people are so happy to have a feasible option beside Biden and Trump that they're willing to overlook Harris' shortcomings.
  
  
• We've been watching The Office as a family. Overall, it's a wonderful show, but it definitely takes a dip in the middle of Season 5. The Andy-Dwight-Angela love triangle goes on way too long, and then a lot of the characters become caricatures. The low is the episode in which Michael frames Toby by planting a bag of drugs (which is actually a Caprese salad) in his desk. Although, the Dwight Schrute "fire drill" isn't that much better. Those storylines were just too out there for me. The show comes back pretty strong, though -- the Michael Scott Paper Company episodes were solid -- and I was laughing again by the end of the season.
  
  
• Speaking of comedy, we watched Spaceballs last night with the kids. It still mostly holds up. I mean, gags like guys getting hit in the nuts and crashing into walls ("Ludicrous Speed") are evergreen hilarity for preteens. But also there are some genuinely clever jokes, and Lil' S2 loved how the combination for the air shield is 1-2-3-4-5. RIP John Candy. I was about to also type RIP Bill Pullman, but he's still alive. It's Bill Paxton who died relatively young. RIP Bill Paxton.
  
  
• I'm watching a little WNBA while I write this. My team, the Seattle Storm, are pretty good this season, which is surprising, as they were one of the worst teams in the league last year. They're playing Caitlin Clark's Indiana Fever, which is surely the reason they're on network TV in the first place. One problem with the WNBA is that their most marketable player is on a team called the Fever. What an awful name. Whose idea was that? Hey, let's name our team after a disease. Is the Indiana Sars already taken? It reminds me of that Foreigner song: Well, I'm hotblooded, check it and see, I got a fever of 103. Dude, you need to go to the hospital. Take an ibuprofen and lie down, at the very least.
  
  
• As I mentioned in a previous entry, I'm reading Lonesome Dove, and it's reminded me of how much it must have sucked to have lived back then (1870s). A major undertone of the book is how uncomfortable everybody is all the time. They're in Texas, so they're constantly suffering through the heat and dust, and there is no place to shower. There's one scene in which a guy gets dirt all over his girlfriend's bed, and it made me cringe just thinking about it. And you know it wasn't a very comfortable bed, anyway, just some sack stuffed with feathers or something like that. Surely there were no springs, and I doubt it had a firmness rating or a sleep number. Then, there is a part where a guy gets a thorn in his hand, and it's get infected because of course they didn't have Neosporin back then. And the way the author talks about the mosquitoes -- it just all sounds so miserable. I don't know when the best time to be alive was or will be, but I don't see how it could be before the advent of antibiotics, sun screen, or Deet.
  
  Until next time...
   

Entry 724: Olympics Recap

As I indicated in a previous entry, I watched a lot of Olympics this year. I've also been listening to a lot of commentary about the games, and the consensus seems to be that this was the best Olympics, from a viewer-experience perspective, in a very long time, possibly ever. I concur with this sentiment, and I think there are three main reasons for it.

1. The contrast with the previous Olympics. The 2020 Olympics were delayed a year due to COVID, and the disease was still very much wreaking havoc on society in 2021. Shut downs were largely still being enforced, and the mood of the world was not very celebratory. High stakes sporting events lose a lot of their luster when they're played in mostly empty arenas. COVID is obviously still around -- in fact, American sprinter Noah Lyles competed while infected with the disease -- but this is the first Olympics in what feels like the post-COVID era.

2. NBC did a truly commendable job of covering the games. The advent of Gold Zone, the streamable Peacock channel was a total game-changer. No longer do you have to bounce around from subsidiary channel to subsidiary channel, trying to maximize your sports viewing, convinced that you're still missing something really cool. No longer do you have to endure the long commercial breaks and schmaltzy vignettes of prepackaged human interest stories just to watch the top events that often aren't even shown live. You can just put on Gold Zone, and be confident that you are getting all the best athletic action going down at that moment streamlined right into your veins. It might not be great for the casual fan who likes the curated prime-time Olympics show, but it is a godsend for the sports junkies like me.

3. The competition was spectacular -- so many amazing comebacks, so many razor thin margins, so many all-time greats being great when the stakes are the greatest. And if you are an American, like me, more times than not your countryman or countrywoman came out on the winning side of things.

Let's look at a few of the highlights.

Katie Ledecky wins the 800m freestyle. I mentioned in a previous entry that Ledecky may no longer be the best female swimmer in the world because an Australian named Ariarne Titmus is faster than her. Well, Titmus is indeed faster in sprints, but Ledecky is faster at long distances, so the 800m acted as a good "tie-breaker," and Ledecky won. So, she's the best in my book for at least one more Olympics.

French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati's sizable dingus* costs him a medal. On the one hand, for God's sake, wear a tighter jock; on the other, dude is gonna be an Olympic folk hero forever now.

*I'm reading Lonesome Dove (total dad book), and the author uses that euphemism in it.

Noah Lyles wins the closest 100m race -- nay, the closest race of any distance -- I've ever seen. The announcer complete botched the call on this one, but that's the only demerit against this race. Amazing. And it's possible Lyles won with COVID. He was positive a few days later when he took bronze in the 200m .

Femke Bol runs down the field in the 4x400 mixed relay. This event was bittersweet for the Americans. They set the world record in the qualifying rounds, but were denied the gold by Bol's incredible dash. What makes this clip even better is hearing Bol give an interview. There might not be a bigger disconnect between how you expect somebody to sound and how they actually sound this side of Rick Astley.

Underdog American Cole Hocker kicks his way to gold in the 1500m. As good as the races above were, the best of bunch, in my opinion, was the 1500m. Remarkable finish by Hocker, who looks like my stereotype of an American distance runner. Like, if I was the director of a film about a high school cross country team, I would cast a guy who looks like Cole Hocker in the lead. He might even be named Cole Hocker -- that just sounds like a runner's name, doesn't it? Dude was born to run, I guess, and not in a Bruce Springsteen way. Kudos too to American Yared Nuguse who won bronze. And a hat tip to Jakob Ingebrigtsen. He ran out of gas at the end, but he went for it. He was going for the world record on the biggest stage, and I appreciate that.

Rai Benjamin and Sidney McLaughlin-Levrone win gold in the 400m hurdles. These races weren't super close, but it was cool to see Benjamin avenge his loss in the last Olympics and beat his arch rival Karsten Warholm. (Also, if you watch in the background, near the end, you see somebody fall on their face, which makes any race a little bit better.) And I always enjoy watching McLaughlin-Levrone compete in this event, just for the sheer dominance on display.

Simone Biles wins three more golds (individual all-around, team all-around, vault), cementing GOAT status. Here's a question for you: Is Simone Biles the greatest female athlete of all time? She's on the short list, and being in gymnastics helps her cause. One of the big things you want as a spectator of sport is to watch people do things that are seemingly superhuman, and you don't always gets that. Like, when I was watching the women's soccer team win gold, I was intrigued and impressed, but I wasn't jaw-on-the-floor wowed the way I am when I watch gymnastics. I can kick a soccer ball, and it doesn't look that different than when Trinity Rodman does it. But I would struggle to climb over the vault, let alone handspring onto it, do a bunch of backflips, and then land on my feet. That shit is literally unimaginable for me.

USWNT wins gold in soccer. Back on top, baby! The team had a little dip a few years ago, when the mid-2010 stars like Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe got old and retired, but they're champions once again and looking as good as ever. The "Triple Espresso" front line of Mallory Swanson, Trinity Rodman, and Sophia Smith scored a baker's dozen goals throughout the Olympics, but the real stars of the tournament, in my opinion, were the last line defenders. Crystal Dunn and Naomi Girma shut almost everything down, and on the rare occasions they faltered, Alyssa Naeher bailed them out. She made a couple of huge saves in the gold medal game and the semi-final game. The only thing I didn't like in the gold medal game is that the broadcast never displayed the graphic showing Swanson was onside when she scored her goal. The thing is, Sophia Smith is clearly offside, but she never touches the ball, and if you look at the cut of the grass, you can see Swanson is probably onside. But I had to break this all down on my own. The broadcast totally dropped the ball on this one.

Lebron, Steph, KD lead US to gold in men's basketball. It was close. The team easily could have lost to Serbia in the semifinals, but they pulled off a semi-miraculous comeback, after being down by double-digits in the fourth quarter. Then they dispatched a game French squad, with Steph sealing the deal with four three-points in the game's final few minutes, including one ridiculous moon ball. 

The women win gold too. I meant to watch this one live this morning, but I didn't because I got roped into building an Ikea desk. S was working on it, and it was not going well, and I could tell we were not going to have a happy household until that thing got finished. It was brutal. I don't blame S at all for struggling. I wasn't much better, but we muddled through. The problem is that nothing was labeled. They didn't have those stickers on the pieces -- no A, B, C, etc. There were no "Left" and "Right" indicators, no "Front" and "Back" or "This Side Up" labels. You had to infer everything from the tiny diagrams. It was so ridiculous. But it's done now and not totally messed up. So, I missed the game, which is a shame as it looked awesome from the highlights. Crazy ending and major kudos to Gabby Williams, valiant effort in defeat.

Alright, that's all I have to say about that.

Until next time...

   

Entry 723: Saturday Night Sleepover

The boys have some friends over tonight for a sleepover, so that's "fun." Actually, it's not bad with these kids. They are pretty mellow, unlike some of Lil' S2's other friends, who were up at 1:00 am playing football at the last slumber party over here. Somehow I slept through that, and S had to deal with it. That's a role-reversal. Usually S knocks out at like 8:30 pm, and it's on me to make sure the kids go to sleep (or at least pretend to go to sleep) at a reasonable hour. But all is good as I type this -- three kids are playing video games on their iPads (two with each other) and one is watching Godzilla vs. Kong (not to be confused with Godzilla x Kong, I've sadly seen them both). So, they're killing their brain cells with screens, but being totally chill while doing so.

The kids who are over are the same kids whose house our boys went to last weekend. I'm not sure exactly why we're having sleepovers on back-to-back weekends, but I don't have a problem with it. It's like a home-and-home in college football. Actually, we wanted to have the kids' parents over for dinner, because they are our friends, and we enjoy their company, but the wife wasn't feeling well, so just husband came over. But the wife and husband didn't communicate very well, so we thought that the kids weren't going to stay the night, and Lil' S2 threw a temper tantrum, but then they did, so it was a tantrum for nothing (aren't they all, though?). That's pretty typical with this couple. They are super cool, but they are all over the place all the time. A big part of it, however, is that the wife has legitimate health issues (hence the not feeling well), and so she has to peace out from everyday life sometimes and take a nap or otherwise go incommunicado, and so texts and such don't always get seen immediately. But it's all good.

Although, it did lead to me grilling in a rainstorm. I was waiting for them to come over before firing up the ol' Coleman, but I finally had to just start without them, because it was already almost 6:00 pm and severe thunderstorms were in the forecast starting at 7:00 pm. Well, they came early, and they came about  five minutes before I had finished grilling. The skies just opened up and dumped buckets of rain, drenching me and the grill. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, so I closed the top, went inside, grabbed my raincoat, came back out, waited a few minutes until I was sure the meat wouldn't give anybody salmonella, and then scooped everything onto a platter and booked it inside. I remembered to turn off the grill and close the propane valve, but I got paranoid that I didn't. So, I went outside again in the pouring rain to double-check. However, I forgot my glasses, and I couldn't actually see which direction for the valve was "Open" and which was "Close". So, I just went back inside. I didn't get my glasses and go back outside again. My OCD has some limits. (Although, I did go back out again after the rain had stopped. The valve, of course, was closed.)

In other news, we are switching the kids bedrooms. Why? No reason. S just wants to change things up. I don't really get it, but sometimes she wants to rearrange things, and doing so suddenly becomes the most important thing in her life. Like, we had this sofa in our living room. We had had it for years -- we moved it from our old house. It was still in pretty good shape, but it started getting a little saggy, and it was really thick and heavy, and didn't fit the aesthetic anymore, so S decided we should get rid of it. Fine with me, but we couldn't find anybody who wanted it -- even for free -- so it sat in our living much longer than S would have preferred. And I swear that thing damn-near led to a divorce (not literally, but you know what I mean). Every morning the first thing out S's mouth was how much she wanted to get rid of that couch; every evening the last thing out of it was how she couldn't believe we hadn't gotten rid of it yet. Pillow talk isn't much fun when the only topic is a sofa bed.

You know, I can't even remember now how we actually got rid of it. Huh, kinda weird.

Anyway, I was fine with the kids switching rooms until I found out that that also entailed moving all the furniture from one room into the other. (I guess our kids have personalized dressers.) After learning that detail I became greatly annoyed, because that requires some manual labor -- not a lot, but certainly enough to spoil a day or two. It's like, Hey, you know how moving really sucks and everybody hates it? Let's do that for fun this weekend! 

Whenever S embarks on a project like this she always says, "Don't worry, you won't have to do anything," which is nonsense, of course. I mean, let's break this down for a minute. You want to move big items of furniture from one room to another, and you're telling the only person in the house who can lift things heavier than a dining-room chair that he won't have to do anything? And it's a no-win situation for me, anyway. Either I help, and spend my precious leisure time pointlessly moving furniture, or I don't help and feel the resentment of S boring into my soul.

But, I do have to give S credit. In order to move a bed frame that was too big to get through the door, she took a picture of the bolts holding it together, went to Ace Hardware this morning, showed it to an employee, bought a ratchet set, and then came home and disassembled and reassembled the bed frame almost completely on her own. (I did help a tiny bit.) She did all this while I watched women's soccer. (Trinity Rodman!) See, we're a modern-day progressive couple, not beholden to traditional gender roles. That's what I'm going with, at least. It sounds better than me just being unsupportive and lazy.

Until next time...