Anywhere but here....

Ah, finally...fall weather is starting to set in around these parts. Oh sure, high temps in the upper 70s is still pretty warm by northern standards, but in the south it's a welcome relief to the 80s and 90s that permeate the region from May to September. It's a beautiful day out today as I sit here at my desk, perusing job applications, wishing I was anywhere but here. Our front desk person left a week ago and now I've the task of screening apps for a suitable replacement. Unlike past recruitments for that position, we've gotten some really good applicants this time, four or five of whom really stand out for me.

A new job for myself would be a nice change of pace. My boss is a nice guy, but he's a dink. He loves coming up with new ideas that he will pawn off on others, let them do all the work, and he'll take all the credit for. He had one of our former front desk persons type most, if not all, of a three book volume he was working on--and then misspelled her name in the credits. Dink. Not to mention he looks at our meager operating budget as "his money." For example he wants to publish research papers four times a year and send them out to other colleges and universities. He obtained $2k in funding from somewhere on campus to do this; already the anticipated expense for just 3 mailings has hit $2,600. I'll take that extra money out of one of his research expense accounts before I tap our department's meager operating budget. I like my boss on a personal level, but in terms of administration and running this department, to restate, he's a dink.

It's a beautiful day out today, and I'm not doing anything that I want to be doing--either today or of late. With gas coming down to a more budget-manageable $2.10 a gallon, I want to take a day off and head to the mountains and go hiking. Not a short two or three mile trail, but one of the longer seven to twelve mile trails. The leaves seem to be turning much faster and earlier than usual this year. There are lots of yellows, and some reds and orange, even at this lower elevation. I'm sure the mountains are much more colorful now and would make a great subject for a day of photography. I want to go hit some small mountain towns and find apple butter or jugs of apple cider. I want to find a huge-ass pumpkin to set on my front porch and take a chance that some little bastard (like myself in my younger days) won't take it and smash my mailbox with it. Many years ago in kindergarten I remember going to a farm somewhere on Long Island where my classmates and I were to get a pumpkin to bring home for Halloween. My mom sent me with X amount of money, and damned if I didn't use it all and get the biggest pumpkin I could find--almost as big as I was! And damned if I couldn't carry the thing.

But no...I'm stuck here at work. Where would I'd rather be? Anywhere but here.

41*

Sie haben ein Datum.

Wenn sie einem mitglied eines bandes, daß sie auf das hören, sie denken erklären, daß sie heraus verkauft haben erwarten sie das zu haben, das zu ein lied gemacht wird. Ich liebe es! Entspannen sie so sich -- sie haben ein datum mit einem Prostituierteen mit einer Penis! Traurig für den schlechten Deutschen.

New York's not my home...

...but it used to be.

A few weekends ago Nickelodeon ran a virtual festival of Brady Bunch episodes. Like a car wreck, I didn’t want to watch but couldn’t turn away either. It had been a long, long time since I sat and watched that many episodes of that show. When I was much younger I really enjoyed watching the Bradys when they came on. It would piss me off whenever Richard Nixon would preempt the show just so he could go on t.v. and proclaim that he was not a crook. I clearly recall telling my mom that I hoped George McGovern would win the 1972 presidential election because I hated Tricky Dick for taking the Bradys off the air on a number of evenings. I also recall my mom telling me it wasn’t nice to root for McGovern. Time would prove me correct. Even as a child I had better political instincts than my parents.

Most of the episodes I watched were from the early 1970s, and three things occurred to me as I watched. First, how many churchgoers these days grew up on that show, not knowing that the actor leading this iconic family was really gay? Hey folks! Your ideal dad putted from the rough! Second, how nice it must’ve been to deal with serious family problems in half an hour. Lastly, where was I in life when these episodes were first aired? At the time I was a youngster living on Long Island, enjoying life in the suburbs of New York.

Ever since that fateful Tuesday morning of the eleventh of September, 2001, I’ve felt what amounts to a certain homesickness for Long Island and New York. It’s a process that really started a few years before that with a sociology class I had and an assignment of researching and writing certain aspects of your family genealogy. At the time I was about to become a parent so gathering a family history was (and is) important to me. But none of this wouldn’t have been necessary had my family not moved from New York to Georgia better than thirty years ago. Why we moved is beyond me; ostensibly it was because my dad had found a job in Georgia, so we packed up the truck and headed south. Once I was asked what brought me to Georgia during voir dire while serving on jury duty. My response was: “I was nine years old and too young to argue with my parents.” That got a laugh from the gathered jury-fodder. But life once we got to Georgia was strikingly different from what it once was in New York.

At the time I was watching the Brady Bunch as first run episodes my family was living in Uniondale, home of the New York Islanders. One of our neighbors was a plumber who worked on the Nassau County Coliseum while it was being constructed; I remember him coming home on quite a few occasions wearing an eye patch because he had suffered some sort of injury. The neighborhood was typical suburbia: modestly sized houses with modestly sized yards, sidewalks that ran the entire length of the block (not common in Georgia), trees lining both sides of Hawthorne Avenue.

The house that we used to live in looked like it was originally built as a single family dwelling, but was divided into a two-family house when we were there. It was by no means a new house. In later years I had assumed it was built during the post-war boom of new housing construction on Long Island in the late 1940s. A check of the online property records for Nassau County showed that the house was actually built in 1924. We lived on the first floor, and I remember the layout very well. My brother and I shared a bedroom at the front of the house. There was a firehouse at the end of our block and I recall being awoken in the dead of night by the engines heading off to a call, our curtains a reddish glow from the lights on the trucks. The living room, which is probably much smaller than I remember, lead into the kitchen, where one would find the staircase which led to the basement. The basement made a great play area; my dad had set up a large sheet of plywood upon which he set up an HO scale train set, and my siblings and I would do art projects down there as well. The stairs leading down made a great launching pad for my GI Joe jeep, at least for the first two attempts after which it snapped in two thus depriving me of an opportunity to sell it on eBay for $200. The basement is also where the huge oil-fired furnace was located. The thing would heat the house very well during those cold Long Island winters, but at a price. It would suck every drop of moisture out of the air and then begin draining fluids from your body. As the saying goes, you’d have to be primed like a pump before you could work up a spit.

Our neighbors were great too. Right across the street from our house lived an elderly lady, Mrs. Rugheimer, or Ruggie as everyone called her. I really wish I had a time machine for many reasons. Her house was literally like walking into an antiques shop, a collection of items accumulated during her long life and her husband’s days working on the construction of the Panama Canal. As a kid I didn’t appreciate her house, and I think the scary bear skin rug you encountered when you entered her house had a lot to do with it. She taught me many things, including how to tie my shoes. You were also aware to be on your best behavior when Ruggie was around as she had no problems telling you when you were misbehaving and then letting your parents know. Ruggie was truly a one of a kind lady and a very special early influence in my life. She died in 1984 a few months shy of her 92nd birthday.

Next to us lived the Hanson family. Mr. Hanson was the plumber I mentioned earlier who worked on the Nassau County Coliseum. Mrs. Hanson was Irish (or maybe Scottish, I can’t remember exactly), and my parents would put one of the stereo speakers in the kitchen window and blare one of their albums of bagpipe music as a cue that it was time to come over for drinks. Across the street and next to Ruggie lived the Friedel family. Their kids were a little older than my siblings and me, but they were often guests in our yard and attendees at birthday parties.

There a quite a number of other kids in the neighborhood, you could ride your bike or big wheel all the way up the block without worrying about street traffic. You could also ride around the corner to Frank’s candy store for a sugar fix (if you had saved your pennies or the Tooth Fairy was generous) or to the Sunoco gas station, where I would go to complete my collection of NFL player stickers they were giving out in 1972 (or where my dad would take my brother’s bike and mine to put air in the tires only to know things had gone wrong by the sound of a small explosion as he over inflated them). The neighborhood where my mother-in-law lives in Michigan reminds me a lot of where I lived in Uniondale; so much so that the first time my wife and I visited her mom after our daughter was born I spent a fair amount of time just walking around the neighborhood and enthusiastically offering to shovel the driveway when it snowed (oddly enough nobody objected to my volunteering). I don’t know what the neighborhood on Hawthorne Avenue is like now, but thirty-five years ago it was a great place to be a kid.

I went to school at Cedar Street School for kindergarten, followed by California Avenue School for first through third grades. Miss Van Note was my kindergarten teacher at Cedar Street, and our afternoon class was her first teaching assignment after graduating from college back in 1970. I remember our classroom was a fairly large space with a bathroom at one side of the room, an area set up like a house at the other, and a collection of tables/desks in between. We did the usual kindergarten stuff—played with modeling clay, colored, got free play time, got to be kids. On one day in particular a nurse came to class to administer TB tine tests. The tests back then were quite different from how they do it today. The device used to inject the medicine into the skin to bring about a reaction looked like a small rubber stamp, except with four ominous looking needles sticking out of the bottom. To a five or six year old child it’s a very intimidating experience. But to make everyone feel better the nurse would take her pen and use the four needle marks on your forearm to make a bunny face out of it. To this date whenever I’m stuck with a needle I feel a compelling urge to turn the needle mark into a bunny face. Cedar Street School was razed in 1972 and turned into a park (it stood roughly where third base and the shortstop positions are on the ballfield).


California Avenue School was already about fifty years old when I went to school there, and it’s still around today though with a few additions to accommodate the increase in students. And I'll bet they still strictly enforce no street shoes on the gym floor. Red Chuck Taylors were my gym shoes of choice. Mrs. Braddick was my first grade teacher. I remember my sixth birthday fell on a school day, and I sat in her class first waiting for my mom to stop by with birthday cupcakes for the class, and then waiting to get home and play with the new hook and ladder firetruck I got for my birthday that year. Ms. McEachern was my second grade teacher. I don’t remember much from my second grade year, except for finding out my kindergarten teacher, Miss Van Note, transferred to California Avenue when Cedar Street School was closed, and my friend Rodney. Rodney was quite a rambunctious kid. Our classroom was on the second floor of the school that year, and quite often Rodney would climb up on the window sill and threaten to jump. Each time Ms. McEachern would get Rodney to climb down, yet another crisis averted. One day we had a substitute teacher, and Rodney decided it was time to test her and climb up on the window sill. “Come near me and I’ll jump,” he threatened (as he always did). The substitute went to get him off the sill and suddenly Rodney disappeared. Seconds later there’s a scream as Rodney landed in the holly shrubs below the window. For Christmas that school year I had the pleasure of drawing Rodney’s name for our inter-student present exchange. For whatever reason I told my mom that I wanted to give Rodney a cap gun. Bad call. Rodney began firing the thing in the classroom, which was promptly taken away from him. Luckily for Rodney he did that in 1972, not in 2006, where he’d probably be tasered, pepper sprayed, and possibly shot by one of those cop-wannabe “school resource officers.” I’m not sure if he ever got the thing back; maybe it’s still sitting in a drawer somewhere at California Avenue like the teacher’s desk drawer of confiscated booty from A Christmas Story.

Sports and entertainment were never short on supply in Uniondale. In the winters they would fill the tennis courts with water and create outdoor ice skating rinks. It was at the Uniondale public park that I learned to ice skate. It was there that I also found out how hard ice is when you fall on it. After we left New York it would be twenty-seven years before I would don ice skates again. It was during our last trip to Michigan in 2001 when I would go ice skating again. For the first few minutes it was a very dicey affair as I tried to figure out how to keep my balance. But after about ten minutes all the training I had undergone in Uniondale came back to me and I was skating fairly well for someone who hadn’t tried to balance themselves on two blades for almost three decades. During the warmer months there were backyard missions that GI Joe had to conduct, and untold numbers of dangerous jumps that our Evel Knievel stunt cycles performed. Of course there was little league baseball to play, and the team I played on would practice on the open field across the street from Uniondale High School. That year our team was sponsored by Associated Supermarket; our blue uniform shirts had a fairly large ‘Super A’ on the backs. I can’t remember how well our team did in 1974, but I do recall that I didn’t play very well my first year in little league and that our team went to Shea Stadium that spring to see a preseason game between the Mets and Yankees.

In the summer there were always parties going on either at our house or at a relative’s. I can recall many a summertime gathering at our house, in particular one evening when a few alcohol-emboldened family members, my dad included, went skinny dipping in our above ground pool which I had the unfortunate circumstance to witness. About the time they dove in Ruggie turned on her front porch light across the street, causing well-founded concern amongst the "adults" in the pool. I don’t remember it, but it was at a party at my uncle’s house when I was two years old that I learned to tap a keg and pull a beer (I didn’t drink, just played bartender). There's a picture in a photo album my mom prepared for me as a high school graduation present as proof of my all-important life lesson. It’s a skill that’s come in handy as I’ve gotten older.

Summertime entertainment would not be complete without mentioning watching Fourth of July fireworks at Eisenhower Park or waiting in line for milk at the Dairy Barn, a drive thru milk store, or trips to Jones Beach to go swimming. Of course, who could forget going to fire tournaments during the summer? To the uninitiated, these tournaments were in essence fire companies from all over Long Island who’d get together and compete in a series of skill drills: connecting hoses to hydrants; planting, raising, and scaling ladders. It sounds pretty simple but the tournaments are very competitive and damned impressive to watch. Check out someone’s album of fire tourney pix on Webshots. And these too.

There’s so much about New York and Long Island that I could write about, but I think I’ve rambled on enough. When I posted my comments for the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I emailed the link to one of my former neighbors from Uniondale. After almost thirty-two years she was a little surprised as to how much I still identify myself with New York. And I think what I wrote to her is a fitting end to this entry. I may have spent most of my life in Georgia but I’m still a New Yorker at heart. I’m a fan of the Giants and the Islanders. I’ve been to Safetytown, Nunley’s, and the Jolly Roger. I know you go to Eisenhower Park to play and Roosevelt Field to shop.

New York’s not my home. But it used to be.

Eight lanes of Chaos

Living in a college town I’m accustomed to bad drivers and bad driving. Every year we get a new crop of wet-behind-the-ears kids with little to no experience behind the wheel who use the town like a drivers ed course. Naturally it doesn’t help when many of these kids have parents who possess crappy driving skills as well. Many of these kids come from the Atlanta area, and the roads around Atlanta are the movie “Deathrace 2000” incarnate. Anyone who’s ever driven on I-285 or I-75/85 has had at least one experience where their life flashed before their eyes.

Which is why I’m surprised yet not surprised to find some of the worst driving in town not in or around campus, but at my daughter’s elementary school. Within the past year the county has upgraded the four-way intersection in front of the school from four lanes to eight lanes, adding a turn lane to each direction. I thought they would be adding a traffic signal to help control the flow of cars but that’s not going to happen. Without any signal or a cop to direct traffic, it’s eight lanes of chaos each weekday morning.

Traditionally the rule of thumb is if you’re first to the line, you’re the first to go. The rule of thumb is chopped off each morning as lines of self-absorbed parents jockey their way to get their kids to school on time, regardless of who they cutoff or, sometimes, even if the crossing guard is hold her stop sign as kids cross the street. One morning only a few weeks ago the guard was starting to escort a young girl across the intersection. They had just entered the crosswalk, the guard holding her stop sign well in hand so everyone could see it. The asshole in front of me figures he’s got time before they’re in his way so he proceeds to ignore the stop sign and go anyway. I see him and his piece of crap, rust-covered white van almost every morning, and every morning I shoot him an “eat shit and die” look. How self-absorbed can one be that they’re willing to run over someone else’s kid so that their kid makes it to school on time.

I had noted this bad driving parent phenomenon quite some time ago. On those occasions when I found myself driving through a school zone in the mornings it never failed that I would be passed by a parent driving well in excess of the 25 mile per hour limit and watch as they would cut off oncoming traffic and pull into the school driveway. Long before I was a parent I was looking forward to the day when having a carseat in my vehicle would grant me sovereign immunity from speeding tickets in school zones.

Once you’ve managed to get through the four-way intersection in front of the school, the front driveway turns out to be worse than the intersection. If I had a dollar for every thoughtless, rude, and downright stupid act of “driving” I’ve seen in the front driveway at my daughter’s school, I could retire right now. On many occasions I’ve been cutoff by other drivers who had just dropped off their kid(s), one instance requiring that I slam on the brakes causing my daughter, who was just getting out of her booster seat, to go flying between the two front seats of my van and into the dashboard. How one misses a large silver van with the headlights on is beyond me. Just last week someone parked at an angle in front of the building; with a line of cars coming in, this one, thoughtless person effectively blocked in the four cars already there when he/she/it decided it was more important to get their kid to class on time—and then walk them in, perhaps to argue with any teacher who dared give their kid a tardy.

Sure, we’re all dropping our kids off in hopes that they’ll learn something useful on any given day. It seems some of the parents need to spend some time at the desks as well. As I’ve said before, for a college town we’ve a lot of stupid people around here.

So much younger then

Last night was a first. Showed up for the Monday bowling league not to play, but to inform my teammates that I needed to quit the team. Well, I didn't actually quit; I'm still on our roster but as a substitute and even then I won't be available until January. A funny thing happened to me last Friday morning as I got ready for work. In the mirror in my bathroom I noticed that my left arm looked a little yellowish at the elbow. At first I thought it was the lighting but a closer examination showed that my elbow was not just yellow, but bruised and badly at that. Looks like I've a grade II muscle sprain in my arm that takes 8-10 weeks to heal for persons much younger than myself. Wanna see? When you sprain the muscle and connecting tissue so badly that it bruises, it means: 1. you're out of shape; 2. you're not as young as you used to be. Fortunately I don't think I've torn anything that will require surgical intervention to rectify. But gone are the days when I could just throw myself into whatever physical activity I wanted and not worry about pulling or spraining muscles or otherwise incurring injuries. This whole aging process thing really sucks. And it's not as though I mind getting older, but it's that sudden stop at the end that bothers me.

For 9/11

At the beginning of 2002 I was asked to write a brief commentary reflecting on the attacks of September 11, 2001, for the Phi Theta Kappa International Honor Society for inclusion in a book of remembrances they were compiling. The entries for Georgia were published in the regional newsletter. While others wrote about patriotism and vigilance and retribution, I chose a more personal observation of the day which I was later told more in keeping with the intentions of the project. For this fifth anniversary of that tragic day, I’m posting what I wanted to write but had to edit down for space considerations.

For me there are only a handful of days for which my recollection of them are so clear it is as if I’m still living those minutes and hours: the day my father passed away, the day my daughter was born, the day Elvis died, and September 11, 2001. That particular Tuesday broke sunny and clear, for all intents a very nice, uneventful day. I had a 9 am class that day, and it was in my criminology class that we first heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. We all assumed it was a small commuter or perhaps even a private plane which had crashed; nobody seemed to be overly concerned about the news. All of my classes that semester were in the same building where I worked, so between classes I went to my office to check my online sources of news and information. That something was amiss in the world became evident as I could not access any of my usual sources for news, their servers being overloaded from demand. I finally did manage to access MSNBC’s site to discover that it was actually an airliner that had crashed into the World Trade Center, and also that a second plane had crashed into the second tower.

By this time the first WTC tower had collapsed. Stunned, I made my way to my next class upstairs, where other students were talking about what had happened. I mentioned that one of the towers had collapsed and someone said that both towers had collapsed. Both? That couldn’t be, I told myself. I was young when I lived on Long Island and we didn’t go to the city that often. But I do remember seeing them on the skyline, especially the last time I visited New York in 1978. These buildings were enormous, their huge presence in Manhattan were on a scale that photographs could not convey. And now they were gone. I was dumbfounded, numbed by the news. My first thought was for my family in New York. Were any of them there? Was everyone okay? The professor had come in and was about to start class when I told her I couldn’t stay.

I headed back to my car to head home for a little while before I had to go to work. The rock station I normally listened to had been preempted for news about what had happened in New York, and, I was to find out, in Washington. There was also a report of an airliner that had crashed in Pennsylvania but nobody was sure if it was related to the earlier events or not. What the hell was going on? Had we seen all the attacks that were going to happen or was there more to come? There was an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty.

I made it home and immediately turned on the news. It was there that I finally was able to see video of the morning’s attacks in New York and Washington. As I watched, my thoughts turned to those people in the Twin Towers who were trapped and of the first responders who went in to rescue them. And like millions of others did that day, I watched many of those people meet their fates in clouds of pulverized concrete and twisted steel. My feelings were not of anger for those who perpetrated this act, but that of quiet despondence and frustration--the human race had devolved to committing violent acts of mass murder in order to pursue someone’s agenda.

By the time I made it in to work most of the major news services had been able to respond to the massive amounts of bandwidth being asked of them that day. The afternoon was spent watching streaming news coverage of the tragedies. Five o’clock rolled around and I headed off to pick up my then two-year old daughter from daycare. I felt a sense of urgency this time for no apparent reason. As I turned onto the road where her daycare was located, I listened to the live coverage on the radio as WTC 7 collapsed. It truly had been one exceptionally horrible day. I arrived at the daycare and found my daughter in the area where all the children would gather at the end of the day waiting for their parents. “Daddy!” she yelled as she came running. For her it was just another day. I gave her a big hug as I usually did, but it was different this day. There was a renewed appreciation for her and my role as parent/protector, and for everyone who plays an important role in my life. How many children had lost one or both parents that day and would never experience the simple act of a hug again? I made the most of that hug on that afternoon.

That was five years ago, half a decade, 1,825 days, 260 weeks—and I still remember it like it was yesterday. Watching a documentary yesterday on the construction and destruction of the Twin Towers brought that fact home to me, stirring up some of the unsettling emotions I felt on that fateful day.

Hanging by the front door at my home is a black and white print I purchased and framed this past summer. It’s entitled “Manhattan Morning” and features the Manhattan skyline with the Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground and the Twin Towers rising up behind. It’s a reminder to me of the ambitions of David and Nelson Rockefeller, how they transformed the New York skyline, how that skyline once looked, how it will never look again, the people who died on September 11, 2001, and how important the people in my life truly are.

Breaker one-nine!

Oh my God! I thought this song was the guano thirty years ago, now I can't stop laughing at it. The video cranks the cheese factor up to 11! This is why I'm horrified that some people think bringing the 70s back is a good idea.

Technology & the Bully

Read a news story today about how schools in Rome, Georgia are implementing a system in their lunchrooms where kids can buy their lunches using their fingerprint. It's kind of disturbing if you think about it--fingerprints for elementary school aged children will be kept on file somewhere for those who choose to participate. Is it a fair trade to swap convenience for a part of yourself to be on file with a government agency? But what I find even more disturbing is how this particular technology will change the role of the schoolyard bully. Once upon a time they'd beat you up for your lunch money. Will they now cut off fingers instead and use the amputated digits to buy their lunches? This is something only Geraldo Rivera and his penchant for yellow journalism can answer! The bully gets practical training as a mafioso or member of the Yakuza, while the poor fingerless victim is condemned to a life as a shop teacher.

Happy Birthday to me....

No, it's not really my birthday yet. That auspicious date doesn't arrive for a few weeks yet, though it seems I've received my first birthday present. Many months ago, right about the time I pulled my right hip flexor muscle, I decided that maybe I was ready to return to bowling in a league once a week. It had been almost nine years since I had done that; I left my last team in mid-season at the end of 1997 as I was about to start back to school. The thought occurred to me that maybe I would want to do some pre-season exercising, try to get back into some sort of physical shape. Then again, this was bowling we were talking about. I wasn't about to be asked to run a 5k race or bench press 300 pounds. The way I saw it, I was in fine shape to bowl--a little overweight, spare tire around the waistline, everything was a go. The only thing was I was lacking was a Wal-drobe, my pet name for having all your clothes come off the rack from WalMart.

I've participated in many sports over the years, but I can say that I am pretty competant when it comes to bowling. While working at Rhone Merieux I was once asked to help organize a company-wide bowling tournament, and I was glad to help. A bunch of people signed up, and I helped assign them to teams based on their assessment of their skills (beginner, advanced, etc.). When the night of the tournament came I realized to my horror that I had put two really good bowlers together on one team; it was almost a certainty that they'd win the contest. That evening I threw my best three game series ever, around a 650, including my personal high game of a 277. We wound up in a first-place tie with the team I accidently put two skilled bowlers on.

Like golf, it's a bit harder than it looks; throwing one good game is one thing, throwing three good games in a series is another. Unlike golf, I'm pretty good at bowling and have done it long enough where I don't feel the need to practice anymore to keep an average in the 170 range. So little things like practice and doing some workouts didn't seem to be that important. I forgot, however, that I'm closer to forty-one than twenty-one and perhaps a little practice and a few workouts might have been in order.

The first week of the league passed uneventfully. I finished injury free and with a total series score that earned me a 151 average--not bad but a little under what I'm capable of. The pulled muscles made themselves known starting the next morning. Most of the following few days were spent either with plenty of Advils in my system, on the heating pad, or both. It took a few days but everything felt ready for another night of league bowling. I showed up at the bowling alley last evening confident that my muscle pulls were healed and could look forward to beng rid of such problems for the remainder of the season. Boy was I wrong. On my first practice throw my left bicep let me know that it was still not quite over the experience of hurling a sixteen pound ball at fifteen miles per hour an untold number of times the week before. That was okay, I thought, I can play through that. On my second practice throw my left quadricep gave me a little warning twinge. Standing away from where everyone was lining up to take their practice throws I tried to stretch out my quads. After many years of playing soccer and trail hiking in the mountains my quads are fairly well stretched and I rarely pull them. But they seemed to be really tight as I went through my usual stretching routines. Satisfied I had taken care of my quads, I headed back in line to take another practice throw.

For the record, if a muscle is nice enough to give you a warning twinge, pay heed to it. On my third practice throw my left quad decided that if I wasn't going to pay attention to it, it would do something more drastic to get my attention. My approach to the foul line was met with a sharp pain in my upper left leg, sharp enough to cause me to instantly break into a sweat. I limped back off the approached and sat down, mentally evaluating this new turn of events and whether or not I could continue. It was obvious that I couldn't continue and that to even try to would likely only worsen whatever injury I had just endured. So I packed up my stuff and headed home to put ice on my upper leg.

I awoke this morning expecting to find that my quadricep had tightened up, but that wasn't the case. It didn't hurt like it did last night, but it was still uncomfortable. Apparently I've strained or sprained the muscle as it's obviously not a pull. As it turned out, my daughter wanted me to walk her into school this morning, so I obliged her. She asked if my leg still hurt, and finding out it still did, began running to the front door. That was nice of her, considering I couldn't run after her. So my first birthday present of the year seems to be a nasty sprain of my left quadricep. They say to keep a sprain elevated, but there's no way I can do that at my job without looking like some sort of pervert. Keep your comments to yourself, Sylvia.

ICUPKN

Hah! I was going through a box of photos I'd taken about ten to fifteen years ago when I happened across this jewel. It was taken in February 1992 during my technical college days. One morning I parked my car and hustled off to class; afterwards I came out and found this purple madness parked next to me. I made it a point to bring my camera with me the next day, and sure enough the car was parked next to me again. Don't you just love the trophy hood ornament and the obviously well-crafted license plate on the front bumper? The barely visible mirrored disco ball hanging from the rearview mirror really pimps this ride. You can't read all the words on the windshield in this photo, but it says "Ain't it Grape?" Want to see the full sized version?