February 26, 2006
Role Playing
Recently Michael blogged about playing Dungeons and Dragons with his daughters.
This reminded me of a conversation I had with Katy last fall.
I play poker fairly regularly, and some of the guys I play with were D&D geeks back in the day. One day I casually mentioned to Katy that we had talked about having a D&D night instead of a poker night sometime.
She stared at me in absolute and total horror. You would have thought I said "Honey, I'm going to run upstairs with the digital camera, take some pictures of the kids while they are in the shower, and post them to rec.pedophile."
Who does she think all those D&D books in our bookcase belong to?
A Box Of Cruft And His Box Of Chocolates
Mike is making trouble for me.
A couple of weeks ago he told me a funny story about standing in line at See's Candy right before Valentine's Day.
I recounted this story to my wife Katy sometime after said holiday. Katy wanted to know why I didn't have to go to See's - I had given her the traditional one-pound box of nuts and chews - and I told her that our employee store stocks it for us around Valentine's.
Katy asked why Mike hadn't bought a box at the employee store.
I told her that Mike generally bought a pound of hand-picked chocolates for his wife.
Then the gears started to turn. Thoughtful silence filled the room.
"You mean you can buy just the ones you like?"
(Somehow she grew up in Southern California without considering why See's has all those individual candies on display.)
Sensing danger, I hesistantly answered in the affirmative.
"No more cherry cordial filled coconut ones? No more dark chocolate?"
I edged toward the door while slowly nodding.
"That's what I want next year. No preboxed set of chocolates. Only candies with some combination of milk chocolate, nuts, nougat, and caramel. And maybe some molasses chips. Get me those next time."
Sigh.
And so early next February I, too, will be standing in a ridiculously long line at See's. Thanks a whole lot, Cruftbox.
Tour of California
Yesterday the kids and I took a short field trip to see some of stage 6 of the first Tour of California. I always follow the Tour de France in the summer and when I realized this race would pass within an hour of my house I figured I needed to go check it out.
We went to the top of one of the hills to see the racers cross the last place where King of the Mountains points could be earned in the race. I figured we would have a good chance to see some cyclists battling it out.
There were hundreds of people there when we arrived. It looked like the vast majority of them had ridden to the event as the sides of the road were piled with expensive bikes.
The Tour de France has its devil, and the Tour of California has angels. One stood in front of us for a bit but moved before I had to point out her wings were blocking my kids' view.
Sadly, only one sponsor was giving out any freebies - Clif bar. I didn't realize that beer was in their product lineup but what the heck, I took one:
One of the things that still surprises me is how close you can get to the riders. Here's a short video (2.2 MB wmv file) that shows you:
(No camera zoom, optical or otherwise, was used in the creation of this video.)
February 25, 2006
February 23, 2006
The International Language of Sportsmanship
The women's gold medal curling match just ended. As the two teams shook hands, you could hear the players saying "Good Game" to each other.
Apparently English is the international language of sportsmanship. Either that or it means something completely different in Swedish.
[Don't act surprised that I've got the Olympics on in my office.]
Lazy Thumb
I get a lot of emails from people using Blackberrys.
Many of them have a special signature line at the end that says "Please excuse grammatical or typographic errors because this is sent from a handheld device."
Sorry. No.
Just because you're typing with your thumbs doesn't mean you can't proof your work. It's just laziness, pure and simple. No free pass for you.
February 20, 2006
U.S. Women's Hockey, A Class Act
I happened to catch the medals ceremony for women's hockey tonight.
The U.S. women, upset in the semifinals by Sweden, beat Finland today for the bronze medal. It was a huge surprise to see them not playing in the gold medal game against the Canadians - the Swedes are the first non-Canadian team to beat them in international competition.
The U.S. women graciously accepted their medals and generally looked pretty pleased to be on the podium. I was a little worried that there would be some display of sour grapes but there wasn't any that I noticed.
As far as Sweden goes, my sister and I saw them play the U.S. in Salt Lake City in 2002. The U.S. won 4-0 but the score would have been 12-0 if not for the amazing play of their goalie Kim Martin - then 15, now 19 and sporting a silver medal to go with her bronze from 2002.
Chad Hedrick, You May Now Shut Up
Not impressed with Mr. Hedrick as the Torino Games progress.
He's been all over fellow U.S. speedskater Shani Davis for not skating in the team pursuit event. Davis didn't want to skate it because he wanted to stay focused on his main event, the 1000 meter - that and he'd never skated the pursuit event before.
From where I stand, though, Chad was primarily interested in getting him on the team to further his own personal quest to tie Eric Heiden's record five gold medals in a single Olympics. Gee, Chad - I guess that isn't happening. Now can you please just shut up and skate?
Wooden Car
Last month Cameron and I participated in his Y Guides Pinewood Derby. It was tempting to take the kit and run with it but I resisted and made sure Cam was involved in everything that didn't involve high-speed power tools.
He sketched out the shape that he wanted and I cracked out the coping saw. Here's what we had after the first cuts. He wanted a curved cockpit - I wasn't really sure how to do that and so I roughed it out with a flat wood bit. This made a big mess of the cockpit and made it difficult to sand out later.
We spent the rest of the weekend sanding the front and back curves. I did a lot of shaping with an orbital sander, and Cam and I worked on the cockpit with a dremel tool.
The cockpit was finished with a special high-tech sanding stick - sandpaper taped around a pencil.
Cam picked a really slick metallic turquoise color. I think we ended up putting three coats on to cover the wood grain, followed by decals, followed by a couple coats of clear gloss.
Here's the car before we left for the races:
Of course I had spent a lot of time weighing the car, polishing the axles and wheels, all the standard Pinewood tricks. But those photos are classified. (And deadly boring. I'm losing you right now as it is.)
We did well in the races. The tournament was double elimination, with the kids grouped by grade. We were in a very fast first heat and came in third, moving quickly into the elimination bracket. We won our second heat going away though, and were one heat away from the finals. However, we came in a very close second in our semifinal heat and bounced out with the fifth or sixth fastest first-grade car.
That night, as I was getting Cam tucked in to bed, I told him how much fun working on the car with him. I told him that I knew he really wanted a trophy and that I was sorry we hadn't quite gotten one. He looked up at me and said "It's okay, Dad. I just had a fun time seeing all the other cars and winning one of my races."
I know it's good for kids to learn that You Don't Always Win. But when he said that to me I couldn't help but wonder if there was something I could have done to make our car just a little bit faster.
February 17, 2006
Go Ahead, Make Fun
You can mock Curling as an Olympic Sport if you like, but let's face it - it's the only path remaining for you or me to make it onto an Olympic team.
February 15, 2006
Secretary of Skate
I think the woman doing commentary for NBC's Olympic figure skating coverage sounds like Condoleezza Rice.
February 14, 2006
A Quick One
Hey guess what? The other night I found out that my kids (first graders) play dodgeball in PE at school.
This is good. I thought that the Nice Police had dodgeball banned everywhere.
February 13, 2006
Funny
Perhaps you didn't see last Sunday's Dilbert.
That's about how my relationship with Katy started. I was very dubious that she was interested in me.
February 12, 2006
Right Up Our Alley
I can't figure out why there aren't any American contenders in biathlon. This sport is made for us - you get to carry a gun around with you, and you get to shoot stuff - well, okay, targets, anyway.
You'd think that out of the three million or so NRA members, you could find one or two that could cross-country ski.
Michelle Kwan
I feel badly for Michelle Kwan.
I know how angry and disappointed I was when I got hurt and decided not to compete in the marathon I was training for last fall. And that was nothing - just some middle-aged doof trying to cover the distance in a semi-respectable time. This is the Olympics. I can only imagine how she feels.
Right now I have a tremendous amount of respect for her.
Update: I've been thinking about this all day. I've come to the conclusion that this was the second-best possible outcome of these Olympics for her. Obviously it would have been huge if she won the gold medal, but stepping down now - gracefully - has to be better than finishing 12th next week and letting the second-guessing begin.
February 10, 2006
XX Winter Olympiad
I Love the Winter Olympics. Love Them!
I was very excited to watch the opening ceremonies tonight. I read something today that really resonated with me - ninety percent of the athletes marching know they have no realistic chance at a medal. The opening ceremonies are really what it's all about for those people. I enjoyed watching the March of Nations and seeing all the faces, people smiling, laughing, and recording the whole proceedings on camcorders. (Hell, if I was in the Olympics, I'd hire a freakin' camera crew to follow me around and document the whole thing. Every fifteen seconds I'd be asking them to pinch me.)
I can't really explain what it is about the Olympics - in particular the winter version - that gets to me, but it does. I'm not Italian. I've never been to Italy. I might be able to pick out their flag from a lineup. But have a ten year old Italian girl stand in the middle of an arena during the opening ceremonies, and have her sing the Italian national anthem (which I've never heard before) and I'm reduced to a puddle of mush.
These opening ceremonies have been long on the goofy - marching band style drills and a soundtrack heavy on classic disco - but the goofy is what is making them great to watch. Bring on the Games!