This Is Fun, Right?

The first day of eighth grade soccer try-outs was yesterday, and I forgot how much I missed coaching; also, I can certainly see how Napoleon kept advancing into Russia, it's just so enjoyable to run your troops ragged while explaining to them that this is what they signed up for.

Recreational Athletics, Brinksmanship, and The Nuclear Option

An evening to go down in infamy: last night, I was coaching the grade 6-8 town basketball team-- both my kids play on the same team and my buddy John is the head coach, but he couldn't make it so I was in charge . . . and we were missing our two best players, and though we didn't have the personnel, I was trying my best to get the kids to run the overload offense against the 2-3 zone, but this South River team has some absolutely gigantic kids (and an awesome little point guard) so were taking a beating, and my son Ian -- a diminutive sixth grader-- was hacked while shooting by a giant 8th grader (the size difference at this age is nuts) and I gave the ref some lip because he didn't call a foul and he did not hesitate before issuing me a technical and Ian was holding his jammed fingers and crying, so I pointed this out to the referee and I guess he didn't like my tone because he gave me a double technical and said, "You're outta here!" which posed a problem, since I was the only coach-- and while I may have overreacted a little, I believe he overreacted a lot . . . but I followed the rules and watched the game from beside the bleachers-- luckily, a random dude that I play pick-up ball with happened to be there (we were both going to play over-30 pick-up after the game) so he took over, and I conveyed some substitutions through my friend John's wife; it must also be noted that the kids played like animals after I got ejected, and they mounted something of a comeback (though there was no way to beat a team with kids this enormous) and I'd also like to point out that I apologized to the ref after the game and explained that it was my son who was hacked and crying, his tiny sixth grade fingers swollen and jammed, and that in that moment I became more of a dad than a coach, and he said, "You were a little over the top" and I should have said, "So were you" but I took the high road and walked away and I'll be glad when it's soccer season because the field is larger and the referees can't hear me.

Refrigeration and Sanitation are Winners

If you want to appreciate modern life-- and I'm talking about modern life, not our post-modern lives on the internet-- then you can either read Robert J. Gordon's fantastic and comprehensive book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War or you could go without a refrigerator for three weeks.

I've done both. I prefer the Gordon book.

Gordon argues that the tech revolution is less important than the five great inventions that turned the dark, damp, cold, and smoky house of the 1870s into the modern house of the 1940s. 

These are the big five:

1) electricity

2) urban sanitation

3) chemicals and pharmaceuticals 

4) modern travel (the internal combustion engine and plane travel) 

5) modern communication

We just got our new fridge yesterday, and it's amazing. Big, cold inside, and easy to shut tightly. It makes ice and preserves food. We got a Frigidaire because that's what Steve the Appliance Doctor recommended. Our old fridge had a bottom drawer freezer and he said those are the kiss-of-death for the compressor. It easy to leave them cracked open, and then the compressor has to work really hard to push the cold air up to the fridge.

Of course, this was a first-world problem, as we had a small refrigerator/freezer in the basement. But you had to descend a flight of stairs, and really bend down to get to the tiny vegetable drawers. And no ice. 

Refrigeration and air-conditioning are miracles that allow you to enjoy all the internet can provide. Without them, you couldn't be inside your house in the summer. Grid electricity and urban sanitation are particularly nice when its 95 degrees and you are holed up because of a pandemic.

We've also been living without an upstairs show-- contractors are replacing the bathroom tiles. We had a leak. So we've all been using the shower in the basement . . . we'll appreciate all our urban sanitation once we get that back.

These technological advances have allowed for humans to enjoy incredible population density and incredible ease of global movement. Population density creates the most vibrant and creative places in the world: cities. The freedom to travel allows us to move from city to city, like little gods of the planet.

 

The cost of this density and ability to travel is the pandemic. 

So it looks like we're going to need a technological solution to COVID-19. If you don't think so . . . if you've got delusions of naturally reaching herd immunity, stop watching random people on YouTube and listen to Short Wave: Why Herd Immunity Won't Save Us . . . it's a credible and vetted science podcast that explains what we know about COVID, herd immunity, and Sweden's experiment.

In other news, I can't wait until the contractors are done. It's hard for me to read, nap, blog and otherwise be lazy when people are working so hard in my house (I did work pretty hard at soccer practice this morning, coaching in the heat with a mask on, but that was only for three hours).

Tennis vs Soccer

I have coached soccer my entire adult life and can organize and arrange a practice for four to forty people in my sleep, but I am finding tennis to be a different animal entirely-- practice is much more chaotic and disorganized: there are challenge matches going on, and they end at various times; there are drills and fun games; there are balls EVERYWHERE; there's a court for our absolute beginners, who are just working on hitting the ball; plus, I try to work with some kids individually on particular shots . . . and there's no culminating scrimmage to end things-- practice start out organized but slowly fall apart as different matches and drills end at different times, so then you can end practice with whacky large group games like "around the world" and "lob doubles touch the net or fence" challenge and maybe some fitness . . . I really like coaching tennis so far, but I'm learning to go with the flow a bit and I can't wait for our first scrimmage to see the kids in action.

9/11 and the Pandemic

The current Covid pandemic and 9/11 are probably going to loom large in my lifetime-- the significant events that will leave their mark on my consciousness-- and I feel the same about both of them:

1) I've experienced both events from an unusual perspective . . . I was teaching in Damascus when the planes hit the towers, and I am coaching and teaching through this pandemic;

2) I feel like both events are common occurrences that Americans haven't normally dealt with . . . pandemics have been the norm throughout history, and most developing countries (including Syria) still deal with deadly infectious diseases on a daily basis-- malaria, typhoid, yellow fever river blindness, chikungunya, etc-- and many countries outside the US cope with plenty of terrorism . . . so the pandemic and terrorism were both events where we joined the rest of the world . . . I wish my looming significant event was Woodstock but that's not how it's going down.

It's Delicious . . . Enough Said

Stone Delicious IPA lives up to its name-- it's tasty, but not overwhelmingly hoppy, and at 7.7 percent alcohol, it packs quite a punch; the words that come to mind when I drink this beer are:

1) crisp;

2) beer-like;

3) good;

and now for the words that did not come to my mind when I drank this beer-- and I have culled these words from the reviews on Beeradvocate-- so these words really and truly came to someone's mind when they drank this beer:

1) herbaceous;

2) sweet lemon grassy;

3) bready;

4) sweet lemon candy;

5) piney;

6) resinous;

7) not abrasive;

8) fluffy sponge;

9) pungent;

10) orange rind;

11) burlap;

12) burlap?

13) grapefruit pith;

14) black pepper;

15) mellow booze;

16) dirty brass;

17) blurry;

18) parching and numbing;

19) yeast cake;

20) lemon zest;

21) tropicalness;

22) tropicalness?

23) minty touch;

24) antique white head;

25) bold drippings;

26) frothy ice-cream;

27) funky yeast;

28) funky hoppy note;

29) very floral;

30) faint jasmine;

and the contrast between these lists leads me to wonder if my palate exists on the same plane as these poetic, aesthetic and rather prolix folks who write the reviews on Beeradvocate . . . I do appreciate a good beer and I am voluble guy with a prodigious vocabulary, but I am loathe to admit it: very few adjectives come to mind when I drink a beer-- I don't know if this is a skill I can foster, or an attribute I don't possess-- but the next time I have a beer in a relaxing setting . . . after a long day of teaching and coaching, I like to drink a glass of beer while I spray water on my wife's garden, and this might be the perfect venue to find some new and creative flavors and capture them with precision . . . but I have a feeling I'm still going to come up with words like "cold" and "refreshing" and "unlike the bitterness of red wine."

The Queen's Gambit is a Classed-up Cheesy Sports Movie

I thoroughly enjoyed the Netflix mini-series "The Queen's Gambit," even as I recognized sports trope after sports trope; it's a Cinderella story and this scene pretty much summarizes the film:

the protagonist, an orphan named Beth, learns to play chess in the basement of the orphanage with her first mentor of many-- the janitor Mr. Shaibel-- so you get the Rocky-style gritty determinism and training, but, of course, Beth is an intuitive player-- her brain is so active she sees the pieces move on the ceiling . . . she has to resort to tranquilizers and alcohol to calm her busy mind . . . and she passes through many obstacles, suffers setbacks, and finally-- with a sequence of mentors (including the archetypal wise Black lady) she finally learns the Russians' secrets-- they are collaborative-- they study games together and everyone plays-- they advance in chess as a nation . . . but, in the nick of time, her scrappy American friends come to her aid and though she once suffered abysmal defeat, it seems that her brilliance-- which she could only summon with tranquilizers-- can also be bolstered by cooperation and friendship and coaching . . . it's a heartwarming feminist underdog tale that made me weep like I was watching "Hoosiers"-- the acting and imagery is first rate, and the color palette almost feels like "Madmen," it's just as much fun to look at the outfits as it is to root for Beth . . . the writers decided NOT to explain very much about chess at all, and this works-- if you know the game, you might think the speed of play is unrealistic (and it would be good to revisit Jim Belushi's SNL Chess Coach skit) but to watch people actually play chess is laborious, and as an added bonus, now my kids want to play some chess (I destroyed Alex last night, just crushed him right through the middle).

Trip to Possumtown!

My wife and I took a road trip to the Possumtown Firehouse last night for what I thought was going to be a two hour CPR class-- I need to update my certificate for coaching-- but the course also included First Aid and the lady running the class was a bit disorganized and a bit tangential, so we were there from 6 PM until nearly 10 PM, learning about tourniquets and nosebleeds and impalements and all kinds of things that make me dizzy-- luckily there was a large couch in the very comfy Possumtown Volunteer Firehouse (the lady's dad was the chief) and this place really had small town firehouse character: a big TV and a kegerator and a soda machine that you could just open and take the soda out and a fish tank with some big fish in it (I watched these fish when the videos got too graphic about blood) and the class was quite intimate, just me, my wife, and a young dude-- it was kind of stream-of-consciousness, with lots of anecdotes from the teacher's EMT experiences and the main thing I learned-- which no other class was so blunt about-- was that you don't need to worry about breaking someone's ribs when you're doing CPR because they are CLINICALLY DEAD . . . once she put it that way, it assuaged a lot of my fears about pressing too hard or whatever, you're literally trying to resurrect someone when you're doing those compressions (and we always have an AED nearby when I coach, so hopefully that machine will do the trick . . . although if someone like me goes down, you'll need the razor in the accessory kit top deal with my excessive chest hair).

Dave's Laziness Saves the Day!

If you haven't been following my life (which you should) then I'll give you the quick update, and I've got to warn you, there's been a lot of ins and outs, a lot of what-have-you's and a lot of strands . . . and if you have been following my life, then skim ahead to the new shit that has come to light:

1) the story so far: last week, a pregnant raccoon invaded our attic and had babies, and she did this the day before the insulation guys came to insulate the attic and so when they went up there to pump in the cellulose, they were chased away by an irate mother raccoon who was very concerned about protecting her kits-- kits which were mewling and sleeping directly over our heads in our bedroom; we called a raccoon guy and he came and threw some male scent up there-- which usually causes them to vacate-- and we saw how she got in: she tore off a screen I had stapled under a roof vent (to keep the squirrels out) and we learned that raccoons are much stronger and craftier than squirrels, and then we learned that this particular raccoon was much more stubborn than other raccoons-- the raccoon guy had to come back three times (unprecedented) and the raccoon was especially aggressive, so he had to hurl bamboo javelins of scent back to where the nest was (under the eaves) because the mother was confronting him at the access hole (and this section of the attic is really just a crawl space)

2) the new shit: after a final trip to our house Thursday afternoon, the raccoon guy declared the attic raccoon free, which was quite a relief, and he gave me some big washers and heavy duty screws and told me to use those to affix the screen, as they were raccoon-proof; at this point, I probably should have gotten up on the ladder and made the attic raccoon-proof, but it was almost time for soccer practice and I had just downloaded the Ultimate Guitar app on our Ipad and so instead of screwing in the screen, I played "Don't Go Back to Rockville" while my kids got their cleats and shin-guards on; at this point my wife came home and I told her the good news and she told me that she really thought I should screw in the screen, but I told her that the raccoons weren't coming back and I would do it tomorrow and she told me she wanted to "go on the record" as saying that it was really stupid to put this chore off, especially after all we had been through, but then we had to go to soccer, and when I got home from coaching, I grabbed a bite to eat and took a shower-- in the meantime my friend Connell showed up, as it was pub night; and my wife went "on the record" with Connell as to how I should affix the screen and made it clear to him that she would kill Dave if the raccoons came back due to Dave's indolence, and then I came down and pleaded my case-- I wanted to get a respiration mask at Home Depot and maybe some extra metal screen and mainly I didn't feel like going up there and doing the job and that I would definitely tackle the project tomorrow, and then I went upstairs to get a sweatshirt and I thought I might have heard something in the attic-- but maybe not, because I was starting to hear things all the time, due to a sleepless week of listening to raccoons every night; so then we went to the pub and it was a big night-- lots of people were out and there was much convivial dart-playing with the locals-- and it was getting late (12:30 AM) but we were shooting bulls in a game of cricket (which can take forever) when my phone rang and, of course, it was Catherine and she said "guess what? I heard something" and hung up, so I high-tailed it out of the pub (after taking two more turns at the bull) and when I got home she called me a "selfish lazy asshole" and I agreed with her and told her I was completely wrong and that I should have manned-up and gotten up there immediately and that I had no excuse except that "I didn't want to" and then we heard another sound later in the night and figured it was the mother leaving for the last time (perhaps she forgot her phone?) and we didn't hear the babies so we assumed that she carried them to a new spot (which is what the raccoon guy said would happen) and I got up early-- bleary eyed and slightly hungover-- and accepted my punishment: I set up the ladder and climbed into the dusty, nasty crawl space (without a dust mask) and stapled the screen into place and then I promised Catherine I would screw it in tight when I got home from school; despite the lack of sleep and the late-night scolding from my wife, it was still a fun day at work-- I got to recount the story and issue a dire warning to my students about the consequences of procrastination and I planned to get Catherine some flowers with a note attached that read "You Were Right!" to restore marital bliss, and just after I gave my last period of the day a much anticipated "raccoon update" my phone rang, and even though I was teaching, I answered it . . . it was my wife and she said, "the raccoons are still in there, call me as soon as you can" and then-- in a sequence of texts and phone calls-- I learned that when the insulation guy went up to finish blowing cellulose into the other side of the attic, the side you can stand in, he was attacked again and he literally had to jump through the attic access hole at the top of the stairs (a bigger hole than the one in our bedroom) and then the raccoon retreated to a deep recess in the attic where the old house met the new house, so Mark (the most heroic insulation guy in the universe) went back up there and covered that spot with a roll of fiberglass insulation and then Wayne -- the contractor, also a great guy and extremely good-natured about this insanity-- came over with a thermal sensor (which looks like a large stud-finder, but costs eight grand) and located the nest; the kits were behind Alex's closet; so he drilled a two inch hole, and when I arrived home from work, I was able to see the babies through this hole, you could poke them, and apparently the mom was somewhere in this recess as well, somewhat trapped by the insulation; Mark also reported there was some other carcass (with maggots on it) in the recess next to this one-- it was either a squirrel or a raccoon, he couldn't tell and he couldn't get it out until the mother raccoon was gone; the raccoon guy came back over and said he didn't realize that the mother could get to the other side of the attic and he recommended laying down more scent in the attic and in the nest hole, and promised she would soon vacate, but Wayne -- the contractor-- wanted to get the job done as soon as possible and was seriously thinking about cutting a hole in the closet wall and trying to capture the mother and get her out that way; there was an interesting, slightly confrontational showdown between the contractor and the raccoon guy, with each of them questioning the other's methods, but the raccoon guy finally convinced Wayne that a cornered raccoon is a vicious dangerous, disease-ridden beast, and Wayne decided he would just have to finish the job later; now all this was compelling drama, but this is what is truly important about the story;

3) part three . . . the moral: what's truly important here is that Dave is no longer in trouble and, in fact, his wife even said that Dave's laziness was "a blessing in disguise" because if Dave would have permanently affixed that screen-- as his wife suggested-- then the mother would have either been trapped in the attic and ripped her way out, or perhaps, she would have been "locked" out of the attic and done serious damage trying to get back in, or she would have abandoned her babies and they would have died in there, creating a horrible stench; so marital bliss was restored (without flowers) and I was a hero in the manner of Hamlet; at this point I decided to switch things up and actually do some stuff, so I reconnected with my eccentric animal trapping neighbor Leonard-- who I hadn't spoken with since this incident-- and though he had given up trapping animals and driving them far from the borough, he was extremely helpful and set me up with a nice metal trap and warned me six way to Sunday about how mean and nasty raccoons were and how they would "rip your arm off" and so I put the trap up in the attic just for extra insurance (baited with marshmallows and peanut butter) and broke the access panel while doing this, so I had to pull out some plywood and cut a new panel-- which was scary because it meant the attic was wide open and that crazy animal was definitely up there-- but I got that done and the panel back in place and then we went to dinner for my grandmothers 93rd birthday, dropped the kids at my parents' house because our house was a mess and full of dust and debris, and then Catherine and I returned home and quickly fell asleep . . . and in the middle of the night Catherine heard the mother carrying out all the babies and in the morning we checked the hole in the closet and the babies were gone . . . so I stapled the screen in place -- very lazily-- and if that loosely affixed screen stays put, then we know we are raccoon free and I can get up there and screw it in, and if not, I'll be writing another extremely long sentence; again, to reiterate, the point of this story is that Dave's Laziness looked like it might undo him, but instead his unmitigated sloth saved the day!

Silver Bullet For a Fourth Grader

Before

After

The bane of the elementary school boy is The School Project (and consequently, The School Project is also the bane of the elementary school boy's mom because she is the one that will provide succor when the elementary school boy announces-- at 9 PM-- that he forgot about his School Project; at this point, the elementary school boy's father, otherwise known as Dad, who has had a long afternoon coaching soccer, advises his son to hand in a piece of crap, take the bad grade like a man, then-- after dispensing this wisdom-- the elementary school dad goes to bed . . . but as evidenced by the "Before" and "After" pics that my wife e-mailed me the next day, this is NOT the proper course and when there is a project, you should take a careful look at "the scoring rubric" so you can advise your son or daughter on what to prioritize and how to make a plan of action and a rough-draft or sketch (or you take the easy way out and just do it for them-- but my wife is too principled for that).

Coaching Trick

If you stick smelly, damp, and dirty soccer pinnies in the dryer for a bit, then they seem clean (or they seem clean to seven year old kids).

Mini-Thursday is Monday in Disguise

We have off this Wednesday for Yom Kippur, and since I'm not Jewish, I don't have to worry about fasting and atonement. It's just a day off. Because of this mid-week break, I declared to my wife this morning that it was "mini-Thursday." 

A cause for celebration.

I explained that tomorrow (Tuesday) is mini-Friday, and that our day off (Wednesday) is a mini-weekend, and then it's normal Thursday, normal Friday, and the regular two-day weekend. An excellent week (or two weeks mini-weeks).

My wife did not buy this. She told me that it was Monday and there was no getting around it. I ignored her, and it cost me.

I got it into my car to go to school, and all the check engine lights came on. One said "TRAC OFF," another cryptically informed me "VSC" and the regular engine block light came on. Then the temperature gauge starting floating from past the H to below the C. Back and forth, back and forth. 

This is not the kind of stuff that should happen on mini-Thursday.

I got to school and found out we had a faculty meeting. I had no idea. And I had to coach a game after school. There are never meetings after school on Thursday, but apparently mini-Thursday is fair game. I talked to my boss and we agreed that I would stay for a little bit and then race home to coach soccer. 

I ran over to the library on my free period, to pick up a couple of reserved books, but the library was closed. On Mondays it doesn't open until 10 AM. Most mornings it opens at 9 AM. But at least my car was driving fine, despite all the cautionary lights. I called my mechanic and made an appointment for Wednesday (the mini-weekend). 

Before the faculty meeting, I ran to the library a second time. Then I watched an especially boring presentation about proctoring the PSAT (which I could ignore-- my son is taking it, so I am not allowed to proctor-- so sweet). Then I raced out of the meeting so I could get home to Highland Park to coach.

On Route 18, my van starting making a weird sound. It stalled out on the stretch of highway through New Brunswick, but I managed to get it going again. Then it stalled again on the hill up to Highland Park. I got it started but it was ugly. It stalled for a final time in the road in front of my house. I was trying to pull into my neighbor's driveway to turn it around, so the van was perpendicular to the road. I had to coach in twenty minutes. Some guy walking by helped me push a bit, but we needed more people. Something about the car smelled really bad. Something was burned out. My van was dying. On mini-Thursday! My son Ian showed up. He's wearing a sling (fractured elbow) so we put him in the driver's seat. We pushed more, to no avail. There was no power steering. Ian couldn't turn the wheel (with his one good arm). Then my son Alex showed up. This was manpower (kidpower?) to get the job done. We pushed the van into a parking spot on the street (facing the wrong way) and then unloaded the car of all the soccer equipment: balls, corner flags, pinnies, cones, my giant coaching bag, etc. We carried all the equipment down to the park for the game. It's lucky I live walking distance to the field. Most coaches would have been totally screwed.

My wife managed to get the car started and drive it to F&F Auto (highly recommended). She said it was about to stall the whole drive, but she caught all the lights. My team played poorly, and my son-- who was the hero of the game on Friday and scored the winning goal in overtime-- didn't get goal-side on a couple of key plays. Yuck. Friday he was a hero, but this was Monday kind of stuff.

I'm drinking a couple of beers now and pretending it's truly a (mini) Thursday night, but it's hard to get into the Thursday night groove. Too much Monday stuff happened. Hopefully tomorrow-- mini-Friday-- will have better karma.

A Wheelbarrow?

Last Friday was one of my strangest afternoons as a soccer coach: though the sun had been out for days, our field was still a mess-- there was standing water full of goose-shit all along the near sideline-- but luckily there was a pile of sand near the goal . . . so all we needed was a way to carry the sand over to the puddles so we could fill them in; I asked my players what we could use to move the sand and one of them suggested "a wheel barrow," which I told him was a great way to move sand, but unfortunately, we didn't have a wheel barrow (and honestly, would I have even asked that question if I had a wheel barrow?) but then in a flash of coaching brilliance I realized I had enough orange practice cones to give every player two, and so we formed a cone brigade and filled the puddles fairly quickly, but apparently this wasn't the best way to warm up for the game because we gave up three goals in the first half (we were playing into a strong wind and trying to score on the muddy side of the field and they had a big fast kid with a mustache, but that's still no excuse for giving up three goals) and then we gave up a fourth goal early in the second half and I was getting ready to call it a day when we finally knocked one in . . . but 4-1 in soccer is still pretty much insurmountable (even with some wind) but then one of my players literally ran a ball into the goal with his chest and our kids realized that they could score and so we knocked in two more to tie it up, and had the ball on their goal line twice in the last minute, and you've never seen kids so happy about a tie.

Arachnohirsutaphobia

After a long day of coaching soccer, I found a dead spider entwined within my leg hair.

Dave Receives a Compliment Meant For His Wife

My wife has been multitasking like a madwoman lately-- work craziness, packing for our son's school camping trip, making lunches for everyone, cooking all the meals (because I'm coaching all the time) and participating in various community stuff (ice cream socials and School Board election events, etc etc) so I decided to get her some flowers and write her a note to her reminding her how much the family appreciates all she does for us; I called the florist and then got Ian and the dog ready to walk over there, but then we decided it would be more fun to bike over, so I attached the dog to my bike and we cycled over to Main Street, picked up the flowers, and headed home -- and I felt a little overwhelmed, as I was:

1) trying to hold the wildflower bouquet;

2) trying to prevent the dog from wrapping the bungee cord around any trees, bushes, or humans;

3) trying to keep an eye on Ian, since we were crossing some busy roads and navigating some areas where there was no sidewalk--

and I must have looked pretty absurd: biking with the dog, trying to hold the flowers, my son trailing behind me, because a mom pushing a jogging stroller took a look at me, made some inferences, and said "You're a good husband!" and I said, "I think I bit off more than I can chew here" and then she yelled-- because I was flying past her at this point: "You're teaching your son a great lesson! How to multitask!" and when I got home, I realized the irony . . . I was trying to thank my wife for multi-tasking with some flowers, but instead I got complimented for my multi-tasking (by a fairly cute jogger mom, I might add) even though I'm a horrible multi-tasker (and not even very adept at doing one thing at a time).

Brilliant Tactics in 4th/5th Grade Recreational Basketball

Things got slightly heated at the recreational basketball semi-finals Monday night -- the league rule is that every player must play two quarters, and most teams have ten players, which makes things easy to keep track of, but the particular team we were playing had been shorting their weaker players minutes all season and our head coach brought this up during the game and so the opposing coach had to play everyone equally, and though this team beat us earlier in the season, we beat them handily this time -- and I was impressed with my coaching partner's strategic use of the rules to make the game fair, but the opposing coach countered with a brilliant counter-strategy: he attempted to have his worst player foul the point guard on our team constantly in the final stretch, so that this weak player would foul out, and he could replace him with a stronger player . . . which, I must admit, is a brilliant plan-- something I would never have dreamed up (I can barely remember to call time-outs).

It's Not Like I'm Trying To Be A Gymnast

So for those of you anxiously awaiting my decision regarding the Trilemma of Dave, I actually rested my injured knee, and I have been wearing my orthotics, which has really helped my plantar fasciitis . . . so this Sunday I was able to return to the soccer field-- with one wrinkle: I did no stretching whatsoever before I played . . . I read some recent research that suggests that static stretching actually weakens muscles, and I always thought when you were injured that you should do a lot of stretching, but I've given up on that philosophy-- not that I ever did that much stretching to begin with-- and I had no problems on the field, and both my legs and my feet felt good after the game, so this makes me very happy, because I find stretching really really boring (so now the question is, do I forego stretching when I am coaching kids? . . . I think we will warm-up and do some sport specific exercises before we play, but no more of the tedious circling up and stretching as a group).

Am I Getting in Good Shape or Full of Intestinal Parasites?

I don't mean to get all Brigitte Jones on you, but between playing lots of soccer, running around with my kids, coaching and having no kitchen, I'm down to just a shade over twelve stone (186 pounds) and I've been on a reverse diet-- plenty of ice cream and candy and pizza-- so I'm very happy with the weight loss, but of course, there's the chance that I have giant intestinal roundworms again.

Tennis and Scooping

Weird tennis match this morning-- I hurt my quad last week playing soccer, so I promised myself I wouldn't run too hard at tennis this morning because I need to stay healthy for coaching tennis, and I played a good player this morning, Jonathan, a skilled and fit Asian guy in his thirties who has played a lot of tennis and I was hoping he'd kill me so I wouldn't get competitive and hurt my leg, but in between killer shots, he made some unforced errors and near the end, I was ahead 7-6 but he tied it at 7-7 and we had to play a tiebreaker-- and my leg was really starting to get tender, but I went ahead 3-0 in the tiebreaker, only to finally lose in the end 7-5 . . . and the whole time I was trying not to run down drop shots or get into long rallies and I'm just glad I survived without injury-- though I really could have beaten him if I was at full strength . . . and then I got bagels for my family and my wife gave me a very complicated order involving a "scooped out" bagel, a term which I never heard but seems to be something they are familiar with at the bagel shop.

Vince Lombardi Would Not Approve

No sport is more abstract than soccer, and at the high school level there seems to be a preponderance of English teachers coaching it (at least in my neck of the woods and the movie Dead Poet's Society) so you end up with comments like the one my friend and colleague Terry recently gave to The Star Ledger, in trying to explain how his team could completely dominate play, but only score two goals . . . Terry said: "They say it is easier to destroy than create" and while this statement pushes the limits of absurd profundity and bombast in the name of athletics, at least he restrained himself and didn't drop allusions to Shiva and Brahma in the rest of his game analysis.