Rested and healed... just in time for the upcoming apocalypse

It's amazing what a couple weeks off from soccer and a few good nights' sleep will do for you. My attitude towards life in general has improved, so has my energy level, and the aches and pains are abating, the abrasions healing, and the pumpkins are carved for Samhain.

I've been listening to a lot of NPR coverage of the crazy financial crisis (including the great shows Fresh Air, and This American Life), and reading through towers of information on Wikipedia, starting here. Through my intensive research and analysis, I have come up with a completely random, unbacked guess as to the underlying issue and it's direct, tragic, consequence:

The U.S. has too much debt. A crisis of some sort would have manifested soon, regardless. If 9/11 didn't happen, if sub-prime lending didn't happen, if credit default swaps were correctly classified as insurance and regulated, if short selling were banned, if the commercial paper market hadn't run dry, if several banks hadn't gone bankrupt, if the stock market hadn't crashed... if none of that happened, the crisis would still have manifested itself in other ways. In other ways just as shocking and destructive. Too much debt. Too many games with money and no real product. For example:

I have a lot of Wachovia bonds, a billion dollars worth, in fact. Wachovia has been in the news a little, and I'm worried that maybe, some time down the line, they won't be able to pay me the interest on my bonds. To hedge that risk, I want to buy a credit default swap (hereafter CDS). I go down to Jane's CDS shop and say "Give me $1 billion if AIG goes under". Jane says "Sure, that will be $2 million per month." Since that's less than the interest I'm making on my Wachovia bonds, I say "Deal", and sign the papers... and watch the market.

Wachovia has a bad quarter, and people are worried that they might go under, including my buddy Bob, who has the same amount of Wachovia bonds as I do. After a tearful, panicked lunch with Bob, I offer to sell him a CDS for his Wachovia bonds. "I'll guarantee you $1 billion if Wachovia defaults on your bonds, for the low cost of $3 million per month". He thinks it over, and says "Deal".

At this point, I'm spending $2 million per month, but bringing in $3 million, and the $1 billion I'd have to pay Bob will be coming from Jane, I'd just have to countersign the check. So now I sell my Wachovia bonds for their current market value, quit my job, and go stock up my bomb shelter with the assets I just liquidated. I'm making $1 million monthly, and have no assets at risk, and no government oversight. Except, I'll owe Bob $1 billion if Wachovia goes under, and I can only afford to pay him that if Jane makes good on her end of the deal.

Things can get more complicated than that, Bob can become an insurer if things get worse, and Jane may have bought a CDS on the cheap from another insurer when Wachovia was making money hand over fist. And it's possible that the point of entry to all this, the source of the $1 billion, should it ever be needed, won't have it. Maybe they've made a lot of bad loans to risky homebuyers who have a history of not paying their credit cards on time, or have rotated minimum wage jobs 5 times in the last year. If Wachovia ever can't pay their bond holders, that could be, like the bullet that killed Franz Ferdinand, the shot heard 'round the world, collapsing all the intermediate companies that will owe their $1 billion to someone.

Ever play Jenga? It's like that. In my opinion, which is worth about nothing since I'm a computer programmer, not a market analyst or financial wizard of any sort, is that something was going to happen now, regardless of whether these specific tragedies were in play, because of all the debt and crazy interdependencies.

Oh, and my 401k is in the shitter, and possibly my dream of early retirement. But since I make my money with my brain and not my back, I can stay employed as long as my brain holds out... or as long as I can fake it, so I'm not worried about survival, just disappointed at all the world traveling I won't be doing.

In closing, it's a good thing I'm all healed up, in case the end times come, and I need to be a little more medieval in my survival strategy. Plus, that should make it a piece of cake to finally lose that pesky last 5 pounds.

Last games of the season

Stacey's soccer team ended the season on sort of a sour note, we lost our last game, making our record 5 - 3 - 2, losing 3 out of our last 4 games. I'm not sure what happened, but we still ended up with a winning record, and the girls had a blast at the end of the season pizza party.

We met at Donatos Westerville (a store I managed back in the day), where Jim treated the girls to a few pizzas, and I passed out the participation trophies, WASA 30th anniversary pennants, and my own creation: personalized acrylic plaques, made by the same guy who did my custom Christmas ornaments last year.

The plaques sit in a base that has blue LEDs, and the light illuminates the plaque, making the frosted areas appear blue. Each girl's plaque had her name on it, a nickname, and something positive that they contributed to the team... "Best passing", "Leading scorer", "Fastest reactions", etc. Here's an example of the template I used for Stacey's:

From U12 Playbook

The girls found it pretty cool, I think, as I went around the table handing out the items and saying something about each player and why I was happy she was on the team. The only sour note about the affair was my inability to keep calm, and still my hands from shaking. I did some breathing exercises to calm my voice, but my body betrayed my nervousness. Oh well, should be easier next time.

The soccer team I play on, the Raiderz, finished the season with a win. I played while still chasing a cold, and struggled to catch my breath for the entirety of my field time. I made no good plays, and half of my touches on the ball ended up going right back towards the opponent I tried to steal from. One of the defense subs injured his leg during the game, so I tried to stay in, even though I was underperforming. Horrible, but we pulled off a 3-2 win without much difficulty.

After the game the players camped out under a shelter, drank some brew, and chatted for about an hour. I had an energy drink in lieu of beer, and enjoyed the banter, contributing a little here and there. I guess I'm mellowing in my old age, because those situations usually get under my skin for some reason. Either I don't like watching everyone drink, or I find their conversation predictable and ignorant. Not so, this time, or the last few parties I've been to with Liberty's family and friends. Just people talking about whatever comes to mind, relaxing, playing party games, with no one to impress. Things don't need to be fantastical to hold my interest these days, which I'm thankful for. In the long run, that will make me seem like less of a pretentious ass.

This winter, neither I nor Stacey will participate in any indoor soccer. I need to heal from being banged up the last few months, and I couldn't drum up enough interest from the other girls' parents to form a complete U-12 team. Just as well, a little less activity will help as Stacey's schoolwork gets harder, and I can return to a regular training program instead of healing during the week from Sunday's injuries.

In other news, I'm in a lot of pain right now. My legs hurt when I walk (soccer induced, no doubt), my back is growing some sort of painful red mark, and I've only been sleeping about 4 hours a night for the past couple of weeks. I've been unsupportive of my girls at home, disinterested, abrupt. In the mirror I look old, and I have a hard time mustering a smile most of the time. I need to rest and heal, and have the support of my immediate family to pull me back up to my feet. Hopefully things will get better soon.

Navratri, Dancing, and Time Travel

So I had this dream the other night that was in the vein of the enjoyable, and predictably cancelled TV show, Journeyman, and the very similar book, "The Time Traveler's Wife". The dream was as follows:

I was driving my car over to my science mentor, who has helped me research and deal with my curse of spontaneous time travel. At some point during the drive, I time traveled back to a time before he and I had ever met, and only realized this as I pulled into his driveway.

When I knocked on his door, he answered, but didn't recognize me, and quickly became agitated. He chased me away, and I ran off of his property (what happened to my car isn't clear) only to have my roommate, Bill, show up suddenly in his car. I hopped in, and the two of us beat a hasty retreat. I was confused, as Bill not only knew to be there, and as far as I knew he wasn't one of my circle of confidants about my "condition", and additionally he was driving the car he owns in the present.

"How did you know to be here? What's going on?"

"I can't tell you yet, I'm involved in the plot," was his reply. Freaky. A dream that breaks the fourth wall with a wink to the audience.

So off we drove, to my old apartment down on Proprietors Road in Worthington, where my self from that time lived. This led me to believe that the year the action was taking place was between 1985 and 1989. As we got closer to the apartment, it became increasingly clear that something was amiss in the timeline. The city had a very third world feel to it, there were police checkpoints everywhere, and an auspicious barricade manned with officers at the entrance to the apartment complex my self from the time of action lived.

At that point, I theorized that a small change had taken place much earlier that caused the timeline to get this distorted, and led to the police actively searching for me in the late 80's. I intuited that the small change probably happened 15 years earlier, say, around the time of my birth!

Sadly, I woke up at this point, right when the plot was thickening. What event transpired at my birth that needed to be corrected didn't reveal itself. Perhaps my own existence needed to be wiped out to normalize things, like the director's cut of "The Butterfly Effect". Perhaps an evil time traveler, my counterpart, the Master to my Doctor, was born at the same time.

So, on to Navratri. A festival celebrating an Indian goddess defeating an evil demi-god was going on over the weekend, and I managed to weasel an invitation from a buddy I work with, and my wife and I decided to make a night of it. The event took place at a high school, and there were possibly 300 people, mostly Indian, mostly dressed in traditional clothes, Saris, long scarves, flashy colors. The event consisted of some food and trinkets for sale in the cafeteria, and dancing around a shrine to the goddess in the gymnasium.

The dances were twofold, first the Garba, a dance in multiple concentric circles around the shrine, everyone moving counterclockwise, dancing in many varied combinations and fills. Liberty and I tried as best as we could to get the basics down, I following the man who invited us, she following his wife. We quickly felt outmatched, and after a few revolutions around the shrine, decided to bow out and observe, trying again to learn the moves. It was fantastic, in the proper sense of the word. Lines of several teenaged girls, all dressed to the nines, all graceful and beautiful, danced lockstep, in perfect synchronicity, with grand, sweeping arm movements and spins. Men dancing out of elation and joy, not out of courtship or coolness, accompanied them. Adult women showed a more conservative femininity, with moves equally as fluid and attention grabbing, without needing the extra flourishes and energy of their youthful counterparts.

A thing of beauty, really. By my count, Liberty and I were 40% of the white people in the room, and neither of us was comfortable looking like the clumsy Americans, and didn't want to give the impression that we came to see how cute all the funny Indians were, so out of respect, we pulled ourselves out of the line when it was clear we weren't getting it on the first pass. Over the years working side by side with people from India, my respect for them as a people with insight and a good work ethic has grown. After seeing them dance one time, my eyes were opened to how full of energy their culture and traditions are. And even though we were the clumsy Americans who didn't know the dance, the couple we came with and their friends gave us nothing but encouragement, showing us steps and asking us to join in, and none of the rest of the crowd gave us any disparagement. Not any. I have never been in a crowd of that many white people and not felt that someone was trying to marginalize or exclude me. Not so here. I felt included to the point that, by the end of the evening, and after the second dance that was much more successful for us, I started thinking of "them" as "my people".

The second dance was the Dandiya, a 5 beat dance where pairs of people hit sticks together in a certain pattern. The pattern we settled on, and there were many variations from the different dancers, was beat 1 bang your own sticks together, then beats 2 and 3 bang one stick, then the other, against your parter's, beat 4 bang yours together again, beat 5 hit both of your sticks against both of your partners. Finally, the next beat 1 you also rotate partners. Seems simple, but keeping a good rhythm was hard at first, and there are several flourishes thrown in. Some people spin when they change partners, some do something else on beats 1 and 4 other than beat their own sticks together (I needed to keep doing that for about 75% of the dance to help me keep the beat). Also, the music (which was live) slowly sped up, and finally, other dancers got added to popular lines. Our line got pretty popular, and we were up to about 16 people at one point. When the music would speed up, some people called out elated chants, and by the end of the dance most people had abandoned the lines and the sticks, and started dancing solo, throwing their hands in the air, spinning, singing out. It was way cool, and Liberty and I managed to keep up with everyone for a long time.

I've since searched for this type of dance on Youtube, and have found either shaky cellphone accounts, or flashy, stylized hollywood-eqsue adaptations. I found nothing that was as folksy or... spiritual, I guess is the word, as the dancing of the people who showed up Friday. I'm glad Liberty and I got to take part.

It was also the first time I had taken Liberty out dancing. As far as good nights out go, we hit the mark, but I'm afraid I may have set the bar a little high for our next dancing night.

More than survival

My wife and I have now been together, as a couple, for over a year. Our love is deeper and our affection stronger than it was during the most exciting part of our courtship. Joseph Campbell recommends that one follow his bliss. Liberty = bliss. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Scout just got back from a week of vacation with her father, and Liberty and she were very happy to see each other. It was clear that she had been coached on who Daddy is during the trip. "You are Curtis," she said to me shortly after she got back, "you are my step-father." And for a while I was Curtis, and no one said Daddy in the house, pointedly, to see what would happen. An hour later, though, I was Daddy more often than not, and I try not to attribute too much meaning to that, as I'm sure it flips the other way when she's with him. He's Daddy, I'm Curtis. Plus, I don't think I'm in the running for favorite man in her life, that was settled shortly after she was born.

The Daddy issue can be pretty touchy for parents (especially when you're younger and age hasn't softened your rage or boosted your confidence yet), but it's been my experience that the word itself has no special meaning for children, despite all our assumptions, and the perceived correlation between petnames and love. The love a child has for a parent doesn't change with the name. For example, we took Scout to our family reunion back in early August, and she met lots of doting aunts and grandmas who held her on their lap, swung with her on the porch swing, etc. To each of them, she recounted something great she had done at "David's house." "I saw Kung-Fu Panda at David's house." "I have new shoes at David's house." So, clearly, he's the first man in her life, and I accept my position as second fiddle.

Stacey's second soccer game was on Monday, and we had a resounding 2 - 0 victory against a skilled opponent. She played goalie again in the first half, and found some relief from her anxiety about being scored on in the first game. We talked ahead of time about staying between the goal posts and the 6 yard box, and sprinting out to the 18 only when she needed to. During Monday's game, she needed to a lot, thwarting many drives, stubbing her fingers once in the process when she grabbed at a ball that was being kicked. She sprinted out and grabbed about four or five balls, once in a bizarre three on one situation, where the opponents were seriously offside and the ref didn't seem to notice. Without hesitating, she ran out to meet the group of three, and grabbed the ball away from the dribbler before she could take the shot. Risky, done with full commitment. Beautiful. As Billie Jean King says: "Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozey." Her ten teammates were singing her praises, and I was a proud father.

We're 2 and 0 now, and I don't know if our luck will hold for the remainder of the season, or exactly what has led us to win both our scrimmages and our first two games. However, I have noticed some differences between me and the other coaches, and between my girls and the other teams. First, we don't do team-building rituals with chants or callbacks... "be aggressive, be aggressive, be aggressive", (coach)"Are we tired?!" (team)"NO!", or even the pre-game circle with hands in the middle "Go (mascot)!" Second, I have them practice getting around a defender during warm-up, not just taking a shot on goal. I go out and play fullback, and they have to get around me to take a shot... and I'm a pretty good fullback. Third, I don't bitch at them from the sidelines all game, and in fact I jumped on the assistant coach the one time he started to sound harsh and frustrated. Long on positive, short on negative. And like Stargirl, I clap for the other team. Does all that help, or would we be doing even better if I were a drill sergeant and a micromanager, giving no quarter to the enemy, that sort of thing? I don't know, but I like it my way, and it seems to be working out ok so far.

For the time being, in all aspects of life, my family and I are not just surviving, we're thriving. Stacey still tests off the charts at school, and is becoming a better athlete and dancer every year. Scout's love for Stacey and me has grown, as has her vocabulary and coordination. We're working on a bike with training wheels, "om my up" has been replaced with "could you pick me up?", and she now stays with us two thirds of the time while dad is off at college in another city. Liberty is happy with more time with her girl, and has enjoyed the freedom of having disposable income again, not being forced to pinch pennies as a single mom/college student. She's been redecorating the house, playing in the kitchen (homemade granola bars -- kick ass), and looking more and more like she's happy to stick around.

All thirteen of my girls are happy, and thus, I am happy. Life is good.

Scrimmage, Birthday party, Decor

The pre-season of my U-12 team is going pretty well. We finally started getting all the girls together for practices, and they're getting fit and getting a lot of touches during practice, tuning their footwork, ball control, and field reading. Friday was our first scrimmage, and we won handily, 3-0, with some good individual performances. The girls' attitude was cooperative and cheerful overall.

Tuesday will be our second scrimmage, and I'm hoping to see more confidence from the girls, some focus on using the moves we've gone over in practice, and better field positioning instead of moving in clusters, which is a problem that usually works its way out as girls graduate from U12 to older age brackets.

Saturday was Stacey's birthday party. We went back to Summit Vision this year, and did a high-ropes course with a zipline. It was trey awesome. Unsurprisingly, the more dangerous parties tend to have a lower turnout, but the 7 girls who did show joined Stacey in having a fantastic time, maneuvering through obstacles like the build-your-own-bridge, the tarzan vines with little hexagonal planks at the bottom of them, and some other equally cool near impossible tasks. I don't have the pictures from the party yet (Don, ship me that CD, man! I can't wait to see how everyone looked) but I'll get them uploaded as soon as I can.

Stacey will be 12 on Monday, is about 5.8", and could pass for roughly 16 until you notice her speech patterns and mannerisms, which are correct for her age rather than the affected adult style that girls her age use when trying to seem more mature. The days of little Action-Stace listening to my bedtime stories are long gone, but I'm thankful that she's staved off the pretentiousness of tweens for another year. She's still my girl, caring, funny, and affectionate, and I think she'll become an awesome young woman over the next few years. As a parent I've just been winging it, my main tools being love and my generic problem solving algorithm, but obviously I haven't buggered things up too much.

Liberty has been giving the living room and the old play room a makeover, and things look great now. The old play room (technically the dining room in the original house layout) has been emptied and turned into an office area with this IKEA bookshelf/desk combo:



...and a similar bookshelf under the dining room window:



In the living room she has some cool lamps, shelves and a 50's turntable/radio from her old apartment, and a desk that was pilfered from her ex, who is moving out of town:





And let's zoom in on those art pieces. The first is a piece by her mother, Heather, a skilled artist. Her work speaks for itself, so I won't brag on it, just... here:



Is that not awesome? Liberty's old boss and sister's boyfriend Eric is an amateur artist. Here is his piece, "Apprehensive Midget Tree" from his "Doodle some stuff at work" period:



It makes a nice addition to the living room, I find.

So Liberty is making the house hers, and I couldn't be happier. Plus I can't decorate for shit, so it's nice to have someone with taste and an interest living here.

Coachin', Week 1

So far, so good. My assistant coach Jim has been more available than he thought he would be, making it to all of the practices so far, and his input has been very helpful. He is the captain of the over 30 team I play on, and his two girls are on the team as well as Stacey. If you're just joining the story, I'm coaching my daughter's Girls U-12 team, filled with mainly 10 and 11 year olds.

Most of the girls on the team have made a couple appearances at practice, and more than half of the girls have a good feel for the game, good timing, and strong kicks. When we pair off for passing and shielding drills, Jim suggested putting the stronger girls with the less experienced ones, so that the strong girls could get a feel for leadership, and the less experienced ones could have a good example to follow, and not get left behind.

The parents have all been friendly, and I haven't felt any bad vibes off of anyone. I'm getting a feel for the loneliness of trying to organize events with busy people. I'm getting about a 33% reply rate to my emails from the team parents, even from those emails that say "please reply and say if you're available for X". Of course, I was guilty of that on the other side of the fence, and often went a week without checking email, and only found out about special events at the last second, or missed them entirely.

The girls are eager to please, funny, and also quick to socialize with each other when they have a minute or two of downtime. Their ideas for team mascot have been great: Flaming Balls of Death, Flaming Millenniums, Flaming iPods (notice a theme?), and the Hot Chili Peppers... since our team color is red, that would make us the Red Hot Chili Peppers. My idea of the Red Pandas was rejected outright, sadly.

We've gone over some basic drills, and I'm getting a feel for everyone's attention span, and how complex you can make a drill before the girls lose interest. I say "lose interest" because they are all smart enough to follow instructions that are arbitrarily complicated, but too hard = less fun. Since they all volunteered to play, they expect to have a lot of fun, and not a lot of lectures and story problems. So, I aims to please. Here are the drills that seem to work OK:

Ball shielding drill

1 – An attacker with the ball approaches a defender. As the defender gets close, the attacker will stop the ball and put her body between the ball and the defender.

2 – The defender will move to steal the ball, and when she does so, the attacker moves the ball the other way.

3 – Ideally, the defender and attacker are then close to side by side, with the ball still shielded. Now the attacker can dribble upfield at an angle to pass the defender.



Of course, the above drill only works if the defender does something she shouldn’t during match play: let an attacker get goalside. If the defender is patient and doesn’t take the bait, then the attacker will need some help from a teammate, hence the next drill.

Give and Go vs. One Defender

1 – Like the shielding drill, an attacker with the ball approaches a defender. This time a second attacker runs parallel.

2 – The attacker with the ball passes to her teammate as the defender approaches, then sprints upfield.

3 – When the teammate receives the ball, she immediately passes it back to the attacker, who is now goalside of the defender.



Timing is important here. Notice in the last panel the pass is to where the teammate is running to, not where she currently is. Passing to a running teammate, and shielding from the previous drill, are skills that will improve the girls’ games, skills they will take with them as they move up to middle school play.

As the girls get more confident and practiced at this basic give and go play, something more realistic to match play can be introduced: a second defender. We practice two basic approaches, the defenders are split, and the defenders are concentrated. The simple strategy against split defenders is to keep them split.


Give and Go vs. Split Defenders

1 – Two attackers run towards two defenders playing man-to-man defense. The attacker without the ball cuts over to stay between the ball and her defender.

2 – As the attacker with the ball approaches her defender, she passes to her open teammate, then sprints up field.

3 – Like the last drill, when the teammate receives the ball, she immediately passes it back to the attacker, who is now goalside of the both defenders.



This play requires good cooperation from the two attackers. We practice first with the defenders running in slow motion, concentrating on timing the passes, and getting used to what the play is supposed to look like. After the girls are familiar with what they are supposed to do and getting a good success rate with the drill, we have the defenders speed up to make it more realistic to a match setting.

When defenders team up in a two on one situation, we reintroduce ball shielding, and add the back-pass. The goal of the give and go against a 2-on-1 is to draw one of the defenders away, and to beat the other with foot speed.

Give and Go vs. Concentrated Defenders

1 – The attacker with the ball approaches two defenders, and shields the ball from them on the approach. Knowing you can’t shield very long against two defenders, she looks for a back-pass. Her team mate slides over to receive it.

2 – The attacker back-passes to her teammate, and then sprints through the defenders. If both defenders stay with her, the pass recipient can dribble upfield unchallenged. If a defender is drawn off, the ball carrier can look for an angled pass upfield before the defender reaches her.

3 – The attacker moves across field quickly to receive a return pass. The teammate with the ball return passes upfield at an angle to where the attacker is running.



This play is hard, and is as complicated as I want drills to be. Drills should use a minimal number of players, have simple goals, and have a high success rate. "Get the ball upfield", "pass to the running player", "back-pass, then run upfield", these are good things to work on for this age group that translate into improved match play.

Other things we work on are basic shooting, trapping, tackling (the ball, not other players), and dribbling, all of which the girls already understand. More practice on the basics = doing them more naturally during a match.

So, we're having fun, and I get to experiment with plays and motivating players in a competitive game, both of which are new to me. What will the season bring victory-wise? Will we have a winning record? Be the best in our league? I don't know, but one thing's for damn sure: we're going to have a good time.

80

For the first time ever, I played a complete soccer game in my over-30 league - 80 minutes nonstop in the blazing heat. There were a number of no-shows on our team, and we ended up playing a man down with no subs, so all of us had to stick out the whole game. We ended up winning 4-1 against a fellow over-30 team that was similarly understaffed (they had 12 players show up, so they only had one sub for the whole game). Our recent string of games against the over-18 teams had helped condition us to play hard at a disadvantage, and we came out on top... with substantial effort.

Late last season we had a similar game, where I arrived right as the game started, the 11th on our team to show up, leaving us a full complement of field players, but no substitutes. I played for 75 minutes, sitting out 5 minutes late in the game to recover and hydrate, and playing my last 5 - 10 minutes basically standing still and hoping the opposing team didn't make it down to me, ending up with a splitting headache and coming close to calling in sick at work the next day. As I recall, we lost that game.

This time I fared much better, as did our final score. First, I'm about 13 pounds lighter than I was then. Second, I've had another year of conditioning to keep my wind up. I closed the game with a few demoralizing clears (I'm a fullback) right as our opponents were making their final charge to catch up from their 3-1 deficit. We scored a fourth goal late in the game, which sealed the outcome. After that, they never made it inside the penalty box.

My problem now is staving off injury. This morning I have a sore thigh, and possible tendonitis in my right ankle. I felt the thigh midway through yesterday's game, and have been feeling my ankle since last week's game, where we played on a field as hard as stone. Fortunately, I'll have a full month to heal, as next week is the family reunion, and then we have two weeks off for a tournament on our fields, and then the fourth week our team has a bye, since there are an odd number of teams in the league. By our August 31 game, I should be all healed up, and hopefully the fields will be in better condition.

So, yeah, the family reunion is this weekend. It started back in the 1970s when my Grandmother organized a get-together in the town she grew up in (Mechanicsburg, Virginia) with her 11 siblings and their families. We meet on the first Sunday in August, and have missed only one year since we started, and the number of family members who show up has grown to approximately 200. Since the numbers have grown so much, my grandfather's side of the family has split off to their own smaller reunion that meets the Saturday before at a different location. It draws a few people who don't usually make it to the big one, and a few like me who go to both, numbering around 30 attendees so far.

This will be the first year I get to show off Liberty and, hopefully, Scout, down there. I'm looking forward to it, but Liberty is showing a little anxiety about it. "Come meet 200 of my family." It's understandable. When she sees that the main questions she'll be asked are "Who are you with?" and "Have you tried the pie?" then I think she'll be OK.

After the reunion, Stacey will be going from Virginia to North Carolina to stay a couple weeks with her Grandma and Great-Grandma, where she'll get to play with babies and be doted on, coming back to be with me shortly before her birthday party. We're going to go back to Summit Vision, this time to do the high-ropes course/zipline. I'm hoping a lot of kids show for that, as it seems like a good time. Stacey didn't have her best social year ever, having the culture shock that is middle school, but I'm hoping the girls who usually show and have a good time will still be up for it.

Last in the news, Stacey's soccer season will be starting soon, and I'm the coach! I took a class to get a coach's license, learned some drills, bought some cones, and checked the little "I'd like to coach" box on the form I signed Stacey up with. I'm excited about it, but a little anxious. I'm hoping I'm going to be healthy enough to participate in drill demonstrations and sprints, and hoping also that I'll be understandable and likable. I'm also hoping my philosophies of "play with your feet, not your hands" and "if you knock 'em down, help 'em up" won't be vilified by the parents.

From my time on the sidelines with other parents, I've seen people preach both sides of aggression and sportsmanship - from no blood no foul, to kids should be kids. Me, I'm more Shoalin: Avoid rather than check, check rather than hurt. I think it's OK for kids to make contact with each other on the field, and blocking with your body is easily interpreted by players as strategic rather than confrontational. Not so with pushing; the more arm you use in maintaining possession/position, the more likely you'll be seen as trying to start a fight. Soccer is fun, and fighting is not fun... so play with your feet, not your hands. That's an easy sell. The other is a little harder.

If you knock 'em down, help 'em up. Maybe I'd be ok with a player going ahead and taking a couple dribble steps and a shot on goal after bumping into someone and knocking them down. After all, it would take that long for the person who fell to take stock of their own situation and determine if they were hurt or could keep playing. Otherwise, I'd like to encourage my girls to sacrifice perceived positional advantage for sportsmanship. If you knock someone down, you are responsible for their injury. The ref should stop play, but if he doesn't, you should pass the ball away, and then help the girl you knocked down back to her feet. If she can get back up and keep playing, she will remember that act of kindness and it will have an effect on her. Yes, I'd like to win games, but not at the expense of being uninterested in the other team's well-being, or worse, a bully. 5 seconds: Pass the ball, help her up, get back in the game. It won't change the score, I guarantee.

On the other hand, being a martyr isn't my bag, so if I get a lot of flak for that, I'll have a challenging problem on my hands. Time will tell how that will play out.

Bike Riding

One of the few good memories I have of interacting with my (now deceased) stepfather was learning how to ride a bike. We lived in Manteo, North Carolina, well before it turned into the resort town/vacation spot it is now, before anyone ever heard of the Outer Banks or put OBX stickers on the backs of their cars to complement their now plebeian and undistinguished Ron Jon window stickers. Back then the town was poor, and many locals, including my stepfather, were fishermen. (And many of the fishermen and their dirt poor families whiled away the time listening to Southern rock and getting stoned, but that's another story.)

For my 6th birthday, I got a bike for a present, a little kid's BMX (redline squareback, I believe). My stepfather, who generally took little interest in me, patiently taught me to ride it, giving me balance support and encouragement, and running alongside me. As I got familiar with it, I was able to pick up speed, and the gyroscopic (centrifugal? centripetal?) force of the wheels was a better stabilizer than my stepfather, so he began to let go, and I was riding fine... until I noticed he had let go.

Noticing that I was on my own was the source of my first few falls. I wasn't prepared for the psychological stress of it. Doing something this dangerous and complicated myself? Preposterous! I barked alarmed complaints out of fear and anxiety, demanding to know why he let go, as I wobbled, overcorrected, and fell. But soon my confidence and experience outweighed my fears, and I managed to regain my balance after I wobbled, and eventually to ride smoothly, as all kids do. By the next week, I was riding with the neighborhood boys around the 1/4 mile dirt circle behind our trailer park, and by the end of the summer I was a daredevil, the youngest in the group of kids I hung with, but jumping over our makeshift cinder block/plywood ramp with as much gusto as the rest of them. In the end, I was the first brave enough to jump the ramp when it was set ridiculously too steep, landing hard but not crashing, inspiring my peers to overcome their fear of getting hurt by replacing it with a greater fear of looking chicken. The little kid did it, why can't you? Bok bok baaawk!

Switching gears -- and if you can manage abstract thought, you'll see where I'm going before I write the punchline -- my first marriage was a complete trainwreck. I've managed for years to not speak ill of my ex-wife in this blog, and I don't intend to now, but the fact is our marriage was a travesty. I felt unvalued and unloved, and looked on other men with suspicion. I developed frown lines, acid reflux, slowly became fat, and closed myself off from my family and friends in an attempt to appease her and gain her love again. She, in turn, thought I was treating our marriage as a job, doing things because I had to, not out of love or affection. She viewed me as having no interest in the world, preferring to sit at home and download nudie-gifs rather than going out to listen to music or just be with people, and treating real-world issues like a flowchart, binary thinking robot that I was.

So, that was a mess. We broke up hating each other, and only after years of separation did our respective wounds heal enough for us to work together amicably for the sake of Stacey. Again, the point here is not to blame or complain, or drag my dirty laundry out for daytime talkshow-esque public scrutiny and commentary, but rather to provide some back story for what comes next.

What comes next? Liberty, who is, by my best reckoning, the perfect woman. Young, alive, nonconformist. Beautiful. Well-read, intelligent, funny. Open to any wild suggestion, believing that I can take care of her, and trusting that I will. I've written about her here a few times, you can guess how I feel about her. Read all the entries from last September until now to get the gist of my feelings for her. They run deep.

Without hyperbole, and not to try to butter her up when she stumbles across this later (as far as I can tell, she doesn't frequent my blogs), and not because she is the relationship I am currently in, but because I have reflected on this privately, and found it to be an irrefutable truth: Liberty has made me happier that any person ever has. She has inspired me to be a man who is strong, asking me to lead. She has made me feel like my presence was valued, showing me smiles and attention whenever we were together. Her love and affection made me into a better man.

And now, we've been married and living together for a few months, and regular life has injected itself. We've seen each other sick, had busy schedules that left us both tired at night (if you're under 18, try not to contemplate what that means), and we've passed each other in the halls without stopping for a quick snuggle. A few times I found myself reading more into that than was there:

"Oh Jesus! She hates me now. I'm latching on to an empty heart, following her around like a lost puppy, what the hell did I do wrong!? No! Don't take this away from me! It was perfect! Have all the years of drinking from aluminum cans catch up to me and give me Alzheimers, have the next soccer game I play cripple me, have the bad wiring in my house short and start a fire that burns it down, have my boss determine that I cost too much and lay me off. But not her. Don't take her love from me, it's the thing that means the most to me."

And like the little boy who fell off his bike because he noticed no one was holding him up, I choked. I barked a confused, accusatory complaint. "Dude, there's nothing wrong, settle," was the response. The love was still there, and still is, and is stronger even than I thought it was. Think of this: Imagine a girl with a young kid who is barely scraping by, whose car falls apart during your courtship, whose cell phone gets cancelled, who struggles every day to get out of bed in time for school or work. She lets you seduce her, moves in with you, lets you be the support that gives her a car and a phone, asks you to stay with her sick kid when she can't miss an exam or when no one else can open at her store. And then she gets comfortable around you, and doesn't spend every waking moment trying to secure her status by exploiting her body. What could that mean?

It means, naturally, that she trusts me. She knows I don't want her to be a doting sycophant out of fear. Her position in our house feels safe to her, and she knows how to claw her way back from the brink of collapse, if need be, but she keeps coming home to me. She keeps inviting me to be with her family and friends, and she trusts me enough not to play a servile role, but to be herself.

What an amazing complement!

The affection? Still there. After a few days of cooling off after I lost my head, we naturally found ourselves in each other's arms. And I can feel the man she turned me into asserting himself, confident in his own position, and his character. I'm back, better than I was, and I don't need the constant whispers of "you are good and I want to be with you" to know that it's true.

Thank you, Liberty, you are amazing, and I have never loved a woman more. And I will be as daring a husband as I was a cyclist, confident and relaxed, with faith in our marriage strong enough to look cocky.

Sweet, Sweet Perl

Behold my latest off-the-cuff answer to a problem of the day:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %lines;
my $all_lines;
my $line_num = 0;

$all_lines .= $_ while <DATA>;
$lines{$_} = 1 for split /\s+/,$all_lines;

while (<>) {
$line_num++;
s/^/#/ if $lines{$line_num};
print $_;
}

__DATA__
169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176
314 315 316 317
320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328
391
403

Feel free to skip down to "Frank Muller" below if reading me geeking out isn't your bag. To save you the tedium of the complete history of what I was coding, I'll skip to the punchline: Thanks to the Sarbanes/Oxley act, brought about thanks to the assholes at Enron and MCI/Worldcom, I had a problem where I have to say how I want large changes made to a security access file 7 days from now, when I will be making daily small changes to the same file between now and then. This was granting emergency access to a service to people who really needed it, and undoing a larger set of access grants 7 days hence.

The solution? Identify line numbers in the access file to be commented out, and put all new daily changes to the file at the bottom, below all the lines to be commented. The script I came up with, pretty much off the cuff, shows the expressiveness of the Perl language. The line:

$all_lines .= $_ while <DATA>;

..iterates through all the text after __DATA__, an inline file handle, concatenating the text of each line to the string $all_lines. The line:

$lines{$_} = 1 for split /\s+/,$all_lines;

..splits the string $all_lines into a list of numbers separated by one or more whitespace characters (\s+), which means that a space and a line feed are both fine. For each item in that list, a hash element is added with a key of the number, and a value of 1.

The line:

s/^/#/ if $lines{$line_num};

..is the coup de grâce of the program. If the line number I'm currently on exists in the %lines hash, replace the first position of the line with a # sign (this "comments out" the line, making the security program ignore it). So in three small, but syntactically complex, lines, I've grabbed a list of lines to comment out, thrown it into a hash, and commented out lines in the config file whose line numbers appear in the hash.

Sweet, sweet Perl. Anyway, on to other stuff.


Frank Muller

...is dead! I couldn't believe it! He apparently just died a couple weeks ago, after suffering for years after a motorcycle accident. This man, more than any other, kept my brain working in a time where I could have easily slipped into working minimum wage jobs my whole adult life. With my active brain, I slowly clawed my way to a good financial position, and now I get to live in a house I own, drive an SUV, and wear dress shirts every day... neener, neener, neener.

Frank Muller was an actor turned audiobook reader. When I spent 4 years flipping pizza, he was with me in my car several hours a night on deliveries, reading Moby Dick, Interview with the Vampire, Different Seasons (Stephen King's short stories under a psuedonym), 1984, and other books. I so enjoyed his voice and style of reading that I stopped looking for books I thought I would enjoy, and began looking for books read by him - a few were stinkers, but there were some pearls in there too that I never would have found if he hadn't been the reader.

After I exhausted most of Frank's work, I found other good readers, like Scott Brick, who did fantastic readings of Dune, Fahrenheit 451, Ender's Game, and a lot of Asimov. To this day I still hit the library a couple times a month looking for audiobooks to listen to on the ride to work, and I always pick up a couple before going on vacation for the car ride down.

And it all started with Frank, the fuel to keep my brain working when I needed it most. Thanks, Frank. I'll miss you.


Honeymoon

My wife and I went for a mini-honeymoon over to Philadelphia for 3 days to check out some museums, included the Mutter museum of medical oddities (which fits our collective morbid sense of humor), and stopped into the wierd cultlike store IKEA to pick up some furniture and light fixtures.

I've got some pictures I took in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that I'll put up eventually as a Picasa album. Good stuff.

IKEA is interesting. They have an upstairs with apartments set up to show how you can design rooms using their furniture and art. Beside everything there are row and slot numbers for the pick-up area downstairs. Through the whole process, the staff leave you alone to go explore. I've heard some of the girls at work talk about how cool it is, and I think I'm going to have to agree.

Philly itself is a city I wouldn't want to settle down in. Too angry, too compact, too much hood. They have some good restaurants, though, and several theatres. Liberty and I went to see Les Miserables at a small theatre downtown, and it was a good production. Good place to visit, if you're good at ignoring the chaff.


Soccer

My local over 30 team, the Raiderz, are 5-1-1 right now! We just had our 5th win Sunday, where my buddy Hemant from work contributed enough to keep us in the game when we were struggling. We were short subs, and all of us were pretty spent after the game. I think we probably would have lost if Hemant hadn't shown up and played as hard as he did.

My own performance was alright. I spent most of the game chasing down a guy with more endurance than me. Late in the game he finally got a good drive around me, I pushed him out to the corner, and he just snuck in a pass before I could block it, and the guy he passed it to scored. That put us up 5-3 in the 4th quarter, and we somehow came back and scored again before the end of the game making the final score 6-3. Lots of fun.

Thursday, Friday, and Saturday is the Columbus corporate challenge soccer tournament, where AEP is entered as 1 of 8 teams. I'm scheduled to play fullback on Thursday and Friday, and Saturday if we are in the top bracket, followed by my normal league game Sunday. I'm a little anxious about the whole ordeal. I'll have fun coming out and playing for AEP, where most people only know me as a code monkey, but I think playing 4 days in a row might just kill me.

Only one way to find out.


Stacey

Stacey's away at horseback riding camp for the week, and will come back Friday evening, exhausted, sore, and hungry. I wrote her a pair of letters that should reach her before she leaves, saying what dads say to their girls - that I'm thinking about you, miss you, and hope you're out following your bliss. Her summer is a series of camps, and a few weeks with family out of state, with the punchline being the giant birthday party right before school starts. The party that I haven't even started planning for yet.


Liberty

Still the best wife a man could ask for.

She's starting new classes this quarter, including Arabic! That gives me the chance to piggyback, trying my hand at deciphering a new alphabet and learning syntax rules of a non-romance language. woot!

I've met some of Liberty's extended family recently, at her grandfather's funeral. They all seemed to like me well enough, and most of them were smart and entertaining. Liberty's grandmother is in town until tonight, so Liberty and I went over to the house she's staying at with some other family for a goodbye dinner. It was simple and relaxed, little Scout played and was chatty with everyone, and I ended up orchestrating a family snapshot with Scout and Liberty slyly placed dead center.

I feel comfortable around her family. They don't seem to be demanding or judgmental, and I feel accepted when I'm around them.

Liberty has just installed some hair extensions to make her hair look long. It seemed like an odd choice to me, but I went with it, and I ended up enjoying putting them in for her. She couldn't put them in very well in the back of her head (since it requires visual feedback and some complex exchanges between hands), so I helped her put in about maybe 20 or 30 locks. I liked both getting to handle her hair for an extended time, and the playing with a new gadget aspect.


Muffin

With the warmer weather, Liberty and I are enjoying taking Scout to parks in the afternoon. She's learning how to climb through the big-toys, getting brave on the larger slides, and talking to some of the other kids a little. The budding of social and physical intelligence is a wonderful thing to watch. This year should bring a lot of that for her, and I think I've most of the way recruited a part-time playmate from next door, little Marissa, who is 5 now.

Our personal relationship also got a lot better over the last couple of months. I passed from tolerated to accepted shortly before her mom and I got married, and now I feel like she enjoys having me around, doesn't ask me to leave so she an mom can play in private, and on rare occasions says that she loves me. Nice to hear, but 3 year olds are fickle, so I'm not basing my self worth on it just yet.


All is well.

Soccer

Things are going well. My work still likes me, Liberty and I are still in love with each other, Scout and Stacey are both happy and healthy, and my mom is up visiting for a week. Liberty is slowly helping me repair my wardrobe, which still contains lots of 2x and 3x shirts from when I was fat, and I am approximately back in running shape. Stacey's extra-curriculars are coming to an end - her orchestra concert was last week, her soccer tournament ended over the weekend, and the dance recital is upcoming.

During Stacey's soccer season, she developed some good skills at goalie, and her footwork and field reading are on par with about half of the team. She played goalie for about 2/3 of the games, and played with my philosophy of coming out from the goal and challenging players as they approached before they could get good shots off. For the whole season she was only scored on once. She also made improvements on offense, scoring the winning goal as forward in the second half of the same game she got scored on as goalie. She'll be a great player, and her confidence and ball handling has improved.

On the other hand, the atmosphere of kids' sports sometimes sickens me. Parents shout angrily from the sidelines, yell at referees, referees yell at coaches, coaches yell at the girls and each other. This season, the girls started getting pushy on the field, no doubt at the encouragement of parents and coaches. Not every game is bad, but in most games you can see clearly the lack of right-mindedness of everyone involved in the game. Stacey is still a clean player, and was mortified when, after a girl pushed her during a game, she flailed to regain her balance and flattened the girl with an elbow to the chest. Stacey, at 11, is 5'6" and strong, but not violent, and will make sure a downed player gets back up instead of press the advantage for points in a game.

That's my girl, strong, smart, compassionate, and the best goalkeeper on the team. But she isn't a superstar, and she isn't accepted, for whatever reason, with the popular girls on the team, and was also marginalized by the coaches during the tournament. She did not get to play goalie, which I assume is from her perceived lack of aggression - don't put the nice kid in a key position, and her good plays during the championship game went unheralded by the team and coaches, and her mistakes criticized by both.

The head coach's daughter was a roughly equivalent player to Stacey. She had the same temperament, non-aggressiveness, and nervousness under pressure. She had the same intelligence, reading the play and being in the right spot on defense, but occasionally being passed by confident, fast opponents. When she made a mistake, you could see the girls attempt to censor themselves so as not to disparage the coach's kid, and the coaches were quick with applause and "that's OK, keep trying, doing good." When the team stars made mistakes, the girls were quick to shout similar encouragement. When Stacey and similarly skilled players made mistakes, the disparagement was uncensored. I think this is in the nature of kids and their pack orders.

The end result of all this nonsense was that Stacey's team won the championship of their division, and each player got trophies of a large chested tween wearing baggy soccer clothes and a confused expression. To try to make the moment more memorable, the coaches tried to say personal anecdotes about each player. They were familiar with the star players' life stories, what was going through their heads the first time they saw them play, etc., and for the players who weren't as accomplished and flashy, they got variations on "tries real hard" and "always plays where I tell her to." Despite her improvement during the year and being the keeper with the best record, Stacey's trophy was accompanied by a "tries real hard" and a botched anecdote about her game-winning shot earlier in the season that included "I saw a foot, but not a face, and then Stacey getting patted on the back, so I assume she made the shot." Amazing...ly bad delivery. However, coach, if you stumble across this some time in the future, no hard feelings, congratulations, and it was great to see your daughter make the season ending final goal. She deserves that memory with all the hard work she did this season.

So the question is, how is it that I don't hate any of these people, or have animosity towards them? They are the Buddha standing before me, helping to free me from attachments. Also, I have already volunteered with the U-12 coordinator to coach a team next year, and have signed up for an F-license class. I won't coach to vindicate wrongs against Stacey, and I do intend to win as many games as I can, but I want to see a team in this league coached the way Henry Bell, one of the WASA directors who sub-coached Stacey's team a few seasons ago, would coach it - games should be fun, and you should see if you can win without hurting anyone. Also, if each player is unique and contributes, you should be able to say something positive and meaningful about each of them equally.

For example, here's what I would have said about another marginalized player, Kristen, who received an "always plays where I tell her to" speech. Kristen was a little heavy, discouraged for most of the season, not quite in the top-tier social circle, but determined and skilled mentally, and her good defense helped keep us in the game many times throughout the season:

"Kristen is now the best fullback in the league, bar none. She recovered from an injury to be a valuable contributor, learned to control her temper, and learned how to read body language very well. Many of you probably saw her make some key blocks in the championship game to help keep us in the running when our faster players had started to wear themselves out. Without her contributions, we may not be getting these trophies now. Thanks, Kristen, we really needed you."

How hard is that? Her work merited at least that much effort -- and she's not even my kid. In fact, Stacey and she fought a little bit last season.

What would I have said about Stacey?

"Stacey is the goalie with the best record on this team. One goal allowed all season. (pause for applause) She aggressively leaves the comfort zone of the net, and risks injury to charge up and grab balls before the opponent's forward can set up for a shot. She shocked some of the teams we faced with her bold plays, and made them a little more timid, which helped us win games. In other positions, she steadfastly refused to push to get a ball, preferring to play with her feet instead of her hands. The opposing team was not the enemy; in fact, she had many cheery conversations with girls on other teams as time allowed, and was quick to check on their players who were injured or knocked down. This empathy with players on other teams did not cost us a point all season, and helped other girls feel good about playing in this league. You are a moral example to the rest of us, and we were sure as hell glad to have you on the team."

I love you, kid, you're still the best.

Changing gears, I am also on a soccer league. It is a co-ed, over 30 league, and there are some pretty good teams out there. Yesterday we played a very good team, and it looked for a while like we were going to get a whoopin', but my team and I came together after the first quarter and really turned things around. It was loads of fun. Loads of pain today as I start to recover, but loads of fun then.

In the first quarter, one of the first few plays of the game had an opponent forward run by me faster than I could keep up, and go in for an easy goal. I was shocked, as were the two people in front of me he zipped by, and our goalie who missed the block. I took my figurative car out of first gear after that, found myself quickly running out of breath, and had two collisions with a large player on the other team. He scolded me after the second hit, I assured him it was unintentional, we high-fived each other, and play continued.

At that moment, something happened in me. I think I went into combat mode. I had the physical discomfort of being winded and having been jarred a couple times, the emotional impact of being down 2 to nothing early in the game, and then the perceived threat of the other player who told me, in veiled terms but nonetheless clearly, that I had better not run into him again. I got calm, my breathing slowed, and I felt energized. I saw the field better, saw where people were going to pass, saw who was winded, who was trying to fake me out, and who would be surprised if I charged them. I started making plays and stopped being clumsy.

By the end of the half, we were tied at 2. I stayed in the entire second quarter and most of the third, and then took a break. During my break, we went up 3-2. I came back in to finish the game, and immediately snuck up on a fast player and stole the ball from him, drove it up field (very uncommon for me), passed it to a forward, who took it in for a goal. My first assist.

We won 4-2, and several of us were shaky and overheated after the game. I'm as sore as I've ever been after a game, and elated at my team and my own personal performance. Plus, my wife was in attendance, and got to see me being cool. Shwing.

Post Surgery, odds and ends

Things have been hopping along lately, and I have several brief anecdotes, any of which could be their own full journal entry, all of which I've clumsily slung together as one post.

So I've been getting these recurring sinus infections for the last several years, causing me increasingly painful and debilitating headaches. Suck. I first went to my family doctor about this in late 2000, and I was misdiagnosed as having cluster headaches, given some Vicodin, and sent on my way. A couple years later, after many headaches and lost days of work, I was near collapse when I got in my car to go to work one morning, and decided to go to the ER instead.

Demerol.

When I came to on my couch with a remote control in my hand some 4 hours later, I vaguely remembered someone having done a CT Scan on me at the hospital. It came back as a massive sinus infection, and I was referred to an ENT specialist, who has been my antibiotic supplier for the last two years. When the infections came on more frequently, and a second CT scan showed that back-to-back rounds of antibiotics didn't kill the infection, he recommended surgery. I said yes.

So I had a septoplasty and sinus procedure done, suffered a mildly irritating couple days of nosebleeds, a week of having a plastic appliance up my nose, and two weeks before I felt like myself again. I've only just recently been able to start exercising again with full effort, and I put off joining my mates on the soccer field when the season started a couple weeks ago in favor of giving myself some extra training time to get my wind back.

Now I'm back to full strength, doing as many push-ups, sit-ups, and chin-ups as I was before the surgery, as long a hold in the dolphin plank yoga pose, as many reps with 50 pounds on curls, Arnold presses, and bent rows. Everything back to where it was, except the running. I haven't run much at all over the winter, and when I was out practicing soccer with Stacey, I felt pretty clumsy, and tripped over my own feet once. Not a good sign.

That was practice with the kid, though. This Sunday was a different story. After one whiff which resulted in us getting scored on, I settled down and started playing well. On the sidelines watching the game were my daughters, wife, and in-laws, who all seemed to enjoy the spectacle. Stacey's old teammate Rachel was there with her father, and she and Stacey had a good time horsing around.

Stacey came pretty close to getting scored on for the first time this season as goalie last week. She let the striker get the ball between her legs, but turned and fell on it before it rolled in. Awesome reaction.

Her dance classes just had their pictures taken in their spring recital outfits, trey cute. I did Stacey's hair in a ballet bun for the first time in years, and it came out pretty good. Thankfully, Liberty was around to help with the make-up, where she vetoed the bad color choices the school suggested, and did Stacey up in something more appropriate to her skin tone... or so they tell me.

Little Scout, Liberty, and I have been having fun with sidewalk chalk lately. It turns out Liberty is the superior chalk artist. I found out that ants don't like to cross chalk lines when I, on a whim, drew a circle around one to see what would happen. It was odd, she (the ant, I'm not actually sure of the gender, but I'm saying "she") ran around furiously, bounding in random directions, and turning suddenly when she touched chalk. Eventually she found a section of the circle that had small gaps in the chalk line, and managed to run across it. Scout watched what must have been serious science to her three year old eyes.

Stacey, Liberty, and I went down to the Earth Day celebration at Goodale Park this Saturday, where we listened to some live music, watched hippies dance, played with dogs wandering around off their leashes, and watched another instance of Liberty's superior artistry. There were several booths advertising political groups, green businesses, nature reserves, etc., and one was asking everyone to draw something in a square of a giant tablecloth that will later be used as some art project or other. Stacey and I threw down some quick doodles, Liberty took about 10 minutes painstakingly drawing a flower pattern. It was gorgeous. In fact, here it is:



Friday was Stacey's 6th grade informal orchestra concert. The theme was the 60s, and the kids were encouraged to dress in 60s style clothes. A few nights before, me and the girls hit a vintage clothing store down in the Short North, and bought Stacey some simple bellbottoms and a hippy-ish shirt with clouds and a smiling sun on it. She looked cool in 60s clothes, with her long blonde hair hanging down loose. When I walked her over to the school for the concert, a number of girls greeted her cheerfully, which I'm not used to seeing. They seemed almost eager to see her, and she was one of the gang. I was elated, and beat a hasty retreat before my presence ruined everything, as I am very repellant to "the gang" in most cases, and didn't want any of that to rub off on Stacey.

At work today, there was an "Operation Feed" bake sale on my floor. Of the 5 or so items brought to the sale, only one of them, cupcakes, was homemade. The rest were storebought, and presumably flavorless, sweets. I made a comment to the people setting up that this was not a bake sale, but a resale. Why don't people like to cook anymore? I've seen the same problem in Girl Scouts and soccer, Stacey and I will cook up something fancy, have fun doing it, and make everyone happy with our creation, and other parents just go to the store and buy potato chips, missing great bonding time with their children - the moments that life is all about, the times you reflect on in your rocking chair when you're old. Liberty suggested Stacey was more fond of me than most pre-teens are of their parents, and most kids that age just don't want to spend time with mom and dad cooking something.

Their loss.

And while we're on a down note, Stacey's soccer game this evening was an atrocious nightmare of testosterone induced madness. Our assistant coach, loud and obnoxious in general (who another parent posed the question "is he for real?" about), got into a sideline shouting match with the other team's coach. Kids on both teams were pushing each other until one of our girls started crying. Some parents were making snide comments to the referee and some of the other players. I was so taken aback by all the anger that I walked away from the field to clear my head -- and missed Stacey taking a shot on goal. The shot was blocked, and followed up by our smallest player, the one who was crying earlier, for a score. Stacey, the tallest kid on either team, managed to avoid any rough play, using her legs to play instead of her hands. Just like I taught her.

Aside from the anger management class waiting to happen, life is good.

My girls rock. Seriously.

Yesterday all my girls made me pretty damned happy. I'll talk about them in the order that I met them.

Stacey.

She played some awesome soccer yesterday. On the way to the past few games, I've been giving a small strategy hint, like "sprint past the player with the ball, then engage her," or "position yourself to surprise the player with the ball - move back a little, then sprint at them when they lead the ball out," or "position yourself to receive a pass, spread out when two of you are near the ball." None of these strategies were really applicable, as little girls soccer doesn't play like a professional game does. No, kids' games are much more fun and interesting. I don't think that 5 minutes of coaching and pep talk during the drive to a game will turn Stacey into an elite footballer, but I think engaging her to think about the game, encouraging her to pay attention to where people are and what they look like they're about to do, lays the foundation that she can build her own strategy from. Basically, it really wouldn't matter what I said, it's just important to get her mind fixed on the problem. Her fantastic mind that far exceeds where I was at her age.

Yesterday she had her game on, blocking shots at fullback, making steals and good passes at midfield, and making three saves at goalie. Goalie is where she really shines, gaining much coach, team, and sideline praise. She has never been scored on (which I try to say as much as I can while it's still true), and is often 10 feet away from the goal, fearlessly running out to grab a ball before the opponent gets set for a shot. It was fun to watch, and she was happy getting the positive feedback from an otherwise demanding and elitist group of kids and parents.

Liberty and Scout came to the game, and when Stacey made her first big save, I was standing near her on the sidelines holding Scout, and the two of us yelled out cheers to her. I could see the glee on Stacey's face, making a good play with family watching and cheering her on.

Although I'm not competitive, don't angrily push Stacey to be the best, and have the sense to allow her to be as engaged with her activities as she wants to, I was happy to see Stacey start to break through the barriers in her game and her interaction with the other girls, getting some camaraderie with her team, and gaining not a small measure of confidence. As her dad, I couldn't have been prouder.



Liberty.

This upcoming Monday we'll have been married for a month. I swear I've never loved a woman more than I love her, even now that we're settling into a routine, and each of us is thinking "OK, now what?" She's still amazing, and as beautiful to me now as the day I first saw her on the sidewalk by PF Chang's at Easton last September 1. I'm not the type of man to be smitten, and have always maintained some reserve around women I've dated. But with Liberty, I quickly lost all pretense of having any sense around her. She is everything I have ever wanted in a woman, and she came to me on her own, sized me up, and liked what she saw. She has the hippy mentality, a healthy dose of pessimism about the way things are, but not so much that she can't find a hundred things to laugh and smile about every day. The look. God, the look. A little spice here and there on top of the body type that, well... I think my kid might read this some day, so I'll skip that part. I've also said before that I suspect she's smarter than I am, and isn't shy about disagreeing with me when she thinks I'm full of hot air. Keeps me honest.

So, yeah, I fell for her. And I married her 6 and a half months after we met. And if I could change anything about how that worked out, I wouldn't have waited so damned long.

Yesterday Liberty had the day off from work and a court date in the afternoon, so we watched Scout from home in the morning, and I got to see a few hours of mommy bonding with her baby girl. She read to her, played with her toys, braided her hair, and gave her the smile that always makes me melt, and words of love and comfort that only sound right coming from a mom. Scout felt cherished, and safe, and wanted. When I see Liberty with her daughter, just naturally affectionate and giving, real, with no affected sing-song voice or baby talk, I fall in love with her all over again. Every time. And as a bonus, when she's focussed on Scout, I can still sneak in a kiss or two.

So Yesterday I watched Liberty work her charms on Scout, and the two of them came to watch Stacey totally kick ass at soccer. She likes her stepdaughter a lot, and despite not being into sports, comes out in support of Stacey. The two of them have spent some time together a few times without me, without needing any coercing. They've gone go-carting at Magic Mountain, and Stacey has learned some of the fine art of retail sales at Liberty's work a couple times (unless you work at the same company, in which case she hasn't, that was a complete lie).

She's the best, as good to me and Stacey as she is to her own daughter. Those of you who had the chance to snatch her up and failed to do so lost out big. What were you thinking? I mean, seriously.

Scout.

"Daddy, om my up."

If I need to tell you what that means, you won't understand how it makes me feel to hear it. My ears remembered the words, and my arms knew what to do. And we never said "hey, Curtis is your daddy, call him daddy, ok?" She just did.

So those are my girls, and why I'm a happy man right now.

The News in Brief

I'm married.



Right now I'm recovering from surgery and don't feel like writing much, so more on married life later.

Don't need a watch to waste your time

First, congratulations to Kris and Andy on the birth of their baby! That would be my ex-sister-in-law and her husband up in warm and sunny Wisconsin. Stacey will be going up there this Spring Break for a week to play with her new cousin. I'll try to see if they mind me putting up more info and some pictures.

What's new with me? Still trying to set my body right after years of unhealthy living. I just posted a new "Inner Stork" entry over on my fatblog, and I recently had a bad run-in with an old friend of mine: caffeine.

I have been addicted to caffeine since I was a teenager, buying cans of Mountain Dew from my high school vending machine for a quarter each ('84, but we were a hippy school, not looking to make mad profit). I got quickly hooked, and drank several cans a day. For years. By the time I was a senior, I had stomach problems, and was prescribed the hot new drug at the time, Zantac. I didn't connect that with the pop drinking, attributing it instead to the stresses of being a 17 year old with a chip on his shoulder. Those of you who knew me at 17 may remember the chip. It was sizable.

Over the years, I had successes and failures with pop and my stomach, somehow being too dense to connect the dots. I went from Zantac to Protonix, to Prilosec, and kept drinking more and more pop, until I was up to around 3 liters a day.

Finally last month I hit the wall, doubled over with constant stomach pain for several days in a row. I took sick time off from work, performed poorly as a father and boyfriend, and was struggling not to be a disagreeable ass.

A pair of visits to the doctor and one ultrasound later, and nothing conclusive was determined, but a new ulcer is the most likely candidate. I started taking Nexium, and stopped drinking pop, and 4 days later I was back to full strength with no stomach pain, able to resume all my life's callings, business, fatherly, and amorous.

Like how I just slipped in "stopped drinking pop" in the middle of the sentence, like it was no big deal? If you've known me any time in the last 20 years, your mental image of me probably has a can of Mountain Dew in my left hand. Stopping was a big deal, and I have slightly more sympathy now for addicts of other drugs. My prior success at losing weight helped, knowing that I could go without something, knowing I could bare some discomfort. The headaches and cravings lasted a few days, and then nothing. And after a few more days, no exhaustion.

So now I've added pop to the list of undesirables I've given up: Alcohol, violence, gluttony, and greed. Next up: Meat, and envy. Those might take a while. However, I'm not a Jain, I'm just trying to get me through the night... alright... alright.

Unrelated - Farewell Gary.

Valentine's Day 2008

I took a personal day this February 14, not for added romance, but to take care of a sick kid. And for the first time ever, it wasn't my own sick kid I was taking care of. It was my soon-to-be stepdaughter Scout who was ill. She accepts me well enough, but I'm not quite a surrogate parent for her; mom and dad are still her favorite people. She had been sick and a little listless over the previous few days, and Liberty had skipped school one day, and taken off work the next to be with her. Thursday Liberty had a test she couldn't skip, so I made arrangements with my boss to take a day off and play caregiver.

We watched a little TV, and made a snack run, and then a flowers run. Both places we went the clerks engaged little Scout with smiles and comments on her frog boots, where she shyly ignored them and buried her head in my shoulder. When Liberty came home, I had the flower arrangement on the kitchen table, with the three boxes of chocolates, one for each of my girls, and Scout was asleep on my lap, nestled into my arm, as I played on the computer.

I couldn't have deliberately planned a more cute way for her to find us, and I didn't plan this one. She didn't want me to put her to bed for a nap, which I assume has something to do with her often waking up to me already being gone to work, and maybe was afraid she'd be abandoned if she let me out of her site. She got clingy as she got tired, and as a father who misses being with his own daughter at three, I went with it, and she fell asleep still grabbing onto me. I was sad that she wasn't feeling well, and that I couldn't communicate to her that I would still be near when she woke up, but still, it was nice.

So the other girls, they both hated the chocolates, and liked the flowers. For Stacey I got some storebought candy more for the pretty box than the contents, and the chocolates themselves ended up being cheap fare. For Liberty I had some Hoffman's chocolates delivered, which seemed nice when they got here, but they were described as "odd". Harrumph. Next year it's old reliable: Godiva.

Last was my grandmother. She is 86 now, and has always had a thing about getting cards, counting them and comparing how many she got with her other sisters on all the standard card-giving occasions. This year I forgot to get cards in the mail on time for me and Stacey, so I instead had some flowers delivered to her on the 13th. They were pansies in a nice porcelain basket vase. My grandmother has always liked pansies, so the personal touch was more important to her than how much money roses would have cost. A followup call confirmed that the flowers went over pretty well.

So what's going on in life? Stacey just received an "Excellent" award for her Science Fair project of Coke and Mentos, testing the hypothesis of whether different flavors of Mentos make Coke erupt to different heights. She had a good time and spent a moderate amount of effort on the project, ending up on par or better than her peers, including the 7th and 8th grader's projects. Next year she is eligible to go on to district competition, so I hope to be a part of her project then. (This year I only bought the raw materials, and her mom organized time and space to do the experimenting.) (Yes, the flavor of Mentos makes a difference.)

What else... I've been in touch with my father, my sister Angela, and her mom Rosemary, to both catch up and reconnect, and to announce my engagement to see if they'll be able to come up for the wedding. Rosemary keeps sending email forwards with pictures of random cute or cool things, which lets me take up some of gmail's huge storage space, so it doesn't just go to waste. You know, if you have a pail, you might as well fill it with something. My Great-Aunt Maxine is having a surprise 80th birthday party thrown for her in early March (shh!) that I'll try to get down to.

Oh, and I'm going in for surgery March 25th, and can finally find out if I'm allergic to anesthesia.

Cloverfield: 5 Stars, No Spoilers

Years of playing first-person shooters has apparently made me immune from camera-induced nausea. Pretentious movie critics of the 80s made similar remarks to the warning above about certain segments of Highlander, which I saw opening week while suffering from a splitting headache, and having set my stomach on edge already by taking too many Nuprin. (Remember Nuprin? Little, yellow, different?) Despite my condition, I didn't notice anything amiss with the camera action, even in the wacky opening helicopter-around-the-auditorium scene. And the same with Cloverfield. I commented on seeing the preview, and I've seen in countless reviews, blogs, and forum posts, that Cloverfield was "Godzilla meets Blair Witch". In fact, it was less like Blair Witch in camera style, more like the Cops TV show. As with Highlander, I didn't find the jerkiness of Cloverfield the least bit upsetting; the camera operator did a good job of keeping what we needed to see in view.

The movie content, however, that was upsetting - psychologically, not in a pretentious movie critic way. I loved it. It was scary. The effect of running around on the ground with a few survivors trying to accomplish a secondary goal while avoiding the monster played off a lot like a zombie movie. So, instead of Godzilla meets Blair Witch, let's call it Cops meets 28 Days Later.

My recommendation: Don't read any spoilers, and go see it. Take a Dramamine if you're a big wuss, but go see it. If you liked Children of Men, or Rob Zombie's Halloween, or Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, or Alien - go see it.

The Proposal

The following paragraph is the beginning of a blog entry about my plans to propose to Liberty the day before she became my fiancée. I got interrupted and never returned to it until now.

I'm writing this the day before I'll propose to Liberty. What I'm up against is a few other proposals she's already had, all of them in bad form. From the "here, I got somethin' for ya'" and tossing the box at her, to "well, I'll marry you if you're pregnant." Coming across as classier than that won't be a challenge, naturally, but that she's been proposed to before in relationships that didn't work out is causing me a little anxiety. Until now, we've transcended the problems our past relationships have had, and we are supportive of each other, kind, patient, protecting, trusting, all that 1st Corinthians 13:4 stuff oft quoted at weddings. But taking the next step is scary.

And yes, it was scary. My proposal to my ex-wife was this elaborate farce where we went out and bought the ring together, and took a trip to the woods where we both understood I intended to ask her to marry me. There was no problem with fear there, only timing. I was disappointed in the whole affair, but happy at the time to get my affirmative answer.

With Liberty, I felt my heartbeat in my chest very fast and very powerful, and wondered for a moment if I was going to have a heart attack. In the twisted logic of the moment, I was worried less that I would die, and more that my death would ruin the moment. She didn't know what was going on, just that we were going to a nice restaurant for dinner. It was too early in our relationship for an offer of marriage (although we both were mad about each other, and visions of a long and happy life together had already come up in conversation a few times), so it caught her completely off-guard.

I told her the long story of my mom's wedding ring, how it was pawned, repurchased by my grandmother, stolen from her, and given back out of guilt, and forgotten about in a box in a basement, patiently waiting to be found again. All the while, the ring was in my pocket, having been freshly shined up at a local jeweler. I told her how I had a heart to heart with my mom about her, and how she knew I'd never felt for another woman what I felt now...

"So she gave me the ring. And now I'd like to give it to you. Will you marry me?"

When she nodded ascent, the butterflies left. My heart stopped pounding in my chest. She was visibly moved, and we were both so happy that we couldn't stop kissing each other for a few minutes. It was a thing of beauty. I'd say you had to be there, but, frankly, I'm glad it was just the two of us. And the spying wait staff, who had been told ahead of time what my plan was, to guarantee us a quiet place in the restaurant.

One of the many reasons she's a keeper: I told her I would have a glass of champagne with her to celebrate, and she said no, citing my non-drinking. I made a vow to myself 16 years ago not to drink any alcohol, and in 16 years, I have not had one drink. I would have gladly suspended that for one night to celebrate with my new bride to be, but she recognized my general distaste for booze, and we contented ourselves with our sodas, and the free desserts the restaurant gave us, for choosing them for the proposal. Nice touch.

That was before Christmas, and we're still mad about each other. Our kids are attached to each other, and our relationships with each other's kids keeps getting stronger. Little Scout has accepted me as a caregiver, no longer making sure mom is somewhere nearby, letting me read her bedtime stories, and take her down for breakfast if mom is still asleep. Stacey has grown fond of Liberty, and for the first time went off with her today without me to do girl stuff. I predict good things for the future.

The News in Brief

I'm engaged.



I'll write a lengthy treatise on how that happened, and how my mom's engagement ring found its way from being pawned for survival money in the 1970s to Liberty's finger here.

I've reconnected with some family down in Florida, including my father and sister, who I've been in a state of part estrangement, part procrastination for the last 10 years. When Liberty and I tie the knot (details to come, Internet crazies who come to crash the party will be politely turned away at the door), they may all make the trek up to Ohio to wish us well.

Got the tree up, and a few cool custom ornaments made, did all my shopping (I usually post a Christmas to-do list, but I've been inexplicably pressed for time for the last month, and unable to sit and just write a good blog entry. Some shots of the tree and ornaments, and Stacey from a recent Christmas show she and the Westerville Center for the Arts did at Easton, and Stacey in the outfit she wore to her first Christmas formal, are up in the latest Picasa album, here:

Christmas 2007

All is well. Stacey is up in Wisconsin with Teresa, Chris, and the Dahlstrom's for Christmas, and I have to wait until the new year to finish celebrating with her (note to self - buy fruit basket on Jan 2). I miss her. I want to tell her I'm engaged, but it should be in person. I need her to see in my eyes that she's still my little girl and can't be replaced or put on the back-burner.

I'm looking forward to spending Christmas with Liberty and her friends and family. Scout (Liberty's daughter) and her father will be there too, and I'll be happy to finally meet him. Beginnings are delicate times, as Frank Herbert preached in many Dune novels, and it will be important for him to see me as a friend and confidant. He is, after all, in basically the same place I was 7 years ago when Teresa and I split up - sharing custody, worrying about the ex trying to steal away with his child, and being distrustful of new people who interact with his daughter, and who used to be his woman. I'll try to do what I can to put him at ease, and it will be interesting to see a version of my past self from my current point of view.

More after Christmas.

Dating after the long hiatus

I have been out of serious romantic relationships for the past 7 years, from the time my ex-wife and I split up in February of 2000, until a couple months ago when Liberty and I started dating. In the intervening years I saw a woman for about 3 months, and while we enjoyed each other's company, the relationship didn't blossom, and we stopped calling each other. A woman I work with and I danced around a relationship shortly, and eventually figured out there was nothing between us but a common loneliness - that ended badly, and it took us most of the following year to rebuild a friendship. All told, about 6 months of false starts, and 6 and a half years of no romance.

What happened to me along the way were several good things. First, I became a devoted father, a stereotypical helicopter parent nosing his way into the school community, throwing many sleepovers and elaborate birthday parties, fretting over my daughter's struggles and beaming with pride at her successes. Stacey was my only love for all of her elementary school years. I mean, seriously, just read the archives of this blog.

I also learned to tackle personal problems, like disorganization, bad money management, a short temper, and chronic reclusion. Lastly, and most important for the purposes of what type of boyfriend I became, I stopped thinking in terms of "what would a good X do in this case?" What would a good father do when there's bickering late at night at a sleepover? What would a good boyfriend do when his girlfriend's kids want him to come play baseball in the backyard instead of hang out with mommy?

The behavior and expectations filter was once this constant background noise for me, almost as if I had no real persona of my own, and was like an autistic child trying to mimic how normally socialized people acted. Or maybe I had a fear of my own natural responses, and took comfort in just playing a part. What happened over the last 7 years was a decay of that part of me. My instincts became stronger than my habits, and I began to act in life as I would, not as my conceived archetypal ideal would. Because as a boyfriend, father, IT flunky, neighbor, and all the other hats I wear, I'm not different people, and my honest behavior and reactions now serve me better than my filtered behavior ever did.

And now there's Liberty, and I am myself around her without any affectations or embellishments, and our romance feels stronger than I imagined was possible. We've passed unscathed the stage where we learn each other's dirty little secrets, we've met each other's kids, had family over for dinner, and made the first hintings of "what if" plans. What if we're still into each other this much next year? What would living together look like? Now, I can't predict the future, I can only hope that things will work out as well as they seem like they might, but I never would have gotten here, never would have achieved this deep of a connection with a woman, without learning how to be an honest man instead of a caricature. As it turns out, I'm as loving and attentive as my ideal "good boyfriend" would have been.

I'm thankful for my flaws, and that it took me this long to grow into the man I am. Otherwise, I might never have met her. She is worth all the years of frustration and loneliness that came before, and much more. Classy, exotic, strong, intelligent, funny, well-read, beautiful, persevering, fearless, patient, caring. Perfect. The woman I love.

75

Stacey's soccer season is winding down now, and her last game is tonight. I believe we are currently ranked second out of the 6 U12 WASA teams, so the girls have enjoyed some success this year. Stacey has grown into a competent goalie, of all things, by being bold enough to come out of the box and grab the ball before the opponent shoots... just like I taught her. Honest.

Saturday was the last practice of the season, and was the "fun day" where the parents and the girls play against each other. We were out running around in the hot sun for about maybe 30 minutes total, enough to wipe out most of the adults and some of the kids. The adults lost, 2 to 1 in sudden death overtime, where the team's leading scorer passed me, playing sweeper, and took a shot that just snuck in on the correct side of the post. Cute kid, Alexa, and plenty of aggressive and hotshot during the team's games. I had harassed her a little during the game, sneaking in and stealing passes, blocking shots, and I finally got her mad enough to beat me on a play and score. I made it clear to her and her dad later that I didn't let her beat me, that she really did earn the point. That was the way the game was supposed to end: victory for the girls, camaraderie and teamwork defeating the greater size and life experience of the adults. It was a good thing.

The game against the girls helped me remember my love for soccer, and how fun it is supposed to be, at a time when my self-confidence as a player has been shaken. I felt good about playing, the other adults complemented me on my mad defense skillz, and everyone left with a smile on their face. So then yesterday was the game in my over-30 league, and my spirit and confidence was fully restored, and it showed.

Unfortunately, we had only 11 people on the team show up. A full complement, but no subs. So I played for just over 75 minutes of our 80 minute game in the blazing sun, finishing dehydrated, clumsy, and with a splitting headache. But before I fell to pieces, I contributed to my team, making a few good passes, harassing forwards on the other team to pass before they were settled, and making what should have been a key save in the game, only to have the ref call a foul on me. The play was against a fast opponent with good ball control who got around me at midfield when no one was behind me. I chased him down to the goal, and stepped on the ball just before he was able to get the shot off, accidentally knocking us both down. A ref called it a foul, to the great protest of most of my teammates, who all gave me encouragement and said it was a crap call. He took the free kick, sending his team up 2-1. We held for a while longer, but by the end we were all too winded to keep up, and we ended up losing 4-1.

So at the end of the day we lost, I ended up with a skinned knee and a headache, wiped out and sore, and I've never felt better. To boot, I got to the field right when the game was starting, and didn't get a chance to stretch. Today I'm a little stiff, tomorrow should be hell.

In other news, my lady friend and I, to the best of my reckoning, are officially a couple now. I've even heard Stacey say something I never thought would come out of her mouth in casual conversation: "my Dad and his girlfriend". Her name is Liberty, and I like her a lot. I haven't been in a romantic relationship for several years, and it's nice to wake that part of my brain up again. I'll be sparing on the details for everyone's privacy, but suffice to say that if my blog is cheerier than normal, she's a big reason why.