Not quite the big time

We had a chance to go see the Gary/South Shore Railcats on Saturday night. The Railcats play in the independent Northern League, with teams from Joliet and Schaumburg, IL, Kansas City, Fargo, and Winnipeg.

This is an interesting level of baseball. Most of these guys are minor league rejects. Some are local guys who tried out and latched on. A few are former major leaguers.

We saw Gary take on the Schaumburg Flyers, who has former Pittsburgh Pirate Jermaine Allensworth playing center field. Allensworth (who is from my wife's hometown of Anderson, IN and a fellow Boilermaker), played a few years in the bigs, kicked around the affiliated minors for a few more, and has been in the Northern League for the last five season. He played two years for the Railcats.

Guys like Allensworth stand out. He's better than everyone else. He never blows the routine play in the field. He has a polished swing. He doesn't make the silly baserunning error. You can tell he played pro ball once. He's just not good enough to anymore.

The rest of these guys might not be good enough to play on the teams I watch in the College World Series. There is a fair amount of slop (the home pitcher, warming up right before the start of the game, threw a wild pitch and the catcher overthrew second base by 30 feet on the throw down). The players play hard though, so it's fun to watch. They certainly aren't playing for the money. They get paid, but nobody makes a living.


Put me in coach!

Gary plays at the US Steel Yard, which is a nice, relatively new minor league joint. It seats about 6000, but almost none of it is in the outfield. There are a few seats near the RF line, and a hot tub section next to that, but otherwise, all the seats are in foul ground.

Like most minor league parks, there is a lot geared toward the kids. They even have a playground behind the hitting background in CF. There is also train tracks that run just past the left field wall, so we'll get a train going by every once in a while that gets every kid's attention. There are also not one, but two mascots, Rusty and Rascal. Rusty was my two-year-old daughter's favorite. They have kids competing for prizes between almost every inning. They also get to run across the outfield during one inning break.


My daughter's first crush

I missed quite a bit of this game (Gary won 6-5). I had the longest wait ever in a concession line - and I have been in a lot of concession lines. The line itself was short, but the guy right in front of me was ordering dinner for his family of six. It took the dimwitted woman trying to process this almost twenty minutes. Just waiting on this one guy, I missed the last two batters of the top of the fourth, the entire bottom of the fourth, and the first four batters of the fifth. I also spent an inning with my kids in the playground.

The game is almost besides the point though. The point is for the family to have a good night out without going broke, and we managed that.


We were all a little bleary-eyed when it was over

Indiana Palms and the Temple of Baseball

With much trepidation, I wanted to try to take the entire family to a Cubs game this year. It's a quest fraught with peril, because you have to first find tickets, then get to the game, keep the younger ones entertained so the rest can enjoy the game, and finally, you have to get the whole exhausted brood back home. Oh, and you have to finance the adventure, but fortunately, rates are reasonable right now.

The hardest part is the first one, finding the tickets. Finding five tickets together, either online or over the phone, is impossible for two reasons: the games are near sell-outs and the system for purchasing the tickets isn't really designed to be helpful.

Everything is based on the date of the game, which makes sense of course. Most people want to go on a specific day or, say, weekend. We had a lot of flexibility though. We wanted to go to just about any day game. To get tickets online, you first pick the date. Then a screen comes up to choose a pricing level (or best available) and the number you need. Then you are taken to another screen to enter one of those security codes, where they put numbers and letters in a box that has lines and stuff in it to make it hard to read. Then, you can finally get to the screen where you can buy the tickets - or in my case, find out that what you need is not available.

Not very useful. Now imagine doing that for every day game, for three or four different pricing levels, and you can see how frustrating that can be. I didn't do that of course. I eventually gave up and called the ticket folks.

That didn't work either. It appears that they have no better way to find tickets for you than you can do for yourself online.

So I turned to a friend who I had hoped might be able to put me in touch with the right person. One of the many people who regularly interview me during basketball season is David Kaplan of WGN in Chicago, which just happens to be the station that carries the Cubs. He did better than put me in touch with the right person. He found me tickets for some pretty nice seats.

When you have four kids, going anywhere, even places like the grocery store, is an adventure. Wrigley Field is tough to get to by yourself. You can drive, if you don't mind the traffic and paying $40-50 to park within walking distance of the park. The other option is to take the L (train), which is very crowded, but much cheaper and drops you a block from the park. That's the way to go, even for us. Our biggest problem is getting a double stroller on a crowded train, but we have always managed it so far. We also still have to pay to park downtown, but that is much cheaper than parking at Wrigley. And the kids, especially the younger ones, love riding the trains.

Another place the stroller can be an issue is the ballpark itself. Last year, when we went to a game, we sat upstairs and stashed the stroller in a corner by the bathroom entrance. That actually worked surprisingly well.

This year, as we walked in, the ticket taker said we could check the stroller for free at the customer relations office. That's a nice feature.

The ballpark staff was generally very nice, which includes the Octogenarian Ninja Ushers. If you have ever been to Wrigley, you will have undoubtedly noticed that the ushers in the seating area are all very senior citizens. I even saw one wearing one of those oxygen backpacks.

Don't let the grandmotherly (or grandfatherly) look fool you though. They are not pushovers and they'll get after you if they need to. If you go where you don't belong, they go right down there and grab you by the ear and take you away.

I wanted to get down by the wall to say hello to another media friend of mine who was on the field before the game, but the ONU wouldn't let me get there. I got out before I got the ear-pull though.

We saw the Padres when they were in town on May 15th, which is back before Spring started around here. Spring this year was from May 25-June 3. It's now Summer, but I digress.

The point is, it was cold. My wife and kids were all in their winter gear. I refuse to wear a winter coat in May, and especially to a baseball game.

The weather kept the crowd down a bit. There were a lot of no-shows around us, and a few of the people were clearly not interested in the game. Like, for example, the lady across the aisle from me who was there by herself and doing her knitting.

We also had the requisite loudmouth half a section behind us, but fortunately, he kept it clean. Even better, he ran out of hot air half way through the game.

Most people wear Cubs gear to the game, but one young lady in front of us must not have had anything, so she wore a blue Cub Scout neckerchief as a bandanna. I guess that's the best she could do.

We sat about 15 rows from the field, looking right up the first base line. We were just at the edge of the net, which was nice because with the kids, we can't spend every second watching for line drives to come back at us.

The game itself was pretty good. The Cubs won 4-0, getting all four runs in one inning off of former Cub Greg Maddux. He got a standing O as he left the field because many of his think it might be the last time he pitches at Wrigley. The game was played quickly (under 2:30), so we weren't out in the cold any longer than we needed to be.

Our younger kids were entertained by the two kids sitting in front of us that were about the same age. Although, I have to say, my two-year-old daughter liked the game itself. She still doesn't talk much, but one of the first words she ever said was "ball," and she loves playing and watching anything with a ball. She's the only two-year-old in America who would rather watch Big Ten Tonight than Teletubbies. At the game, when she would see someone swing the bat, she would swing her arm across her body to mimic that. Now, when ever she sees the Cubs logo, she yells "Ball!" and swings her arm.

After the game, we waited around for the crowds to die down so we were among the last ones out. Before we headed to the train, we walked over to check out the new Ernie Banks statue, just on the third base side of the entrance at Clark and Addison. The sculptor did a great job capturing Ernie. It's a great tribute to Mr. Cub.

Getting home was relatively easy, except for some rush hour traffic. The car was a lot quieter as some of us slept. A great time was had by all, and it was definitely worth the effort.

Former President visits

Last week, those of us in Schererville got a chance to see something we had never seen before. A former President of the United States came to visit.

Bill Clinton made an appearance to stump for votes for his wife, Hillary, in advance of Indiana's primary today.

Those of you who have read my profile know that I don't favor either party particularly. However, I always vote, and in the primary, I always vote in the Democratic. That is because Lake County, where I live, is so heavily Democratic that the primary is the only chance I have to vote for local officials. The Democratic primary is the de facto general election locally. The fact that I always vote in their primary means that the local Democrats think I'm one of them.

It also means I get to vote for Hillary or Barack Obama, the Senator from Next Door, so I thought it might be useful to hear what Bill had to say. I also thought it would be a good chance for my older boys (11 and 9) to see a former President and get a taste of the process.

But first, we had to hurry up and wait.

The doors to the little banquet hall that Clinton would be speaking at opened at 2:45. We were not told when Bill would actually speak, but we were prepared for a long wait.


The crowd waits breathlessly

We showed up right at 2:45 and had to wait in a little bit of a line to get in. Security was not as tight as I would have expected for a former President. Bags were checked, but that's about it. In fact, I went through a more thorough security check to get into the arenas for the NCAA tournament.

For the occasion, in honor of Hillary's drinking habits, I wore my most obnoxious Boilermakers shirt.

The place was standing room only, but not because it was overly crowded. There were no chairs, so all we could do was stand. The room was a little less than half full, maybe about 200 folks. It was almost all adults too. My kids were the only grade school age children there. There were a couple of babies and toddlers, and a few HS kids as well. There were also a few media types, and seemingly every Schererville cop. It would have been a good day to rob a bank.

I was about 40 feet from the podium, which meant I could see OK, but it would have been better if I'd worn heels. My kids had trouble seeing, but they could find an angle on occasion.

Clinton started around 3:30, so it was only a 45-minute wait. Bill has a reputation for being a charismatic speaker, and he did not disappoint. He was concise, by his standards, funny, and at times blunt. And his style wasn't typical of most politicians. Politicians generally speak as if they are talking to idiots. In many cases, they are. They'll pause. After. Every. Word. As if you need a few minutes to process each one. I can't stand that. Bill spoke like he had somewhere else to go (which he did), even though he went on for 40 minutes.

He was giving us some of the main points of Hillary's platform (jobs, energy, health care, education, balance the budget, get out of Iraq, etc), the details of which I'll leave out here. You can get that in other places.


Bill doing his thing

His speech didn't end until ten minutes after the doors opened at his next stop in Crown Point. Those folks undoubtedly had a longer wait than we did.

Even though he was campaigning for his wife ("I'm just here as a volunteer campaign worker."), I expected to see more presidential stuff. Perhaps this is against protocol - I certainly wouldn't know - but I thought the presidential seal would be on the podium, but it wasn't. He does have security, though. I saw four Secret Service guys total. There was one on each side of the stage when he spoke, and two others joined the party when Clinton shook hands afterwards.

My sons and I got close enough to shake his hand, so we did. He and I actually chatted a few seconds about No Child Left Behind, which I think is useless and which he said Hillary wants to do away with.

And then he was gone, off to Crown Point.

One strange thing about this event was that there was no handouts, which is a sign, I suppose, of how cash-strapped Hillary's campaign is. There were no buttons, stickers, pins or signs given away. They did have a place to sign up to help, but as you can see, they weren't getting much interest.


Little help? Please?

They did give us a black-and-white flier on the way out, but I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do with it. It wasn't any different than the one I received in the mail earlier that week.

Bill and Hillary hit this region hard. We hardly saw Obama in NW Indiana, but the Clintons were here at least once a week. We'll see today if that pays off.

Kalama-Air Zoo

Last weekend, I took my two older boys to a Cub Scout overnighter at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo museum.

The itinerary for the event called for a night of building rockets, touring the old museum building, where we were sleeping that night, and watching a movie. The next day, we would shoot off the rockets and tour the new Air Zoo building.

The only problem with this schedule is that it didn't start until 7 PM, and once the rocket construction ended around midnight, that is when they would show the movie. That's fine if you have a bunch of HS kids, but these are all elementary schoolers. Most of these kids are usually in bed by 9, and now we're keeping many of them up until 1:30 or 2 AM to watch a movie.

For me, this kind of event means a night of next to no sleep. I do not sleep well away from home generally, and do particularly poorly when I sleep in a crowded room on an air mattress on the floor.

Still, I thought I'd try to take advantage of the relatively quiet time in our sleeping area during the movie and try to sleep then. That plan was foiled because the father and son camped out closest to me (about 10-15 feet away) happened to be the Fabulous Fartersons, and they chose that moment to launch and all-out Fart Fight.

The next 30 minutes - or perhaps it was a week, I don't know - went like this:

Father: RIPPPPPPPPPP!
Both: "heeheehee!"
Father: "SHHHHHHHHHH!"
Son: RIPPPPPPPPPP!
Both: "heeheehee!"
Father: "SHHHHHHHHHH!"

And so on. If that's not a special father-son bonding moment, I don't know what is. Just think of the stories the son will be able to proudly tell his children and grandchildren. With any luck, that particular skill will be hereditary so they can show it off at family reunions. Imagine, a four-generation fart-fight. A veritable choir of flatulence. This assumes, of course, any of them can overcome that overwhelming talent and successfully breed anyway.

After that, we learned that the father is also a world-class snorer, but he wasn't the only one in the room. So, I didn't so much sleep as pass out and come to a couple of hours later.

I did learn something in those wee hours of the morning though. I didn't realize Kalamazoo's airport, which the museum borders, has commercial flights, but two Northwest flights left there by 7:30 Sunday morning.

Before we launched the rockets on Sunday, we got to visit the hangar where the museum does its restorations. Among the equipment we saw was a Sopwith Camel, which is best known as the kind of plane Snoopy flied in his fantasy battles with the Red Baron. The real Red Baron was supposed shot down by a fighter in a Camel, but it was later learned that he was down by Australian ground fire.

The rocket launch was fun for the kids. It was a very windy day, so they traveled a long way. The new museum was also fun. It had more newer planes than the old one, including a Navy Tomcat and a Blackbird spy plane. They also have a flight simulator where you can control the flight and do things like barrel rolls. It got the better of my kids though. They got upside down and couldn't get out of it.

Still, it was a fun time for the kids. I hope someday to forget it.

Merry Christmas!

Normally, I write one of those Christmas letters and send them in the mail. This year, like a lot of things in my life, I didn't have time to do it. Honestly, there wasn't much to write about, and I'd just as soon forget the whole thing.

It wasn't all bad though. Here are some of the highlights.

* Mathew (10) is still being homeschooled and working about two years ahead in most things. He played soccer in the spring, and that's his only sport now. He is pretty involved in church activities, including children's chimes and choir. He's also an acolyte. His highlight of the year though was his first communion this fall. He had been looking forward to that for at least two years. He had a great deal of enthusiasm for his church activities. He is also in the last year of Cub Scouts. We'll see if he goes on to Boy Scouts.

* Erik (8) is the family athlete, by Palm standards, anyway. He plays soccer, football and basketball. After being one of the smallest kids on his football team last year, he got taller (if not wider) and played left offensive tackle this year. I think soccer is his best sport, but he has also played that the most. He is one of the best defensive players in his age group. I think he likes basketball the best, but that is also the current sport. He is also taking an interest in watching college and pro sports. Sometimes, he'll get up in the morning and instead of turning on cartoons, he'll turn on the Big Ten Network.

He is also working ahead of grade level at homes going reasonably well. He is at the Bear level of Cub Scouts and joins Mathew in the children's chimes group at church.

* #3 son, Karsten (4) is starting to do some pre-school work at home. He's reached the age where he wants to do everything his big brothers are doing, which includes schoolwork. He knows all the letters and can write most of them. He is now constantly asking us how to spell things. He also started Sunday School this year, which he just loves.

* The last but not least Palm child, Annika, will be 2 in March. She's adorable, of course, though I may not be the most objective observer. She's also wants to do everything the older kids do, but we haven't armed her with a pencil yet. Right now, she's into learning parts of the face, so whenever we hold her, she's poking our eyes, sticking her fingers in our ears, etc, wanting us to tell her what part that is while we also try to stop the bleeding.

She is also trying to talk and has a few words, mostly names for all of us. Mommy and Daddy she has down pretty well, although sometimes it's "mommies" and "daddies." I know I'm big, but I didn't think I was big enough to be plural. Mathew is "Momo," Erik is "Ay-yah" and Karsten, who was the first one to get a name from her, is "da-DEE", where the last syllable is kind of like a squeal.

This is such a cute age.

* The newest thing in my work is that I have been covering games instead of just writing about ratings. That actually started last fall, with Notre Dame football. I didn't cover them as much this year. :)

I also covered a lot of basketball games, including the Missouri Valley, Big East and NCAA Tournaments. All this game coverage is for CSTV.com, which is where I do most of my freelance writing.

* Cheri has been trying to keep the household from falling apart, and despite all our best efforts to thwart that, she succeeds. None of us function without her.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas! I started writing this before 5 AM, so naturally, Mathew and Erik are already up. We never see them this early the rest of the year.

My Thanksgiving tradition

Like many families, mine has traditions that are followed every Thanksgiving, and our traditions are probably very similar to yours. We start out with the ceremonial preparation and consumption of mass quantities of specific foods. After that, we waddle into the family room and watch large, padded men - men who were probably bigger than us before we ate dinner - play football. And we can do that even longer now because there are three NFL games on Thanksgiving instead of two. While we're watching football, we usually have a dessert or six, and then, mercifully, the games end. After that, we stumble upstairs in an effort to go to bed, but usually fall short and pass out on the stairs. The kitchen is covered in a layer of food shrapnel which will require power tools and about a week to clean up. My kids' hair is now orange because they tried to absorb the nutrients from sweet potatoes through the top of their heads instead of through their mouths.

I'm sure your family goes through the same things, but mine has started a new tradition that began a year ago, and that is that we have a piece of the plumbing system fail. Last year, it was a clogged pipe downline from the garbage disposal. That took about three hours to find and fix. This year, it was our brand new dishwasher deciding it was no longer going to drain water out of the tub. I thought we could just leave that to Friday, but my wife informed me that if I didn't fix it, I would get to do all the dishes by hand. Since I didn't want to pass out face-first into a sink full of dish water, I decided to try to fix the dishwasher. That too was successful (the drain hose was kinked because it was too long), so I was able to join the rest of the family in passing out on the stairs.

I can hardly wait for the surprise my plumbing has in store for me next year, but in the meantime, does anyone have a sander I can borrow? I have to clean the kitchen.

Catch up/World Cup preview

It's amazing how little time I have now that we have another baby in the house. It's not so much the baby (she's doing great, BTW) that makes it difficult, but the fact that whoever isn't dealing with the baby (usually me) has to take care of the other three. That means writing for the blog has fallen down on the list of priorities.

Instead, I've been doing things like planting a garden, which is doomed to fail because I have a brown thumb. The only plants I can't kill are weeds. I'm the leading producer of dandelions in Lake County, despite attacking them with every form of chemical and home remedies known to man. Maybe if I let the big boys do most of the work, the garden has a chance.

I've also been trying to fix up a room so that we have a place for the baby to sleep when she outgrows the bassinet in our room. Whenever I attempt handyman-type stuff around the house, it always looks like vandals broke in and did it, so I have a friend who is a home builder helping me out and that's going much better than if I attempted it myself.

I'm also managing my two older sons' baseball team. It's a 7- and 8-year-old league, although my older son is nine. We held him back because he hasn't played much baseball and he isn't ready for the next league up. My team has four 7-year-olds and six 8-year-olds, plus my 9-year-old, which is roughly the age makeup of all the teams, but all my kids are about the same size, which is smaller than the average 8-year-old. Every team we play has at least one kid that looks like he's ready to start shaving, and all my guys are about the size of the bat. We're the only team in the league where the best player is a 7-year-old. That's not to say my 8-year-olds are bad players, but they aren't all-star caliber players. I'm really fortunate though that my kids do a good job playing hard and following instructions, and they're all getting better, which is the only goal anyway. It's a non-competitive league, so there's no score kept or standings. They are really good kids, so it's a fun team to coach, but it's a pretty time-consuming job.

So, today is the start of the World Cup and I'm excited to get to watch it this year without having to stay up until ridiculous hours of the night like I did four years ago when the tournament was in South Korea and Japan. I'm a fan of the game, although not as rabid as I am about more traditional American sports, but I watch some MLS games or some of the European league games on Fox Soccer Channel. I went to a World Cup game in Chicago in 1994 and saw Germany and Spain play to a 1-1 tie. I had my German jersey on and it turns out my ticket was in the top row of the Spanish cheering section. That was the only time I used all that Spanish I took in high school and college.

Anyway, Brazil is the big favorite in this year's tournament, and you'd have to be a blithering idiot to pick against them, so naturally, I will. I'm picking the host Germans. If you have a good enough team, and the Germans appear to have one, home field advantage is big and they'll use it to knock off Brazil in the final. Germany will be breaking in a new goalkeeper after the retirement of Oliver Kahn. They'll need a big tournament from his replacement Jens Lehmann.

I also like the US team to come out of a very difficult group E with the Czech Republic. They key for the US will be to get at least a draw with the Czechs in the first game. To be successful, the US have to be tight on defense, which occasionally lapses, and do a better job finishing its scoring chances. Italy is also in our group, but they've had some turmoil and look ready to be sent home. Ghana is probably not good enough to come out of this group, but is certainly good enough to be a spoiler for one of the other three.

Group A has Germany, Poland, Ecuador and Costa Rica, and it would be a huge upset if Germany didn't win the group and Poland didn't finish second.

England leads Group B and is the favorite despite the injury to Wayne Rooney. It looks like he will play in this tournament at some point, but Rooney's health will be a key to the Brits advancing much beyond the group stage. Sweden is a slight favorite to advance over Trinidad & Tobago and Paraguay, but both have puncher's chances to take out the Swedes.

Group C has a heavy favorite in Argentina, and I the rebuilding Dutch squad to come out of there as well. If the Netherlands struggle, then Serbia-Montenegro, which isn't a country anymore, will advance. The Ivory Coast is the other member of the group, and they'll leave with lovely parting gifts.

Mexico and Portugal will advance from Group D, but the order isn't as clear. I'll take Mexico, although they've not been sharp in recent friendlies. Expect an inspired performance from their keeper, Oswaldo Sanchez, whose father just died. The funeral may cause Sanchez to miss the opener with Iran. The others teams in this group are Iran and Angola, neither of which have much of a chance.

The Brazilians will win Group F and Croatia will finish second. The other two teams, Austrailia and Japan, could not compete with either even if they combined forces.

Group G is where we find France, which won the tournament as host in 1998. Zinedine Zidane was the star of that team, and he's still kicking around, but the new star is Thierry Henry. France should advance easily. South Korea, which did well in 2002 as host and has many of those starters back for 2006, will battle Switzerland for second. I'll take the Swiss, which were undefeated in qualifying. Togo will be satisfied to be a spoiler.

Spain and Ukraine figure to emerge from Group H, though neither look good enough to do much damage after the group stage. Tunisia has a chance to surprise, but Saudi Arabia looks overmatched.

Knockout stage picks:
A1 Germany over B2 Sweden
C1 Argentina over D2 Portugal
E1 US over F2 Croatia
G1 France over H2 Ukraine
A2 Poland over B1 England
D1 Mexico over C2 Netherlands
F1 Brazil over E2 Czech Rep
G2 Switzerland over H1 Spain

A1 Germany over C1 Argentina
E1 US over G1 France
A2 Poland over D1 Mexico
F1 Brazil over G2 Switzerland

A1 Germany over E1 US
F1 Brazil over A2 Poland

A1 Germany over F1 Brazil
E1 US over A2 Poland (3rd place)

Company Expansion

Palm Sports Resources announced today the hiring of Annika Eliese Palm as a Special Assistant to the President. When asked what role Annika would have in the organization, President Jerry Palm said, “We plan to start her off slowly so she can learn the ropes. Since she’s only 20 1/4” long and 7 lbs, 13.5 oz, we’ll probably limit her activities to eating, sleeping and pooping initially. We will also put her in charge of ensuring that we have the proper amount of sleep deprivation in the Executive Suite.”

Palm added, “If she is able to do those things successfully, we will be expanding her responsibilities into other areas to be decided upon at a later date.”

The EEOC began an investigation into the company’s hiring practices last summer when rumors surfaced that the company had only hired males so far, but Palm was quick to point out that the investigation had nothing to do with Annika Palm’s appointment.

“Obviously, it’s no fun when the government shows up at your door and starts rifling through your drawers, muttering things like ‘Title IX’, ‘gender bias’ and ‘federal lawsuit’, but Annika isn’t the token female around here. She has impressive credentials and we’re committed to her for the long term. We expect big things from her. It probably won’t be too long before she’s running the place. Of course, if hiring her gets the feds off my back, so much the better.”

Palm wasn’t kidding when he talked about a long term commitment. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, a well placed source says Ms. Palm signed an 18-year, no-cut contract.

Mr. Palm also got a little defensive when pressed about the fact that this looks like a patronage hire. “Hey, this is Lake County, Indiana,” Palm said, adding, “Every job in this county is a patronage job. This isn’t like Chicago, where patronage hiring is illegal.”

Baby update

As many of you know, my wife is due to deliver child number four on or about March 1st. Obviously, I'm very good with numbers, but I seem to have trouble with a calendar, since that is the busiest time of the year for me with my work. I was very worried that this baby would be fashionably late and arrive on March 12th, which is selection Sunday.

For us, that kind of thing is very predictable. All of our major pregnancy events happen on or very close to special occasions.

Child #1 was due on Mother's Day, but my wife's water broke on April Fools' Day (which also happened to be the day after the national championship game that year) and he was born the next day.

My wife started going into labor two months before #2 was due, but she spent a day in the hospital and they were able to stop the labor before it really got going. That day was my birthday. #2 son ended up being born about four hours short of Groundhog Day.

Pregnancy #3 ended in a miscarriage on Halloween.

When they told us child #3 was due in late October, a Halloween baby never occurred to us. We were thinking more along the lines of Labor Day, or optimistically, Columbus Day. It turns out that this one was late. He was born on Election Day.

So, with a due date of March 1st (Ash Wednesday), we started planning for a new addition on New Year's Day, MLK Day, our anniversary (Jan 17), Groundhog Day, Presidents Day, Valentine's Day, selection Sunday, the Ides of March (which also happens to be my wife's birthday) and St. Patrick's Day.

My wife's doctor says we can cross the last few off the list though. He's leaving for vacation on March 3rd, so he wants to make sure that baby is out and my wife is well on her way to recovery before he takes off. That means that March 1st isn't just a due date, it's a maximum due date.

Maybe it'll be Fat Tuesday (Feb 28), which considering how skinny my first three kids are, would be quite ironic.

Pinewood Derby

We had our first experience with the Cub Scouts' Pinewood Derby last weekend and things went amazingly well. #1 Son is a Bear (3rd graders) and his car won three of his four heats and finished second in all four finals races for second place in the Bear group. The only car that beat his is the one that finished first. More on that in a minute.

#2 Son is a Tiger (1st graders) and his car did even better. He won all four of his heats to finish first in the preliminaries. The second place car was creatively designed. It was called "Fast Food" because it was a thin block of wood with a plastic cheeseburger, french fry box and shake cup glued on it. That was one of my favorites, along with the one that was an aquarium (no water, of course) done by one of the Webeloes (4th-5th grades). But, I digress.

In the heats, #2 son's car beat Fast Food twice by about a car length each time. His car also won the first race of the finals, but by a nose. Fast Food won the other three races in dead heats (too close to call without a computer, which it's a good thing they had), so Fast Food ended up being the winner of the Tiger class.

Fast Food then went on to be Grand Champion, winning the four finals races convincingly. That means #2 son probably had the second fastest car there, but only got second in class. That's racing, though!

Pinewood Derby is kind of funny to watch off the track. It's different from family to family, but it's really more about the dads than the kids. This is the kind of project that adults have to be involved in at some level because we’re not going to let the kids use power tools at age 8, but some cars clearly looked like the kids had nothing to do with them. There was one dad that was so anal that he brought the car to the race in a one-foot cube steel box which had been lined with foam that had a car-shaped cut-out in it.

When I kind of off-handedly suggested to our (Bear) den leader that it would be cool of one of our kids won, he said it wouldn’t happen. He told me who would win and said the same dad wins every year because he starts working on the car the day after the previous race ends. It shows too, because he has the most professional looking car there. I wonder if the kid even sees the car before race day.

The cars the kids in our den made looked like amateur hack-jobs by comparison, which they were, since they were mostly done by amateurs. The only thing the adults did for the kids in our den was cut the car and make sure the wheels were on straight. Our goal was for the cars to get all the way down the track without catching fire, blowing an engine or having a tire fall off.

As it turns out, our den leader was right and worked-on-it-for-a-year car won, but some of our den’s hack-jobs finished second, third and fourth. I’m sure the dad that spent a year making his car was shocked not only not to be Grand Champion, but to lose to a car that could have mostly been made by a six-year-old.

So, while there is a TON of information out there about how to make a winning Pinewood Derby car, what we learned is what #1 son already knew before we raced. In the car on the way to the race, he blurted out, “winning the race is mostly luck.” We more or less proved that.

Long time, no write

Gosh, it's been so long since I've written, I've forgotten just about anything I might have wanted to say. With both football and basketball seasons going on, it's hard to find time to write. Here's a few things rambling around in my head.

* The Sox made a pretty risky deal yesterday, sending CF Aaron Rowand to the Phillies for 1B Jim Thome. I love Thome, but he's on the downside of his career and coming off an injury-marred season. I hate to see the Sox give up their best defensive player and team leader - and a relatively young guy - for Thome at this point in his career. It makes me wonder if the Sox think they can't sign Konerko.

* Kyle Orton is doing a nice job at starting QB for the Bears, who are now 7-3. Like most rookies, he's had some ups and downs, but they are not relying on him to win the games. The Bears have a great defense and a good running game, which takes some pressure off of Orton.

Orton's QB rating of 62.5 won't get him a lot of all-star votes. He's 30th in the NFL in that category. If you throw out that one 5 INT game against the Bengals, his rating is 73.2, which isn't too far off of average. Hard to believe one game could make that much difference.

The one thing that has puzzled me about Orton so far as a Bear is that he seems to be missing guys deep. When he was at Purdue, he was the most accurate deep-ball thrower I had seen in college. It seemed like he was more accurate the farther he threw the ball, but in the pros so far, he's had trouble hooking up on the long ball. Maybe it's just a matter of still learning his receivers. When he starts clicking on the deep ball again, he's really going to take off.

Rex Grossman, whose injury gave Orton the chance to start, is going to be back in uniform this week as the third QB when the Bears play Tampa. Some fans are thinking he should go back in whenever he's ready, but they forget that Grossman has six games experience - total. Orton already has seven WINS. Grossman's career QB rating is 71.1, so it's not like he's the second coming of John Elway.

* Further evidence that there are too many channels: the Collegiate Bass Fishing Championship was on ESPNU yesterday.

* We went to see the Harry Potter movie last night. It was pretty good, although they obviously had to cut a LOT out to make a two-and-a-half hour movie. No house-elves, no Dursleys, and don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it coverage of the Quidditch World Cup. Even Snape is an afterthought. Still, it's a good movie and the special effects are great.

* My two older boys have just joined Cub Scouts. They're both pretty excited about it and they'll probably do OK, but I remember my efforts at scouting and I wasn't particularly good at it. Hopefully, I can stay out of their way. :)

Busy, busy.

It's been a busy week, which is partly why it's been a little quiet here. We've been taking the kids out and doing a few fun things, like the Porter County Fair. Then, I spent the last two days at the Big Ten football media days, which I'll write about some on the site.

I've also been writing about the Harry Potter book, which I hope to post later this week.

Our strange school

I've been meaning to write about the strange goings on at the school we sent our kids to this year, but I just don't often get about 12 uninterrupted hours to put anything together.

Fortunately, another parent has blogged her experiences at the school, which will give you an idea about what we were up against. Her story is similar to ours in some ways and different in others, as you might expect, but dealing with the person she calls "Nutjob" and her son's teacher were among the similar ones.

She talks about people she is supposedly responsible for leaving the school, which is what Nutjob is telling other people, but that's a lie, of course. We are among those that she says were driven off by this other parent, but we are leaving for our own reasons.

We're now homeschooling. The public schools around here are fine for kids within two standard deviations of "normal," but my kids aren't in that group. We've been to three different private schools (a Christian school, a Montessori school and this last one, which was secular), and none have been able to work with our kids at their academic levels. So, we've decided we're going to having to do it ourselves.

I'm sure it'll be fun. The kids are looking forward to it. We're not really organized as far as acquiring a curriculum or anything like that, but we've already started anyway. For now, life is school. They're doing some reading, some math books, and they've created and are caring for a garden. We'll do something more formal in a couple of months.

Updates

I've spent most of the last week working on a garden for my boys' summer project. They are six and eight, so they're not quite old enough to use the roto-tiller yet. As a result, I haven't had much time and energy to write, so here are a few updates.

The Marquette community will choose between Golden Eagles and Hilltoppers for its team nicknames for next year. The voting ends June 24th and the result is expected to be announced July 1st.

The pope's car is finally back in Illinois awaiting a hearing over who actually owns it.

I watch very little TV unless there is a ball involved, but one of the shows I really like is The Dead Zone on USA, and a new season starts up this Sunday night.

Baseball's draft was Tuesday. It is easily the least exciting draft of the major sports because nobody drafted on Tuesday is expected to be any sort of immediate help to the major league club. Anybody who makes it to the big leagues in the next two years will have moved fast.

One semi-interesting note is that the Cubs' first round pick, some high school pitcher from Utah, signed right away, even though his agent is the notorious Scott Boras. Boras' reputation for unmitigated unreasonableness (is that a word?) is such that half the teams in baseball won't take his clients, so to get one of his guys signed within hours of the draft instead of months is newsworthy.

Back-to-back Puck

My kids have had a double-dose of Puck the last two days.

Thursday, they got to meet Chef Wolfgang Puck as part of the celebration of Sue's fifth birthday party. My oldest even got a one-on-one cookie decorating lesson. He was very excited to get to meet someone famous. I guess I have to work on my Q-rating some more. :)

It was fun to see them on TV, even though it was so early in the morning. The CBS affiliate in Chicago did their morning news traffic segments live from the museum. Their traffic reporter, Susan Carlson, would interview somebody or do something with the kids during each segment. The teachers said she was great with the kids and the kids were pretty well behaved. You never know what you're going to get from kids, especially sleep-deprived ones.

They also got to do a dance to a song that Al Jarreau sang. "Dance" might be stretching things a bit. It was more like hand motions, but what can you teach kids in a short time.

Here is a link to Susan Carlson's page on the CBS 2 Chicago website, which has links to a few of the video segments from the museum. You can see my kids best in the one where Al Jarreau sings his new song, but the Wolfgang Puck one is kind of funny, even though my kids aren't in it.

Last night, I took the kids to see playoff hockey. Many of you may not be familiar with hockey. It's a sport where people skate around an ice rink and try to shoot a small rubber biscuit called a "puck" into a net. They used to play this sport at a high-professional level in this country, but they don't anymore.

They do still have lower professional levels, and the Chicago Wolves are one of the better teams in the American Hockey League. Last night, they scored four third-period goals to eliminate the Cincinnati Sitting Ducks 4-1. They'll face the Manitoba Moose in the next round.

My oldest hasn't typically had the patience to sit through an entire sporting event, but he really seemed to enjoy the game last night. My middle son likes sports and will sit with me and watch them on TV, so watching it live was fun for him. They gave out those thundersticks, and those entertained my oldest when the game wasn't.

I get to one or two Wolves games each year, and this was one of the smaller crowds I've seen at one of their games. They had just over 5,000 people there, and I don't think I've been to a game where the crowd wasn't at least 10,000. The Sox and Orioles played the same night, but that hasn't typically been a problem before. In fact, there have been nights where the Wolves outdrew the Sox when they played at the same time. I wonder if the NHL kamikaze mission has hurt attendance at the lower levels.

There was a lot of penalties in this game too. Usually, in a playoff hockey game, refs forget to put the peas in their whistles, so you hardly have any penalties called. In this game, though, there were 20 penalties called, all minors and each team had eight power plays.

Cincinnati was so bad on the power play most of the night that you often forgot which team had the man-advantage. The Wolves were better in the sense that they usually got a lot of shots, but didn't connect until early in the third period.

While I always enjoy going to these games (in fact, I'd rather go to a Wolves game than an Hawks game), they never fail to remind me that there is a reason why these guys are in the minors.

Sue Turns Five

You'll note by the time on this post that it is a ridiculous hour of the morning to be out of bed, but I am. Even more ridiculous is that my 6- and 8-year-olds are up also.

That's because they are going to the Field Museum to celebrate Sue the T-Rex's fifth birthday party and their school gets to be the background for the TV coverage on the various network stations in Chicago. They have to leave their school at 4 AM to do this.

Wolfgang Puck (making the cake) and Al Jarreau (singing Happy Birthday) are going to be there too. That's quite the A-list crowd for the birthday of a bag of bones.

If you live around Chicago, every station (2,5,7,9,32) is covering it at some level on their morning shows and/or local news programs. If you don't live around here, but get WGN on your cable, you might see coverage there.

We (parents) were given no specific information as to which channels were showing this when, so we get to spend the morning channel surfing.

Roast Pork – Sort of

As I mentioned in my profile, one of my interests is cooking. That’s a relatively new interest for me, which was born out of watching the Food Network on TV. In particular, I like Good Eats with Alton Brown and Iron Chef. I used to joke that the only thing I could cook was Spaghettios (recipe: open can; eat with spoon). That may still be true, but after watching professional chefs on the Food Network make things look so easy, I’ve tried some other things and, as you might expect, had some mixed results.

Last night was one of those things. My wife suggested cooking a pork loin roast (bone in) on the grill, which I’ve never done before. In fact, I had never done anything requiring indirect heat. It turned out surprisingly good – so good that I thought I would share the recipe with you.

Ingredients:
Pork loin roast – bone in
Wife or alarm clock
Whiny kids
Potato chips

Prep time: 30 minutes, not counting nap.
Cook time: 2 hours, 18 minutes. Approximately.

1. Take a nap. Have your wife wake you around 3:30 and ask you if you’re going to start the coals. An alarm clock will do if you don't have a wife.
   
2. Start the coals in the grill.
   
3. Kids start to complain that they’re hungry.
   
4. When coals heat up, move them away from the middle of the grill. Put a drip pan with some water in it in the middle of the grill, surrounded by the coals.
   
5. Panic because it looks like you used about half as many coals as you need.
   
6. Add more coals.
   
7. Put the roast on the grill, fat side up.
   
8. After about 45 minutes, check the roast. Doubt to yourself that it’s cooking fast enough, but turn it over anyway.
   
9. Kids complain that they’re hungry again. Give them a few potato chips.
   
10. After another 45 minutes, stick a meat thermometer into the roast. Wonder if the thermometer is working correctly or if the inside is still so cold that the needle doesn’t move.
    
11. Kids complain that they’re still hungry. Tell them to quit whining and set the table (in case the roast ever gets ready).
    
12. Give up on the grill. Put roast in roasting pan and into cold oven set to 400 degrees.
    
13. After about half an hour, take roast out, stick in meat thermometer. Needle should barely move.
    
14. Bedtime is rapidly approaching. Kids complain that they’re still hungry. Send them to their room.
    
15. Give up on the oven. Put roast in microwave for 5 minutes at 70% power.
    
16. Stick thermometer in roast. Needle should move slightly, but still not reach temperature scale. Start doubting again whether the thermometer works correctly.
    
17. Put roast in microwave for 6 more minutes at 70% power.
    
18. Stick thermometer in roast. Needle should start to offer signs of hope, but it’s not done yet.
    
19. Put roast in microwave for 7 more minutes at 70% power.
    
20. Cover with foil and let sit for a few minutes before serving.
    

We didn’t season or marinate the meat, but you certainly could. It actually turned out pretty good. It tasted smoky, like it had been grilled, but the meat was still pretty tender.

Today, for Mother’s Day, I’m cooking for the mothers (my wife, my mom and my mother-in-law), who no doubt are wondering if I’ll screw up again and end up taking them out. That could be a problem, since about the only place we could get into on Mother’s Day without a reservation is the Kwik 'n' Krappy’s (“Burgers on a stick!”). If it turns out good, I may share those recipes here.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of you mothers! (From someone who is often called a mother)

Do These Kids Have a Life?

I’m as big of a sports nut as there is. I always joke that I don’t watch TV unless there’s some sort of ball involved. I was pretty obsessed even when I was a kid. I played baseball for nine years, even though I was the worst player not only on my own team, but in the entire league every season I played (note: I’m not making that up. I was really that bad).

Still, even the good players did other things. Many were three-sport athletes, which seems to be a dying breed. These days, kids specialize, and they do so at a young age. The Chicago Tribune published an article Tuesday which talked about how some parents pay up to $10,000 per year to put their 12-year-old sons on national traveling baseball teams. These kids pretty much play baseball and do nothing else.

Some of these teams attract some big sponsorship dollars to help facilitate this activity.

To me, this is a complete loss of perspective. These kids have had no childhood. They’re pros now at age 12, and to get to this level, they’ve had to pretty much devote their short lives to nothing but baseball. These kids talk about how they are chasing their dreams of the major leagues (which, even for kids this good, is a longshot at best), but when you consider how early they had to start chasing it, you wonder if it was their dream originally, or if they are actually living out their parents’ dreams.

The kids in this story are from California, where they can play baseball year round, but there’s some of that lack of perspective around here too.

I have three boys, ages 8, 6 and 1.5. The older two, like most boys their ages, are involved in sports. They have played soccer and baseball, more soccer than baseball. In fact, last spring was the first time they had played baseball. We signed them up for T-Ball in the Dyer Little League.

Dyer’s Little League 12-year-old team made the Little League World Series in 1997, so we figured they would be pretty organized and know what they were doing. What we found out was that when it comes to the all-star and travel teams, they did know what they were doing. That was because everything the league did was built around those teams.

The regular season schedule ended a little early, so that the travel teams wouldn’t have conflicts. That applied to T-Ball as well, which as far as I know, didn’t have a travel team. That day is coming, I’m sure.

Also, teams were “stacked,” by which I mean that the best kids were placed on one or two of the teams, so that the potential travel team kids played together. That led to some really ugly games. I was a base umpire for an age 11-12 game that ended 35-0. Do not adjust your monitor – you read that score correctly. In that game, the stacked team hit eight home runs, and had a stretch where they just missed hitting five in a row (the third kid in that stretch hit the top of the center field fence, but the ball bounced back into the field). How much fun do you think it was to be on the losing team for that game? What is the motivation for those kids? Even for the team that won, it couldn’t have been much fun.

That wasn’t the worst of it, though. There were even stacked T-Ball teams. We played against two teams that had nearly all older kids (6 and 7, though there weren’t a lot of 7-year-olds in T-Ball), and I would say that 90% of the best players in our league were on those two teams. We had one kid as good as any on either of those teams. The sandlot scouts must have missed him.

The league picnic/award ceremony (every kid gets a trophy) was two months after the regular season ended to accommodate the schedules of the travel team kids. The whole awards ceremony was built around those teams, although we regular folks did get our brief moment in the sun. We knew it was bad when the league president got weepy with joy and pride when she discussed how the 9-year-old team finished second in the state tournament. I was thinking, “they have a state tournament for 9-year-olds?”

So, since my kids are not likely to ever be travel-team caliber, my wife and I moved them over to Schererville Baseball this year in the hope that this league devotes as much attention to the fair-to-middlin’ kids as they do to the travel teams.

Things are so far, so good on that front. Our team has only one kid who appears to have the pressure of his father living vicariously through him. At batting practice one day, while I was working with him, his dad kept giving him pointers too. That wasn’t so bad since we were both saying relatively helpful things. At the end of his session though, I told him he had a nice swing (which he does, even though he doesn’t make much contact), and his dad said something like, “he should; he’s had hundreds of dollars in lessons.”

No pressure there, kid.

I wanted to tell him to save his money and just let the kid play, but I didn’t, of course. Of all the kids on our team, though, this one seems to be having the least fun. I can help him work on his swing, but I don’t know what to do for this kid so that the game is fun for him. I’m not sure, but I would guess there are a lot more kids like this one than the ones written about in that Tribune article, and that’s the real shame.