What's New?

We had a small respite from the rat race because it rained all day Friday forcing the cancellation of Adam's baseball practices on Friday night and Saturday morning. Derek's practice late Saturday afternoon was moved to an indoor facility. The kids were a little unnerved hitting within the confines of the indoor batting cages.

I picked up a cup and some batting gloves for Derek. Adam's hands are still too small for batting gloves. Derek needs a cup because he might play catcher some. He wore it to his practice game last night, but didn't tell the coach that he had a cup until the game was almost over so he didn't get to catch. He seemed disappointed. Adam had a practice game last night. Derek went with me and skateboarded around. Helen had her weekly tennis practice\round robin.

We're hoping to avoid the flu. It seems like people all around us have had it. I played tennis Sunday morning and then felt really drained and shut it down. Helen felt drained last night and is hoping to get some rest to nip it in the bud. Several years ago we all had it for the first time that we could remember, so we got flu shots for the next couple years. Then a couple years ago Adam still got the flu right before our ski trip and we all had to take Tamiflu, which made us all feel like we had the flu also. After that, we haven't gotten flu shots the past couple years and have been fine - so far.

Helen spent a lot of time grading papers last weekend and felt much better in terms of being on top of her work. She estimated a couple weeks ago that it would take her about 9 hours to get caught up on her grading. She tells me often how she really needs to grade some papers and I say ok and that I will take care of the kids, but then she says that she doesn't want to grade papers. She "needs" to, but she doesn't "want" to. So she keeps putting it off and gets stressed about it, which adversely affects her family. It becomes a typical male\female conversation: Helen: I need to grade papers. Me: Ok, grade papers. Helen: But I don't want to. Me: Ok, don't. We have many of these types of conversations where it seems simple to me as there are only 2 choices - yes\no, do\don't, etc.

On Saturday night, Derek asked to hear the song "The Weight" by The Band. He also often requests to hear "Up On Cripple Creek". That led me to put in "The Last Waltz" DVD that Helen bought me for our anniversary last year. We had rented the movie last year and were blown away by it. The kids really loved it also. My intention when I put the movie in was to just watch a couple songs, but we ended up watching the whole thing and keeping the kids up late. They were into it the whole time.

On Sunday, Helen's parents came over for brunch and then took the kids home with them for the night since the kids were off from school on Monday, but Helen had a teacher work day. We talked about having a date night, but I felt like I was coming down with something and slept for a long time. Helen caught up on some papers and then we watched some movies we had recorded. One was "War Of The Worlds". Helen kept watching it, but she was not happy. Anything that makes her think that the future for her kids is not bright upsets her. She claimed she had bad sleep that night and blamed me.

Last night, I finished reading "The Camel Club" by David Baldacci. I've also recently read a couple other books by him, "Simple Genius" and "The Collectors", and enjoyed them all. They're mystery\suspense novels that really grab you - similar to authors like Dan Brown and Harland Coben.