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It’s been a couple of long seasons/years on Will’s soccer team. Last spring, they didn’t win any games. Last fall (I was an assistant coach of sorts on this team), we didn’t win any games. And we started this year (again, I’m an assistant of sorts) by getting crushed by like nine or ten goals.

But losers we are no more.

Today, Will’s team (hey, my team too, right?) finally won one, I believe 3 to 1. Here’s a link to a few pictures of what was a perfectly beautiful spring day, soccer or otherwise.

Much of Will’s weekend (and some of Annette’s and a very little bit of mine) was spent building a lovely model of a fort typical of the French and Indian War.  At least according to Will.  I am sure that they did not have forts built out of painted popsicle sticks, felt, sticks, and little pegs for guys.

Anyway, it turned out pretty cool.  Here’s a link to a Flickr set of pictures.  Be sure to look at the pictures individually because Will and I put in some notes to explain what different parts of the fort are and what the different guys in the fort are doing.

The last time Will did a project like this, he ended up getting what I think we all here thought was an artificially low grade.  He better do well on this one….

Oh, and I am rather surprised to know almost nothing about the French and Indian War.  Other than I think there was some unit on this when I was in about fifth or sixth grade.

Least you think that there has been no fun around here while the mice play at the CCCCs, I was lucky enough to attend a Detroit Tigers baseball game yesterday with Will and his fellow safety patrol members from Estabrook Elementary. It’s almost a game we missed– Will didn’t bring home the permission slip initially because, as he put it, he just doesn’t care much about baseball. “Neither do I, Will. But going to the ball game is fun!” So I talked him into it and he was glad.

I got to go along as a parental chaperone, though as far as I could tell, there were at least as many grown-ups supervising as there was children. It might have had something to do with the free tickets. It was also the first trip I’ve had on a school bus in years. Most amusing to me was that both on the way there and the way back, the kids were pretty successful at getting passing semis to blow their horn at us.

Anyway, it was safety patrol day in general at the park so there were many different youth groups on a clear but chilly day. I think it’s fair to say that the highlight for Will was hanging out with friends and eating a $5.50 hot dog. The highlight for me was shopping for but not buying and Tiger merchandise ($25 for a T-shirt I can get at Target for half that price? Thanks, no…), resisting temptation and staying on diet, hanging out with fellow parents, and discovering with my iPod that there was a wifi network in the stadium.

As to the game: like I said, I don’t really follow baseball much. But as far as I can tell, all this hype about the Tigers this year is perhaps ill-placed. This was their third loss, and as far as I could tell, they got spanked in this game.

Anyway, a pretty fun way to spend the day. I can’t very well complain about free tickets, but I think I’ll wait until the temperature is about 60 the next time I go see a game. For the curious, there’s a few pictures here.

Loyal readers already know that today is my actual birthday, but one day is frankly not enough for anyone. While Bill HD claims that no one older 8 ought to be allowed to have such a perversion as a “birthday week,” I am of the opinion that it is exactly the opposite: the older you get, the longer you should be allowed to celebrate. Ultimately, most retirees are simply celebrating their birthdays year-round.

In any event, there were a few family snags with my usual birthday plans I won’t go into now, but all in all, a good time. I have received many fine wishes on Facebook, some family cards, I’ve had some cake (albeit a low-fat/low-calorie one), I’ve been able to goof off a little, I’ve enjoyed my new iPod Touch quite a bit, etc.

One kind of weird thing over the weekend though. This is a picture of the birthday card (and its contents) I received from my parents:

The black parts are my sloppy ways of blocking out address and other info; the problem here is that the envelope and enclosed card had about the bottom third of it sheared off. The whole thing came in a plastic bag from the post office that basically said “we’re really sorry, but this was damaged.” It does make you wonder why this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often– this is the first piece of mail I’ve ever received that was damaged like this– and my bank still cashed the check, so all is well.

I guess mostly as a result of my whining about it (because I knew what I was going to get) and partly because my actual birthday is on a night Annette is teaching, I got her and Will to give me my big birthday gift, an iPod Touch. Sweet! (Actually, I tried to post this from my new pod/touch yesterday, but I got tired of trying to make it work, so I’m posting this from a regular computer. But I’m still back dating the post).

For those not in the know, the pod/touch is basically the same as an iPhone but without the phone: that is, it’s an iPod, you can watch videos, and, assuming you have a wireless connection, you can track your stocks (my vast portfolio, of course), you can buy stuff from iTunes, check your mail, and sort of surf the web with Safari. When the iPhone first came out, my first reaction was “I don’t need a phone, but if I had something that had the rest of this stuff, that’d be cool.” Well, here ya go.

Anyway, I haven’t taken it out “in the wild” yet, so I don’t know how well it will respond/connect to wifi networks in coffee shops and stuff. I guess it’ll work fine. The email app works great, and the google sites I use all the time (reader, news, etc.) have iPod/Phone/Touch -specific versions, which is nice. And now there’s a whole bunch of web sites specifically made for the iPod/Phone/Touch, which is a potentially interesting topic of “Writing for the World Wide Web” this spring. I finally figured out how to use HandBrake to rip a DVD to an iPod/Phone/Touch format, meaning I can watch Spirited Away on a tiny screen in fantastic resolution. This is cool, but I am not sure I can watch a 2 hour movie like this– David Lynch probably has a point.

Oh yeah– it plays music too.

Anyway, mucho thanks to Annette and Will!

My birthday is Tuesday, March 25, and so I’m getting a bit of a late start on my traditional birthday week/birthday month. I guess there really isn’t anything that “special” about 42, although, as this helpful entry on wikipedia points out, there’s a lot to good ol’ 42, including (and how did forget this?) the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

My actual birthday itself is Tuesday, and my big plan/gift/surprise to myself is I am taking the day off and I absolutely refuse to go anything school. My hope is to spend some time playing around with the “surprise” I know I’m getting. Since Annette teaches Tuesday (and hey, it’s the middle of the week too), we’re going out tomorrow, a real surprise for me. Stay tuned for the details on that.

This was on my mind because of the surprise CD set I received today, Vee-Jay: The Definitive Collection, was waiting for me. This was surprising for two reasons. First, I didn’t order/buy these CDs; rather, they were the extra/gift item we received for the donation for the WEMU fund raiser. What I’ve heard so far is pretty cool, but it isn’t the sort of thing I would have bought directly. Second, it seems like we sent in the pledge card about three days ago.

Anyway, surprise CDs are always good, birthday week or not.

This is the last one of these sorts of things at Estabrook since Will is one of the big kids now. I think my favorite is still when Will was one of the narrators– either the second or third grade– but this is best movie of one of these I’ve made.

For what seems like the thousandth time this winter, we have snow. Lots of snow– well, lots of snow for this part of Michigan, but probably not much by UP or Buffalo, NY standards. So I am home with Will, also home from school. We are about to go shoveling, but for some reason, I am thinking back many years ago to a less significant snow day.

In 1988, after I had graduated from the University of Iowa, I moved to Richmond, Virginia to start the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. For the first time, I was living far from the midwest and alone in a pretty sketchy part of town near campus. My apartment was on Franklin on the first floor and in the back, right on the alley. I don’t know what it’s like there now, but at the time, that was a really good spot to find drunks and bums if you were looking. I used to hear them back there all the time. My apartment consisted of one main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom, all laid out in a row. My typical way of getting the day started was I would stumble out of bed, go through the kitchen, and into the bathroom to look out the window at something that wasn’t the alley before doing my business and getting in the shower.

One day in late November or early December, I got up, did my usual walk, and when I opened the window, I saw snow flakes. Just flurries, but big and giant white flakes. And, I don’t know, I had a moment of real home sickness and missing the chill of Iowa and the real snowfall we would have had there by now. Anyway, I closed the window and went through my usual routine, and by the time I looked out the window again, the snow had stopped. I started the coffee and while it was making, I turned on the radio to hear some semi-hysterical disk jokey going off about the snow, about being “real careful” out there, etc. What weather babies, and most of my time in Richmond just confirmed that impression.

Anyway, I don’t know what this has to do with much more than a few flakes of snow right now or not, but it’s what came to mind. And now to the shovels….

Gary “AD&D” Gygax passed away. As geeky IT web site “The Register” put it:

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax rolled a natural one on his fortitude save today, dying at level 69 at his home in Lake Geneva.

Best known for developing D&D with Dave Arneson in 1974, Gygax helped formulate a pen-and-pencil role playing ruleset that would become a touchstone for modern gaming across its genres.

My own AD&D phase was in junior high/early high school, with a few gaming sessions all the way into early college years. Truth be told though the people I hung out with were more likely to play Traveller or Runequest. Will is getting the itch to play these games already, playing a kind of watered-down version and also making up a version with some friends at his school. I suspect Gary would be proud.

As a winter break family outing yesterday afternoon, Annette and Will and I went to the new Borders after we picked Will up from school. And yes, our family is such that going to a book store is considered a “family outing.” This new store is a “concept store,” and fairly accurately summarized in this CNNMoney.com article, “Borders Celebrates Grand Opening…” Borders, which has its headquarters in Ann Arbor and which has been hemorrhaging money for a few years now, sees the store as at least one of the futures of the business. I guess.

Anyway, the store is located in a big-box strip mall over near Ann Arbor-Saline Road in the space that used to be a CompUSA store. One of the reasons why Borders opened this store here is because the Borders suits are here, and when we were there Tuesday, there seemed to be tours of various Borders employees underway, which was a little weird. It’s a big store with snazzy lighting and furnishings and all of that, kind of arranged in a sort of wheel/spoke pattern. In the middle, there were sections of food and wine, travel, exercise and diet, and something else I’m not remembering.

My wife the Children’s Lit professor scholar noticed that a good half of the book space of the story could be included in her classes: besides a big children’s book section, there was a lot of “young adult” and whatever the book category is called for the kind of junior-aged high school kids, and a very large section on Manga, Anime, comic books, and graphic novels. So much for the “kids today” not doing any reading– or I guess the “kids today” just aren’t reading “Literature,” which was sort of shoved off into a corner of the store.

But probably more than half of the store was devoted to the miscellaneous stuff that all big box book stores sell nowadays (stationary, candy, bags, notebooks, etc.), music, and “gadgets.” Over in one corner they had a LongPen station, which was (apparently) invented by Margaret Atwood to do virtual book signings. I couldn’t find a picture on the very bad LongPen web site, but basically, it’s kind of a station sort of thing a bit bigger than an ATM with a camera and a microphone, a screen that would presumably show the author doing the signing, and a surface where you put your book and the mechanical pen thing. I dunno. The argument is that these people are saving the environment by reducing travel. It seems to me though that they’d do a lot more environmental benefit by publishing fewer books on paper and making eBooks compelling and affordable. Really, I think the main reason for the device is that Margaret Atwood (and others like her) must really hate to travel.

And then on the other side of things, somewhere between a half and a third of the store, is a very large technology stuff/gadget section. They had the Sony Reader on display, which makes sense as a book store techno-gadget (and after playing with it for about 10 minutes, my reaction to the grey and $300 price tag was who in the hell would want to buy this thing?), and they also had a display of those frames with the electronic pictures in them and some exercise gadgets, too. They were selling FlipVideo cameras and other digital cameras (I knew way more about the FlipVideo than the sales dude), and there probably were some non-iPod mp3 players in there too. They had some computer kiosks where you could download mp3s to your iPod (or whatever) right there, or you could burn them to a CD, for about a buck apiece, and they had a station where you could print out your digital pictures. And then they also had a station where you could print a customized book (I couldn’t get that thing to work) and a station where you could do family genealogy (??).

Anyway, it was an interesting idea and I’m sure it will evolve, but right now, it had the look and feel of a bunch of stuff thrown against a wall to see if it would stick. eBooks and custom printing of trade books hasn’t quite taken off yet, and it seems to me that the only people who would use an in-store/f2f service to do things like download mp3s to a disk or print digital pictures are folks who aren’t all that comfortable with technology in the first place. And genealogy? Seriously?

So we’ll see what happens over the next couple years. We did all spend some money there. I bought Blogging Heroes more or less as a risky but potential BAWS resource since I have not had any luck so far getting high profile bloggers to participate in my survey or case studies. Though after looking it up on amazon.com (which is what I link to above), which features some free chapters and a $5.38 price tag, I feel like I’ve been ripped off, which is not a good feeling to have upon reflecting on a new store.