Life on the Sidelines


Sarah had her first couple volleyball games this past week. On Tuesday she played against Waukesha West. While they lost all three matches, I was so incredibly proud to see her out there in uniform I almost cried. She is so tall, that I think this is the perfect sport for her.

She played in the first game (therefore, I can say she "started") and did OK. A couple of legitimate gaffes (foot faults, muffed serves, etc) but had some shining moments too. They lost the first game 25-15, second was 25-19 and the third was 15-12 (called on time). The two teams are cross-town rivals and don't like each other very much. The kicker was we had to stay and watch the Varsity play 2 of their 3 games after that. Of course, they didn't play RIGHT after Sarah's match either, there was a 30 minute difference. So, we did not get home until about 8:30.

To follow it up, last night she had to play in a 5 team invitational at South. It started at 5:00 and did not get finished until 8:30. With cleanup, etc., Donna did not get home until 9:00. (I was at writing workshop).

They went 3-5 on the night in matches for Sarah's team. I got to see her win her first game, so that was cool. She is clearly one of the top six players on the team at the moment. I really think that if she decided to apply herself to this sport, she could do quite well. I hope and pray she does, but we'll have to see how this year goes.

I don't know how multi-sport families do it from season to season though. Between volleyball and football, the van is always going to or from Waukesha South, it seems. I LOVE the fact that my kids are involved in sports at this level, but it is a huge commitment for the whole family. I probably will be very happy when mid-October arrives however...

Class last night was good too. We have a new woman, Stacy in it, though she didn't get a chance to read her stuff, so I'm not sure what she's writing. Looked like fiction to me.

I got some discouraging words from the instructor on how we'd need to "beef up" my page count by, oh, a hundred pages or so if I want to try and publish it via conventional methods. That may have a huge bearing on whether or not I go that route. I'm going to focus on re-writing what I have and trying to make it fuller. (is that a word?)

Well, I have to go and get some writing done, so I'll blog off for now...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flash Update (No, not Flash Player)

The week is as crazy as I feared. I made it down to Sarah's game tonight. They played well, but lost two out of three. I was one of the few parents who made the trip. It was a bit ridiculous to drive all that way down for an hour, but I think Sarah appreciated it. I really enjoy watching the games though, in part because I love playing the game. Mosaic leadership went OK on Tuesday night. It turns out my group had only 3 kids in it and two of them were from my old boys club group. They are good kids and I'm glad I listened to my heart and went and did it. It's really where I belong and it just felt extremely right. Funny how God works sometimes. Writing workshop went well too. Got to hear from one of the new students who's writing Young Adult fiction. She's writing about kids entering into a closet fantasy world. I put forth three poems, two of which were crap, or so I thought. The class thought they were OK. The one I thought was the best was received as just OK. T...
Read more

New Chapters

Image
 As many of you know I retired last week after almost 27 years at Waukesha County. It was a bit of a shock to some, in part because I am only 61. Nevertheless I'd given it much thought and talked it through with my family and determined it was time. I wanted to get out while I am healthy and perhaps more specifically just do something different. I am lucky enough to say I've loved my work over the past 37 years. GIS and mapping has been my passion since college and I was fortunate enough to get paid to do something I loved.  I'll be honest, while I looked forward to the date of retirement, I was not looking forward to the celebration. Like my daughter, who is more like me than not, I do not like being in the spotlight. While I've become more comfortable being in front of people in part because of my writing and its related promotion and readings, deep down I'm still an introvert with extrovert flares, as they say. But dreading it as I did, it turned out to be a spec...
Read more

Welcome to Microsoft Support - Part 1

Well, I've had quite a go-around with the fine folks at Microsoft regarding my son's XBOX repair and XBox Live Account over the past week. It has been extremely frustrating and almost comical at times to the point where I said to myself I HAVE to write about this. It will ultimately be therapeutic, so here goes. Ben's xbox , which he purchased with his own money was giving him a strange problem. When he started it up every time, he would get a grey filminess to the screen. We determined that to fix it on our good TV, he had to unplug and then re-plug in the yellow video plug. This didn't seem right to me, so I sent the unit back to MS for repair a few weeks ago. Last week, the unit showed up at our house with a free 30 day trial of XBox Live. This came despite my complaints that we should receive a year free for our trouble, but hey, that's better than nothing. The trial is redeemed in the form of a gift card that has a 25 digit redemption code. So Ben goes on...
Read more