enunciate

So I ran into Starbucks and was making small talk with the girls there, as I do...and I asked the girl how her weekend was...

she said, "Fine."

Then I asked, " No black eyes ?"

And she looked at me really funny so I followed with, " That's great, I like to set the bar really low."

Then she looked at me even funnier and I left.
 

I'm back at my desk and realize that she thought I asked " No Black Guys ?"

I wonder how the coffee at Dunkin Donuts is ?

Pretty funny

Just your typical Wed.

Wednesday night Mike H. and I were scheduled to meet with the executive board of the fire company.  This was the first big meeting where we were to discuss the Township increasing our involvement in the administration of the department and the entire exchange was going to require diplomacy and a deft hand.

Thing started off well.  I made introductions and provided oversight, then I handed things off to Mike who started asking for input.  That's when the chief said, "that's great, but didn't share any of this with any of these guys, so they have no idea what you're talking about."  So while we were there to get information from them to begin our strategic plan, we ended up looking at a table full of blank faces taken totally by surprise.

Then the sirens went off and radio dispatch came through the loudspeakers, " active structure fire Decartes Rd, possible high occupancy residence".

Literally 1 minute later I'm in a vehicle with sirens blaring and flying down to the southern end.  7 minutes later I'm standing in an apartment with a half dozen firemen opening up windows and taking pictures of a burnt stove top.

Eventually we got out of there and started back to the station..then..." station 66 - class 2 vehicle accident Millersville Pike and Schoolhouse Road.  All units on standby, respond".  And so it goes.

Needless to say, meeting cancelled.

After all of the hullabaloo I still hadn't eaten and needed a drink so I took Mike over to the hotel bar Loxleys.  I go to Loxleys for mainly because two of their three bartenders are the best in the county.  One is a good looking, smart-ass chick who makes the best Hendrix martinis, the other is right out of central casting, Scott the bartender/philosopher.  Unfortunately we got bartender #3 - Goofy McDopicus.

Mike went to use the bathroom and I sat down and ordered. " I'll take a Hendrix, rocks, olives and I'll take a McCallans rocks for my partner".

My partner.  OK, not the weirdest thing to say, but the only other people at the bar were these two guys a few stools down and they kinda looked at me funny when I said it. 

So Mike came out of the bathroom and the next five things he said, though benign, sounded to my paranoid ears like RuPaul having drinks with Liberace, " Hey Billy Boy...wanna split something ?  Hey McCallans, a man after my own heart !  God I love this young kid from Ole Miss...a real good looking young player "

So of course I ( holding my martini glass in the manliest of ways) tried to butch it up with a bunch of comments about the hoops game sounding like Bob Costas in a hostage situation, " Yeah, they're gonna fuck those dude's up man !.....Slam motherfuckin Dunk !"  Apparently I think "fuck" to gay people is like holy water to vampires.

Finally one of the two guys at the bar smiled at me and said, " yeah, you're right...that was an NBA three".

Oh cool.  We're cool.  Everything is cool.

10 minutes later one of the two guys got up and left, but the other guy stuck around for one more drink.  At some point I turned toward Mike (whose back was to Mr. NBA 3) to answer a question and the guy stood up, looked over at me, smiled,  tipped his drink, and winked.

Winked ! 

No not something in his eye winked.     Like, " hey why don't you ditch the old queen you're with and meet me outside" wink. 

( Or that's what I suppose it was because, of course, I don't know what gay guys actually say to each other....not that there's anything wrong with that )

My jaw hit the bar and in shock I just started shaking my head in the negative.

Mike looked at me puzzled, but then continued talking.  And with that my new friend went to sit down,  missed his bar stool completely and fell flat on his back onto the bar room floor.

BOOM !

The retarded bartender didn't notice and Mike has his back turned.  The dude then jumped up, looked at me, grabbed his shit off the bar, and ran....stumbling and crashing into the hallway walls the whole way out of sight.

Now, WTF am I supposed to do ?  The dude was obviously hammered.  And he was heading out the parking lot.  So I can't let the guy drive - but if I run out into the parking lot after him, I don't need him pulling his pants down.

I gave a big sigh and interrupted Mike, " hey, that guy at the bar is hammered.  He's heading out to get in a car.  Can you get the manager, I'm going after him ?"

I found the guy in front of the bar trying to light a cigarette. " Hey man.", I got his attention.

" Heeeeeyyyyy", he responded with a smile.

" Oh God....listen...are you driving home ?", I groaned.

" Nooooo", another smile, " I have a room here at the hotel." Oh god it pains me to write that he purred when he said it....purred.

Finally, thankfully, the manager came walking out the door.  It was the third life saving rescue I'd witness that night.

sorcery

My daughter plays on a high level volleyball team for girls 15 and under.  Their coach is a college coach who's previous experience was as an instructor in the Marines.  What he was "instructing" in the Marines was not made clear.

Before the season started Coach B told us a few things straight away..." I'm going to mess with your daughters heads.  We're going to push them when they need to be pushed and we're going to back off when they need room, but we're going to challenge them to get the most out of them."

That was borne out after the third practice when my daughter got in the car and said, " I get the feeling that this guy is messing with my head....but I think I like it".

He warned to, " not talk your daughters about how they played or practiced for at least one hour after they're done."  This was advice I ignored twice, and never again.  I don't know if its good advice in general, or if its simply he doesn't want me tinkering around while he has her head open ( more likely).  Now, when she come out of practice all adrenaline up, I spend the ride home doing nothing other than mentioning positive things about her play and progression and either forcing the conversation to silence or distracting it to non sporting issues.


Finally, he told us , " Boys you can yell at.  Boys can hate each other, but when they step on a court or field of battle they'll give everything for the combined cause, and they're fine going back to hating each other when the game is over.  But girls......girls first need to bond...and it only after they've bonded with each other that they can fight.  And a tight group of girls is a force to be reckoned with."  ( fact that I suppose any of us should have learned in a college bar)

So I've been careful to watch the subtle things that the coach and his staff are doing to bring these girls together.  This is not an easy situation.  These are all super competitive type A girls who are all the best ones on their school teams.   They've almost exclusively played against each other in practice as their first tournament is this upcoming weekend. And they're all fighting each other for starting spots.  Oh and they're all 14 and 15 year-old girls. The situation is potentially as volatile as it gets, and hardly the stuff of sleepovers and pedicures ( I apologize for my obvious lack of understanding of how girls bond).

So what I've seen them be able to do is both frightening and impressive.  I'll give one small example.  At the end of each practice he has the girls go through a post workout stretching routine/ritual.  They were lead through it one time the first day.  After that they're just sent off to the side, in a tight area, to do it themselves while the coaches tend to some other items.  The area that they're sent to in totally contrived....its near their bags ( more on that in a second)...its away from all parents and coaches, and its in a tight space so they have to all get on the floor to stretch, but they're almost on top of each other ( hmmmm sort of like a sleepover).  The "stuff" that the coaches are doing is contrived,  mostly they're doing nothing....but this has forced the girls to come up their own system of who leads the stretches, etc etc.

All of that is obvious.  Its obvious to me anyway, and it seems obvious to the girls...but as I was told, " I know he's messing with me, but I think I like it".  What it does is it provides a safe excuse and a structured format for the girls to interact in a cooperative way all while relaxing physically and emotionally.

But the think that I find most impressive is that the stretching time, and likely its obviousness, is nothing other then a decoy for what he's really doing.  On day one, the coach moved the girls around a couple of times under other auspices, that forced them to carry all of their stuff with them.  When they began practice, instead of each of the girls leaving their clothes and bags and coats with their parents, all that stuff was put together in a corner.  People being creatures of habit, the girls put their stuff there every time now.

The girls stretch right next to their stuff.  So he has them in practice mode, drives them hard, brings them down stretching, isolates them, then tells them that practice is over.....hardly.   With all their stuff right there, and them already sitting down, the girls spend 15 minutes changing, talking, laughing...and that's how every practice ends....bonding.

I think we should all be grateful that Coach B left the Marines for volleyball and not not to start a religious cult....or time share sales.

Slip of the tongue

My son just used the word "poontang" inaccurratly and in the most unfortunate of settings.

Between this and the turkey incident, I can't image Grandma is going to want to stick around much longer.

pretty freakin funny

via Andy Scarpandy

This cold

I have one of the three cold/flu that everyone else seems to have right now.  I've got the version with the slight fever, fatigue, and small cough.  It's bad enough to make me feel lousy, but not so bad that I'm willing to pack it in under the covers.

Basically home bound I was able to get a couple of things done this weekend that I found fun.  The first was that I cleaned out my garage.  The second was that I was able to watch the national cyclo-cross championships.  These two items are not as dissimilar as they might seem.

When cleaning out the garage I came across all the paperwork from when I created the Pennsylvania Cycling Association  www.pacycling.org.  In those files I found old results, emails, and photos from around 1996 and up.  In those days, pre internet, the cycling calendar was disjointed at best.  Basically, you heard about races when attending other races, or when you got VeloNews in newspaper form and were lucky enough that the race hadn't already happened.  I found myself at the center of a perfect storm of cycling popularity and technology, and I was lucky enough to have a lifestyle situation and good people around me, to form the PCA and have it really take off.

In short order we went from no calendar and poor quality races, to a full calendar of excellently run events with good attendance and strong prize lists.    While I provided the framework, it was people like George Theil, Andrew Albright, Mike Kuhn, Mike Hebe, Mike Miller and a half dozen other people name Mike that stepped up to the challenge and the cycling scene here flourished on the road and in cross.

But as with most things in life you get an ebb and a flow.  And while the remnants of the PCA continues to provide a service to the cyclists in the region, and I believe the overall quality of the cyclist scene is better than it had been prePCA, we're far from our high water mark.

I think that ties into what we've witnessed nationally as well.  Cyclo-Cross nationals went well this weekend in Madison.  Cross here is more professional, better organized, and has a higher quality of competition than it did 25 years ago.  But like the PCA, its a far cry from its hey-day with the SuperCup.

I had the good fortune to manage Kopps Cycles in Princeton NJ for a while.  Its the oldest shop in the country, and the Kuhn family has been at the forefront of cycling in this country since the 50s.  I used to be stunned by their nonchalance.

" Hey this is a picture of you and Eddy Merckx !!!!", I'd exclaim.  
" Oh ?  Yeah, I think his wife made stew that day...it was awful". " 

" Is that a picture of Greg Lemond in the shop ?"
" Yeah, nice kid."

But after participating in this sport for the last 25 years, I'm starting to get a better understanding of where they were coming from. 

Cycling in beautiful.  Cycling is shit.  But most of all cycling is eternal.  And though I lack the ability to accurately capture the sentiment, there's clearly something poetic about its cyclical nature.

Later this week Lance is going to go on TV and talk.  Its not going to matter.  And I don't say that because his interview is going to be wordsmithed by lawyers and public relations consultants....that is surely true....but its not going to matter because no matter how much it may have seemed to be the contrary at times....cycling transcends everything.....even Lance.

So take it from a guy who started out as a fan of the Stedina's, Phinney's, Zabel's and Roche's of the world - and is still here to see them come around the second time.  Its all good, it always has been and always will be.