Sort of a Schedule

I hope to finalize the REAL schedule by the end of the week. Sorry, but I have some balls in the air that are making it unrealistic to assign real times as yet, but they should clear up soon.

For now here is a loose guideline of the potential for work out dates through the winter.

We have rented RIPS, down by the airport in Burien for the following Sundays from noon to 4:00. Our team will have rotating 2 hour blocks in this schedule and will perhaps have a weekend off in each month. We will go from noon to 2:00 or 2:00 to 4:00 the following weeks.

Nov: 7, 14, 21

January: 9,16,23,30

February 6,13,20,27

Sorry for My Poor Communication of Late

Sorry for the late notice of no practice this weekend.  I really should have got this word out sooner so you could have all made plans for an open weekend.

My lame excuse is that I am a CPA.  Although I no longer work for a CPA firm and am just an in-house guy for one company, my day job was CRAZY this week.  We had to wrap up our 401K audit and finalize the form 55oo and have them completed by Friday, Oct 15.  That and I still do the returns for myself and about three deadbeat friends ALL of whom wait until the last minute and give me a shoe box full of receipts and expect me to work a miracle and get them a refund.  My wife is self employed and her idea of getting me her tax information is that she has until 8:00 pm on the 15th, since I have until midnight to file.  And I am even powerless to snoop and just take it over as her business and all her information is in French and as you all have come to realize by now; I struggle with English!

That said, I love her dearly and worship the ground she walks on, but grrrr her sense of time and her bookkeeping skills cause me internal strife.

As we begin our winter workout - with an official real dependable schedule that will only be changed when you least expect it - you will note that we will go once a week hitting at RIPS (which is out in Burien) for two hour blocks of time.  Our times will vary between Noon to 2:00 and 2:00 to 4:oo.  Most likely our time will coincide with Seahawk games which will be either good or bad news (it is too early in their season to know just yet).  And we will go three weeks on with one week off on a four week rotation.  I thought it would be nice to have a weekend off every so often.  

Again this will start 11/7, we will shut down the week of Thanksgiving and start up again the second week of January.  We will repeat this three weeks on one week off until March and then we brace ourselves for Seattle weather and start practicing on a diamond a couple of times a week.

We will be having a mandatory parent meeting on November 7.  Jamie and Karen will be in town.  They would like to meet you all, discuss expectations of parents and players and do an  overall welcome to MBC.  The time of this meeting and its location will be know soon.

God bless google. I read many poems as a young man. I loved to read, and surprisingly I loved to read a good poem. But like the people in my life, I am not too good with names. I read things, get into discussions about them and am at a loss when one asks me who the author is. And now, as an older man, a man in such awe of those who write so well, for those who capture life in words so well, I am embarrassed that I typically do not know the author.

But google has changed that for me. Now I remember just tiny pieces of what I read many years ago, type the phrase into google and I get the author, complete works, and I even get things they wrote that I neglected to read at my younger age. As a young man my reading was undisciplined, haphazard in both what I randomly got my hands on, or what some wonderful English teacher put into my hands; thank you Miss Pesnell (of Memphis), Mr. McCamey (misspelled I am sure of Seattle) and Mr. McFarlane (of Seattle; and who in order to suck up to Peggy not too long ago pretended that SHE was his favorite student and not me).

But I have now discovered that Carl Sandburg wrote many of my favorite poems, and here is a good one.

Thank you Carl Sandburg!

A Father To His Son

A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?'

Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.'
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.

'Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.'
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.

A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.

Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.

Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.

Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.

Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.

Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.

He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.

RAINOUT

Due to considerable conflicts for attendance, the forecast of rain, the actual rain falling at the time of this message and the BIG LARGE LETTERS on top of the current calendar (i.e. OCTOBER) I am cancelling the practice for Saturday Morning at 10:00AM

Please email that you have the word, I will start calling people at 9:00 AM tomorrow if I haven't heard from you.

And I am not real good at this, but it sure would be nice if some activist among us developed a phone tree system for situations just like this!