Whew! It's been crazy around here. Baseball season is in full swing, so to speak, and my Bad News Bears (All Grown Up and Extremely Rowdy) have scored almost seventy (that's seven-zero) runs in the first five games, three of which we lost! I am pitching a bunch of boys 'cause the ones coming off of their high school season have sore arms and the rec pitchers haven't thrown in so long, they can't throw too many pitches or they'll get sore arms. The point being to arrive at the play-offs with six pitchers without sore arms. So far, we've proven to be very erratic in the field (I scored nine errors in a game we lost 20-19), but we can hit the ball. We've had seven home runs, one of which my darlin' youngest son hit over the left field fence into the tall pines. I think it landed on the back porch of the fire station.
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Last week we had the pre-trial hearing in The Matter About Which I Cannot Speak. It went very well. Of course, I have no way of knowing how this will unfold, and I confess to being a little bit afraid of knowing what happens next, but after so many years of preparation and build-up, just the movement feels good. I will say that the defendant, a very large corporation, continues to amaze me. They seem to be having a hard time providing us with the information we need to determine damages, which I find shocking because publicly held companies are required to keep financial records. It is my understanding that if we continue without the documentation, the jury will be instructed to presume that it would have been damaging to the defendant, which is fine with me.
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It's looking like I'm taking Friday and Monday off to travel to North Carolina for our oldest son's graduation from UNCW (and his birthday). It's so hard to believe in so many directions. I know it can't have been so long since I moved him into his dorm, or carted him off to Montessori School for that matter. I've made my reservations, although it took me a long time to decide. I chose the less expensive suite hotel in the heart of little Wrightsville Beach rather than the ocean front condo on the very northern end of the island. It took me forever to decide. I love being right on the ocean, and sleeping to its soothing sensual pleasures of sound and wind coming in by way of the balcony, but I also love rolling out of bed in the morning and walking out but a few steps into Wrightsville Beach for coffee and newspaper and people milling about. I also confess that two things made the decision for me: they were down to their last room and they offered free wireless internet. So, that's what it's come to. *sigh*
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The Atlanta Journal and Constitution is doing a long, multi-part (many multi-parts) story on what happened in the hospitals in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the man-made flood that followed her landfall. I am posting links to the three parts that have already been published and suggest that you check them out. I'm afraid that if you want to continue to follow it you will be on your own, but caution that it will be quickly archived and become premium content. I hadn't seen it until someone pointed it out to me, with highest recommendations, but have copied and pasted it so that I can read it later, when I have time. Here are the direct links: Part I, Sunday Part II, Monday Part III, Tuesday
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Finally, we all have dates that stick in our heads, dates like November 22nd or September 11th, and now for so many, August 29th. Then some of us have our own dates, dates not everybody knows and one of mine has always been November 14, 1970. As they say in the USA Today article:
That was the rainy, fog-shrouded Saturday night when the Marshall University football team, having lost to East Carolina and completing a road trip aboard a charter jet for the first time, crashed into an Appalachian hillside near Huntington's Tri-State Airport.
All 75 people aboard the DC-9 — including 37 Thundering Herd players, five coaches and several prominent citizens who were boosters — died in what is still the worst sports-related disaster in U.S. history.
I was not quite seventeen (okay, so now those of you who can add know how *very* old I am), and a senior at Huntington High School in Huntington, West Virginia. I wasn't in town that weekend, because a good friend and I had driven, or rather ridden with her parents (who would have normally traveled with the team), to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to visit our boyfriends at Wake Forest. We learned about the crash on the late news when we returned to our hotel. She and I and our two sweethearts in our room heard it first, as we were eagerly awaiting the score of the Duke game to learn whether or not Wake would win the ACC that year (Duke lost, so they did), before running into her parents' adjoining room with the shocking, heart-breaking news. It's hard to describe what happened next and I don't know how I feel about this becoming a movie, beyond surprise that it has taken so long. Marshall is the beating heart of Huntington and those prominent citizens on the plane left many orphans among my peers. The crash site was there, just outside of town. I still remember the details of the NTSB report, and know the mechanics of the crash by heart: equipment (the DC-9) that was too big for the airport, no working glideslope and a very low ceiling with visibility reduced by a foggy nearly freezing misty rain, a barometric altimeter that was off (as they so often are in inclement weather), a map that listed the height of the last hill on final approach without including the trees on its top, which were clipped by the landing gear causing the chartered Southern Airways DC-9 to cartwheel into the next hillside. I am guessing I will see the movie. Matthew McConaughey, Matthew Fox and David Strathairn are three good reasons why. Still, it makes me sad just to think about it.
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But I will not be sad right now. There is baseball, unseasonably cool weather (summer will be here soon enough) and a college graduation in a lovely coastal town to attend this weekend. We have dinner reservations with other students and other parents at a nice spot on the water near the bridge out to the beach for Friday night. We have a beach party Saturday afternoon and another celebration Saturday evening on a rooftop overlooking historic downtown Wilmington and the senic Cape Fear River. I haven't left Atlanta since March of 2005, the last time I went to New Orleans, and I am very excited.
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Finally (and this time I really mean it), I saw this online this morning and found it amusing. Definition(s) from Netscape: Lingweenie: A person incapable of pronouncing neologisms. (A neologism is a word, term or phrase that has been recently created or coined).
Peace, out, ya'll.
Edit: Here is the permalink to Part IV of Hell and High Water. Part V.
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