October Dispatches 10/30/05

My middle son has a close friend from high school named Patrick Fitzgerald. He has another named Andrew Card. I couldn't make this stuff up. Unfortunately, most of his close friends are away at college while he's Katrinad home for a semester. I think he's lonely and really misses New Orleans and all of his school friends (and The Boot). *********** My youngest son's Fall Ball team won the "Championship" but it was a bit hollow, because, after getting our rears kicked in the "Upper Tier" all season, we were moved down to the "Lower Tier" for the playoffs, to the chagrin of all the other teams in the Lower Tier. It sucked and we pretty much rolled over everybody, even "holding back" in the final game (didn't use our ace left-handed pitcher in an 11-4 victory over old friends). Still, we got t-shirts proclaiming us "2005 Fall Ball Champions". Each player got one, as did both field coaches and I. It's time now for him to play basketball for his school. I am really, really looking forward to that. There, I am just a spectator. *********** My blog looks like crud. I have tried to straighten it up a bit but can't seem to find my way around the new system. My blog board has this strange font (have no idea where that came from) and I don't seem to be able to fix it, at least not the old way. Hell, I seem to have very little control over font, generally. I would love to use a new template built with FrontPage but can't seem to get it properly uploaded and just haven't looked hard enough to see if the proper extensions exist to do this or if there's some way around it. They do appear to offer some ability to upload templates from another source, but I don't know the nature of the File Transfer Protocol. I, of course, haven't a clue what I'm doing with any of this. I can't even seem to load any of the blog-city offered templates saved as mine. I've always redecorated on a regular basis, even if it was just by changing the colors around, but it's much harder than it used to be (at least for me). I know the directions are here somewhere, but I have have so little time for this anyway, that I have just let it go until now. Advice welcome. Also, when I blog from home (on My G4 PowerBook using Safari), I don't see any of the MSWord-like options. Zero. Zip. Nada. If I want to bold or italicize or put in a link (or have a paragraph break, for that matter), I have to type in the commands myself and they don't always work. When I'm on the PC at work, it's much easier, but still very, very imperfect. Forget trying to compose and Word, then copy and paste into here. It comes out like a bucket of Louisiana Pinks. *********** I wore my youngest son's catcher's gear to a Halloween Party last night. It was great. I wore his uniform pants and the left-over extra jersey, conveniently, number 13. I wore his hockey mask, chest protector and shin guards, including Knee Savers. It was obviously, well-used (lots of baseball dirt). I was told by my friend who stopped by to help me with it before we went out that it was not detectable to anyone but me, but from inside it was vaguely, er, aromatic. It was hard to drink and eat with the mask on, but I could cock it up onto my forehead to nibble and I could sip using a straw. It was, oddly enough, a blast to wear while dancing! I had a great time. The band was fabulous and there were so many funny costumes among good friends. *********** I know I swore off talking about politics here, but it's gotten pretty ugly recently. It's sad, sad business in Washington, these days, if what appears to have happened, actually did. I dunno, but if the White House (or the Vice President's office) really did what some people seem to believe they did, and they intentionally outed a deep undercover CIA operative to the press to somehow discredit her husband's position that there were no WMDs in Iraq, WHAT IN THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?????