Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

The Narrow World of Sports

I'm spending most of the weekend at RFK, mostly because I don't want to miss any send-off that the team might end up giving Frank Robinson.

Even before the Nats had played a game, my brother-in-law, life-long Baltimore fan, had told me that Robinson's flaw was that he runs the pitchers into the ground. Even though I still don't know baseball too well, I sort of see where BIL is coming from...but on the other hand, I'd love to see a bullpen of pitchers tough enough to play like that.

I think not understanding baseball is why I'm still as in love with the Nats as I was last year. I'm naive. I forget they are in last place. It's like watching the Caps when I was eight years old; I don't know any better. And with my combination of naivete and sentimentality, I love Frank and I wish they'd extend his contract. With an owner's money to spend, a GM could work with him to find players who respected and understood Frank's way, and maybe that could be a great club...

But I guess that's not happening, so I hope at least they retire #20 and make a huge fuss.

I am actually going to miss the Caps home opener this year, because I'll be out of town for that century bike ride. Remember how I said I was wimping out to do the metric (62 miles; i.e., 100 km)? Well, I haven't trained worth squat. The metric is going to kill me. And to make it uglier, I found out yesterday that the metric route is really 69.2 miles. I know seven miles doesn't sound like much, but once your untrained ass has been on a saddle all day, seven more miles can make you weep.

Wonder how I could score some of that dope everybody's been talking about?

Actually, I probably would have written pages about cycling and doping this summer, but I was too absorbed with my aunt's death. The quick summary of how I feel about what's up is: Lots of questions about Floyd's positive (testosterone wouldn't have helped him win that stage anyway, it was the stage 16 bonk, not the stage 17 win, that was the aberrant ride for him), I don't think it is a French anti-American conspiracy, Dick Pound is a jackass, I'm glad Frankie came clean. I doubt the extent of who-took-what-when will ever be known, and I don't think that the overall standings the last ten years have really been affected by the doping.

Football (the Redskins and the Terps, that is) has been giving me headaches so far this season, so that's it from my narrow world of sports.

Food for thought

I made pörkölt tonight. As it happens, I just scanned my aunt's handwritten recipe to send to my cousin. I don't make it the same way my aunt did...I don't even spell it right. (Looks like in Hungarian you don't have an r in it.)

It made me think of a passage from a book I just read, Heat by Bill Buford. In fact, I read it on the trip, so family and food for on my mind then, too. (Betta is the Italian woman who taught Buford how to make pasta by hand, the way her aunts taught her.)

But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I'm back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can't hear any more, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

More pictures

So much easier than writing.

This is what I do at wedding receptions when other people are dancing. (I would rather have my feet cut off than dance.) I used a spoon as a tripod so I could manage a long exposure without too much shake. Next thing I knew, everybody was trying to take candle pictures.

Get well soon, Nick

I had the Nats game on the radio yesterday, so I didn't see Austin Kearns and Nick Johnson collide...but even on the radio the gravity was obvious. I did eventually go turn on the tv, and you could tell by Jose Vidro's reaction that he'd heard something awful. (Jose immediately started waving to the dugout; it reminded me of when Joe Thiesman's leg was broken; wasn't it Harry Carsons who waved the trainer over the second he heard the break?)

Damn, damn. I try not to get too attached to players, because having a favorite will only break your heart later, but how can you not love Nick Johnson?

I haven't been able to find any news yet this morning about the outcome of the surgery he had last night. I know it will be a tough rehab, but he's a tough guy. I wish him the best.

Two minutes for elbowing

(I finally got my mom to download her pictures.)

It's better than it looks

This is poutine:

I was skeptical...a mixture of french fries, cheese curds, and brown gravy didn't sound like a winning combination...but I also wanted The Canadian Experience.

(Ok, I fudged the Experience a little...I heard about some places in Quebec to go to get good poutine, but the rest of my family wasn't as into it as I was. I couldn't even convince them to go a kilometer or two out of the way so I could go to Harvey's. So I got my poutine at a cart, and a cart of the Ontario side of the river at that.)

I gotta say, if this is bad poutine, I need to go back for good poutine.

But the Pogo...no. Never again.

Le Rocket

So somebody at work said "Did you take your camera to Canada, Nic?"

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Did I take my camera to Canada? What do you think?

Two hundred and thirty five pictures later she was wishing she hadn't asked. I'll spread it out here, though, since it'll give me six months of posts.

Dim the lights, the slide show is starting:

This is the "Never Give Up!" monument to Maurice Richard.

Don't touch my bags if you please, Mr. Customs Man

ByWard Market in Ottawa had stall after stall of fruit and vegetables, but I don't think you can take plant products over the border. (I was tempted, very tempted, to smuggle some spinach, though.) I wasn't sure if cheese was legal, either, especially unpasturized cheese. So I had to stick to the junk food culture.

"Do you have anything in the car now that you didn't have when you left the U.S.?"

Lemme see...half a bottle of Coke Diète, a box of Timbits, four boxes of Smarties, a bag of Mars bars, an Aero bar, and a box of maple biscuits.

I didn't think poutine would travel.

The GF remains enigmatic

Victor here, posting some pictures the gf sent to me from the road at her request. Sadly, she neglected to give me upload rights.

*sigh*

Still, I'll do my best. The first picture was taken outside of Dillsburg, PA, and it's a great view of (I'll do my best here) her father's right arm on the steering wheel, with an even better view of his forehead in the rear-view mirror. It seems to be farmland beneath the mirror, or a housing development, or perhaps a river (lousy VGA resolution camera picture!), and to the right is the passenger-side headrest. Believe you me, my description does not do this picture justice.

Second is a picture of the top of a Subway sub shop in Watertown NY. I confess this one has me a bit puzzled; there are Subway shops in Maryland, too.

Finally, a box of Timbits. These seem to come in boxes of ten, which explains why Americans, with their boxes of a dozen, are fatter than Canadians. The quantity is given in French ("boîte de 10") which is kinda funky if you run it thru Bable Fish using an English keyboard which doesn't have that bizarre "î" character. Spell it "boite de 10" and it's translated as "limp of 10" which I find hilarious.

Also, Nic claims Tim Horton's coffee is better than 7-11 coffee, an idea which just turns my world upside down.

UPDATE: I used the incredible power of my massive mind and came up with a way to get them posted. Just to make this a game, I'll post them in an order different from my description, and you try to figure out what order they go in. It's fun!

Take off, eh?

I wanna go to Tim Horton's. And since there aren't any in Maryland...

road trip.

Saw this too late

I'm back from my conference. It was really good this year, but since I belong to a fairly obscure profession, I won't bother to talk about it. Every time I mention it at home, Victor's eyes glaze over and he falls into a state just short of coma.

Speaking of Victor, he sent me a recipe for SPAM Primavera. This confused me a lot until I realized that the Gmail spam folder links you to SPAM recipes (mine was Creamy SPAM Broccoli Casserole, which sounds frighteningly similar to a dish I loved as a kid that my mom made with canned corned beef.)

He is always pointing out the suff on Google that I miss, like odd stories about cats driving cars or the links on "How-To of the Day." Take today's How-To, for instance: How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger.

We will honor them by remembering their lives...

Lillian Caceres

I can tell you some facts about Lillian Caceres.

Lillian Caceres, age 48, was at work for Marsh & McLennan in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

She had a daughter named Joanna.

She was a devoted Christian.

I found these facts, and others, researching this tribute. There is more...an article in the Staten Island Advance talks about how Ms. Caceres played the role of an angel in a church play the night before she died.

There are the words of her friends and family on memorial pages, like the Marsh & McLennan's online memorial.

I've composed a dozen e-mails to Ms. Caceres' family, to see if there's anything they'd like me to say about her, but I haven't sent a single one. I'm too afraid that I might inadvertantly cause them more pain.

I've also been looking at her picture , wondering what she would want us to remember.

Her faith, I think, is the salient thing that I kept seeing in her tributes. I keep imagining the scene in the church play where the angel leads the people away, and remembering the lines from On Eagles' Wings, the song version of Psalm 91:

For to His angels He's given a command,
To guard you in all of your ways,
Upon their hands they will bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.

And He will raise you up on eagle's wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.

Tomorrow

I'll be in a hotel conference room tomorrow, a hotel in Arlington from which you can see the Pentagon.

In 2001, the conference was in the same hotel, but a few weeks later. The Pentagon Metro station was still closed, and every morning that week when the train rolled through I would close my eyes.

My ex-husband, a DoD contractor, wasn't in the Pentagon office on the 11th. My brother's first girlfriend, whose office was in the D ring, was out on maternity leave. My dad, frequent business traveller, had not been flying. All my family and friends were safe, and three weeks after I was still grateful and amazed and intensely aware that the commuter in the seat next to me might not have been so fortunate.

Earlier this summer, blogger D.Challener Roe had an idea: recruit a blogger to pay tribute to each victims of the September 11 attacks, so that on this fifth anniversary there would be 2,996 memorial posts.

My post for tomorrow will be that tribute.

And I'll be thinking of everyone when I roll through the Pentagon Metro station tomorrow morning.

As a P.S.: There is one victim I had met, hockey player Ace Bailey, about whom I wrote last year.

Cross training

My heart rate was 152 while I was swinging, so I think it counts.

Actually the training I should concentrate on now is butt-on-bike time. The century is October 7, and the training plan went out the window in July when my aunt got bad. In August I did much more packing and moving of boxes than riding, and the 44 miles I did last week hurt. like. hell.

I need to be realistic: a century is not in the cards this year. Instead I'll shoot for the metric (64 miles) and hope that that doesn't kill me. All I did today (besides swing on the empty playground) was 10 miles. Tomorrow through Wednesday I'm at a conference, and Friday through Monday I'll be in Canada (without a bike.) I have my fingers crossed for good weather the following two weekends, but I'll see what happens.

You can plan a route down to the inch, but you better be ready for detours. At this point, any detour that doesn't involve actually attending a funeral can't upset me too much...and if I see an empty playground, I'm stopping for it.

We'll always have Insalata Caprese

This summer wasn't the best I've ever had. I know a lot of other people had worse, though.

I'm trying to keep things in perspective. Ebb and flow, good and bad, sunrise and sunset.

My friend Bill loved insalata caprese. At his funeral a few weeks ago his wife mentioned that, said something about how when Costco started selling buffalo mozzarella it was the happiest day of his life.

There are a hundred things a day that remind me of my friends and family who have died. There's the family heirloom kitchen gear I've mentioned so often, but other people and other things, like hearing my friend Scott's favorite song on the radio like I did on the way home last night. It made me realize that it's been 16 years since he died. He's been gone longer than I knew him, but it's surprising how often I think about him.

And when I do think about him now, I don't choke up, at least not usually.

This is what the grief counselors said: One day you'll realize you remembered and it didn't make you cry. Then you can savor the memory.

That's the entrepenerial spirit

Seen along the Western Maryland Rail Trail:

And better yet:

Rainout

Tonight's Nationals-Diamondbacks game scheduled to begin at 7:05 p.m. at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., has been postponed due to rain.

I kinda had a feeling that was going to be the case.

This is just the Nationals' second rainout at RFK Stadium since the franchise relocated from Montreal following the 2004 season.

Wouldn't ya know, I had tickets to them both.

Well, at least this time I found out before driving to RFK.