The Adrenalin Keeps You Going

22 March 2015

I was favorably impressed at how much Brianna's baseball playing abilities have improved in a year.  (Photo by her other grandma)

We went to her softball game today and she is one of the best hitters on the team and definitely one of the best runners (this may be, Laurel tells me, because when you misbehave in her classroom, you have to run laps on the school playground, so she's had lots of practice!)  In fact, after being "scouted," she was just picked to be a substitute on another team, so she may end up playing two games on some Saturdays.

But all the girls on her team have learned how to play their various positions, most can hit a pitched ball and they were all head and shoulders above their opposing team today.

Many have not played T-ball, so this is their first experience with baseball.  Bri, who was on the  all-boys T-ball team last year, has a leg up on all of the girls who are just learning the game.

I had to laugh at the other team, though.  Their girls wore pink batting helmets, used pink bats and many had pink shoes.  The smallest on their team makes diminutive Bri look big and she was so small that whenever she swung the bat, it pulled her around in a circle with it!  Such fun!

 

Tom was one of the coaches (3rd base),  This is a job he was destined to do...coach his child's sports team...and he was in his glory.

 After the game, we went to our respective homes and napped, then regrouped at Tom and Laurel's for a family birthday party for Bri, who turns 7 next week.  She had party games, like Limbo

 

...and demonstrations of feats of strength.

 

Everyone had to perform, and some of the "acts" were hilarious (especially Auntie Nan as a cheerleader).  Then it was time to make pizza and pasta.  Bri is getting to be an old hand at making pasta.

 

Even Grandma got to test her hand at making pasta.

 

As for Lacie, she is very particular about how pepperoni is arranged on her pizza.

 

Our dinner was not only beautiful, but delicious too.

 

After dinner there was music.  Brianna is learning to play the bass guitar and she and Jeri did some jammin' 

 

 

And, of course, since this was a birthday party, the evening ended with cake.

 

I don't know how those girls kept going through the busy day they had.  The adults were exhausted.  Bri finally hit the wall around 9 and we took our cue and came home to collapse ourselves.

Where's the Lotus?

San Francisco radio personality, Don Sherwood, used to end his program with a saying I just loved: Out of the mud grows the lotus.

For Donnie-Babe, who had more "do-yourself-in" / comeback episodes than Lindsay Lohan, it was the perfect mantra. He found himself in the mud more times, and somehow, miraculously came up smelling like...well...a lotus. We loved him.

I actually fantasized about writing a book about Sherwood and it would, of course, have been called "Out of the Mud Grows the Lotus." But Laurie Harper, the wife of his friend Hap Harper beat me to it in 2003 and I can't argue with the title she chose for her book, which probably sold more books than my obscure title would have!

I'm kind of feeling like I'm wallowing around in that mud right now and I'm wondering when I'm going to find the lotus. (or as the saying goes--with all this shit around, surely there's a pony somewhere!)

Everything bad going on around me is happening to somebody else, but it's all I can think about. My body feels like it's moving through mud. I went to lunch with the friend I lunch with twice a month and I would find myself staring off into space, not in the conversation, wondering when we are going to hear about Nora's or Kathy's death.

I sat down to write letters this morning, the thing I love doing, and words wouldn't come.

Everything seems like an effort and I spend a lot of time just bent over, holding myself and uttering a quiet expletive.

I've been here before and I know the feeling, but it still sucks. What's worse is feeling guilt about thinking about me when everything that is bad right now is happening to someone else.

Kathy continues to beat the odds. "She looks the best I have seen her look in months," her daughter wrote this afternoon, "although her grasp on reality is continuing to slip away. As far as what this means for her prognosis, we have been told anything from weeks to years. Kathy continues to defy the textbook definition of anything and to wish for an end to all of this. For now we take comfort in knowing how well cared for and safe she is."

Nora's daughter writes, "Mum hasn't let go. It's tough but we are all with her. I told her you sent your love. Not sure whether she still hears or understands. Will let you know but it is very close now."

These are two very tough, very determined women and they will obviously leave this world on their own terms. But the waiting is hard on everyone. Still they are both surrounded with people who love them and what more could one ask at the end of one's life?

But there are diversions. We took Ned out to dinner for his birthday this evening and had a good time. I ordered ranch house onion rings, those tiny slivers of onions...actually pretty much fried fat with a touch of onion attached. Walt actually ate some and so did Marta--and they both hate onions.

It was a good evening and I hope Ned and Marta had a good time.

Over the Top

If you want to make yourself really sick, go to this page of the San Francisco Chronicle and read the story of the first episode of a TLC television program called "Outrageous Kid Parties." This is not a show that I intend to watch, especially after seeing the two brief videos that are posted on the web page along with the article.

In this kick-off episode, the mother of a six year old girl spends ... THIRTY TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS to throw a ... well, "lavish" hardly seems a proper word ... party for her daughter's sixth birthday.

The party started with spending $3,000 for hand made invitations made to look like medieval scrolls, delivered by the guest of honor's older brother, who, for a mere $100, dressed as a jester to make the deliveries.

The little girl arrives at her party in a horse-drawn carriage that looks like Cinderella's pumpkin chariot and she is accompanied by her friends, who are all dressed in what looks like baby wedding garb.

There is a troup of dancers who perform and I don't know what else (because I only watched the brief film clip) and the child of the hour seems to be having a great time until they bring in the birthday cake, which is at least three times taller than any cake I ever baked when I was doing cakes. I didn't look closely, but it may have been a duplication of the Cinderella castle in Disneyland. But at the top of this gargantuan cake was a life size bird, which I imagine was fashioned out of cake and gum paste and which looked not only life size, but life LIKE. When the little girl saw it, she burst into tears because the bird was purple and it was supposed to be blue.

This would hit me wrong at any time, but on the day after I heard from Fred that they spent the family's Christmas present on rice so they could bury his little sister just made it that much more disturbing. Fred is an about-to-be 8 year old who has never had a birthday cake because his family can't afford it. (I'll bet HE wouldn't cry if a damn cake bird was the wrong color!)

$32,000 is an amount of money I can't even fathom spending for a child's party. Obviously these people are rich enough to afford it (though the article says that the mother tried to lie to her husband and let him know the party only cost $15,000), and who am I to tell rich folks how to spend their money. But...$32,000...????

We have had lots of parties, some of them quite good, if I do say so myself, and none of them came in at even triple, let alone quintuple digits. We had a Star Trek party for Tom's birthday one year where I made a tribble cake and cut out Spock ears for "Pin the Ears on Spock" and made cloth tribbles that they could throw at Klingons. Nobody complained that it wasn't fancy enough.

There was the Tom Sawyer party for Ned, where I let the kids paint the back fence with tempura paint and then strip and play in the wading pool. It was the perfect idea, with lots of mess and no complaints abouat clean up, until I found out that tempura paint soaks into wood grain. I think the stuff they painted on that fence was still there when we sold the house.

We used the nursery school to do a pirate party where the kids got head scarves for a party favor and they did things in the playground like digging for chocolate "dubloons" as buried treasure. They wore eye patches and carried cardboard swords, walked the plank and said "arrrghh" a lot.

For Jeri's birthday one year, I taught the girls how to make sugar eggs (the kind that you build scenes inside and then look through a hole to see the scene). Everyone had a great time and I think that replacing the linoleum with Pergo finally got rid of the last of the sugar on the floor. But it was great fun.

We had a Superheroes party for Ned on year and I made a Superman cake and all the games were geared toward super heroes.

We had scavenger hunts and pizza parties, where each guest got to build his/her own pizza. Once in awhile we took a group to a real pizza parlor, but mostly we did things at home that were fun and didn't cost a mint.

I know kids' parties aren't like that now, but I don't see the need to put yourself into hock or to play the game of one-upsmanship just for a child's birthday. I would rather see children appreciating what they have and not crying because the damn bird on the multi-thousand dollar cake was the wrong color.