So you wanna be a roller derby star, part II

The Dark Side: front: Queen Myradala (Myra Maines), Darth Mel (Mel Content), Darth Tater (Norma Lee Wright), Indy Sith (Indy Cent), Nina Millimeter. Back: Yvette YourMaker, Sargentina, Sonya MouthShut, Chuck Yeah!!!, Go-Go Hatchet, Sassy Squash, Anne Akin (Anne Arkie), Carnage Wilson (bench coach), Tori Adore.

Well, the bout was Saturday. It was a blast, I got to dress up as Darth Vader, I really liked the gals on the team, and it was very educational. Unfortunately, my theory proved wrong, or at least incomplete. We were outscored pretty significantly, which caused me to revise my view: I still think that a strong defensive team can shut down a good jammer, but, what I failed to take into account is, a good jammer is an individual, and a strong defense is a group that has to work together and all be on the same page strategically, so having a total of zero full-team practices pretty much precluded my defensive powerhouse of skaters from two different teams becoming a well-oiled machine by the time of the bout.

A friend of mine is working on a board game version of roller derby to be played with dice, and I've been thinking about the mechanics of the game. Something that may be unique to roller derby versus other sports is that both teams are playing offense and defense simultaneously. In most sports, there's a clear demarcation as to what role the players have at any given time---even if it may change often based on one team stealing the ball or puck from the other, at any given moment, the players are either on offense or defense. But in roller derby, any player can be doing either (or both) at any moment. It makes strategy a real challenge. I didn't have much opportunity to really talk strategy with the skaters but I'm hoping to do so in the future.

Now that the local league season is over, the All Stars take center stage. The Windy City Rollers are a league, and have multiple teams that play each other, but they also have a "travel team" made of the best players from all the local teams, and that team takes on the travel teams of other leagues around the country. The schedule has not been set yet but they will play a number of bouts over the remainder of the year, culminating with the national tournament in November.

This year brings a new twist. The All Stars are one of the top teams in the country, and are competitive with the best other leagues from major metropolitan areas. But there are a number of other leagues in smaller cities, or just less-established or less-accomplished, and it doesn't make sense from either perspective for the All-Stars to play those leagues' teams. Well, for the first time this season, the WCR is putting together an official second travel team, which will (a) provide an opportunity for WCR skaters to skate against teams they might not otherwise, and (b) give up-and-coming skaters experience in inter-league competition, and keep them skating competitively throughout the rest of the season.

Many of the Dark Siders, including Kelly (Mel Content) are going to be on the "B" team, so I am looking forward to their bouts. Of course I'm also looking forward to the All Stars bouts, too.

According to scuttlebutt, a number of prominent skaters will be retiring from the league after this season. Skaters seem to have a half-life in the league of about three or four years. I'm sort of amazed that skaters at the very top of their game would walk away, as seems to be happening in several cases if rumors are true, but I'm sure there are dynamics at work in the roller derby world that are unlike other sports---they are not paid, and to compete at the top level of the sport (and the really good skaters in the WCR are definitely there) places serious demands on a skater's time. Flat-track roller derby is relatively new and has changed a lot since it started (it was resurrected from the corpse of old-school banked-track roller derby in 2003, and just started in Chicago in 2004) and it's still evolving---this year is bringing a substantial revision to the rules. So perhaps the game is moving away from what brought some of the relative veterans into it. I have heard that over the first few years it became much more athletically-focused than when it started, but most of the reported retirees are excellent athletes, so I don't think that's it. I wonder if it may be a case of no more worlds left to conquer. It will be interesting to see if the next generation of skaters---the women who have been skating for just a couple years---stick with it longer, or if they start bowing out in another year or two.

In the mean time: it's been fun to be a fan, and it was fun to be a sort-of coach, and I'm eager to see what happens next. I know I'm not going to be a skater! Other than that, who knows?

So you wanna be a roller derby star...

Followers of this blog may remember this post from last year, about my friend and bandmate Kelly joining the Windy City Rollers, the local roller derby league. (Or, you can read it now.) Since then I have indeed attended a number of bouts, along the way gaining a better understanding of how the sport works, and getting to know the skaters in the league (their on-track incarnations, anyway). It's been a lot of fun.

The WCR is an all-volunteer organization: everybody from the skaters, to the officials, to the stats people and scorekeepers, to the folks who set up and take down the track, donates his or her time because they like the sport and the league. I think it would be fun and interesting to get involved somehow but this year so far has been pretty hectic and weird, and I have not been in a position to commit the time to another activity. So, I've just been a fan. (They also serve who only sit and cheer.)

But then a few weeks ago I heard about something that sounded right up my alley. At the end of the local league season, the two top teams play for the coveted Ivy King Cup. Rather than having the other teams play a meaningless consolation bout, the skaters who are not on the teams playing in the championship go into a draft pool, and the league auctions off the opportunities to coach two teams that the winners get to draft from that pool. The proceeds to to help Tequila Mockingbird, a skater who was seriously injured a couple years ago. What a great chance to get involved, on a finite basis, learn more about the game, meet some interesting people (and they are an interesting bunch) and help out a good cause! So I bid on and won the chance to coach the black team in the black-vs-white scrimmage.

I'm posting this before the bout, but I figure the odds of anybody who (a) doesn't already know and (b) would have any surprises spoiled or (c) could give any advantage to the other team seeing this are vanishingly small, so...

I drafted a pretty solid team, I think---I went with defense over offense and I hope that turns out to have been an astute plan, but the girls seem confident and in the regular season there seemed to be some sort of correlation between how well the teams did and how strong their defense was. In some cases I went with spunk and verve over prominence and experience---I drafted gals that I stood out to me during the season for being in the middle of things and mixing it up. In anything like a draft, it's easy to think woulda-shoulda-coulda but in retrospect, the more I think about it, the happier I have been with this team---in just about every situation where I think back and ponder, "Well, I could have taken Skater X instead of Skater Y," I'm pretty happy now that I have Skater Y on my team---I wouldn't want to give her up to get Skater X, and that's really what it boils down to.

So we had to come up with a team concept, and there were a few floating around, and I came up with several, but the one the gals latched onto was "The Dark Side," with a Star Wars theme. Perhaps because I told them that if we went with that one I would wear a Darth Vader costume when we came out for the bout. In any event, a number of them took that idea and ran with it. Our opponents took the name "White Zombies", which I like to say is appropriate because they are dead, and just don't know it.

I went to scrimmage on Monday and met most of the women who will be on my team, and got a little taste of what it's like on the bench during a bout, as we went up against the Manic Attackers, one of the teams playing in the championship bout. I think I can get the hang of it eventually, but fortunately one of the veteran bench coaches from the Fury will be there to help with calling line-ups---we planned out line-ups that will hopefully be balanced and get everyone into the game, but once people start getting penalties, the set line-ups go out the window, and I'm not entirely sure how to deal with the ensuing chaos.

But I like my team, I think we have a very good chance of winning, and I think we are going to have a lot of fun in any event. One thing this has made me realize is how little I really grasped about strategy etc. even though I watched every bout this year. I will certainly be a more educated spectator going forward. And I wouldn't mind helping out on a more regular basis as a volunteer, if my life calms down enough to make that practical.

I'll post an update after the bout.

Just checking in

I note that it's been a while since I posted anything. When I started this blog, I was hoping to have approximately weekly posts, then I sort of settled for approximately monthly posts, which I justified to myself by trying to write longer, "essay" sort of posts rather than "Gee the weather is great today" type posts. But on the assumption that a few people check in here from time to time, I figured I ought to put something up to remind everyone that this blog is still a going concern.

It has been pretty hectic lately. Most significantly, my father-in-law, Paulis Anstrats, died on May 21. He had been pretty sick for several months and we all knew it was coming, just not exactly when. He was a neat guy, and I will miss him. He came over from Latvia after WWII and went from being a penniless refugee to a college professor---he taught German, world literature, and western civilization at DePaul for almost 30 years, but he retired in 1990 so I never knew Dr. Anstrats the professor, but he did love literature and words, and tended to illustrate his conversation with references to books. He was a smart, clever guy, and his coversations tended to be entertaining. He and my wife, his only child, were very close. He appreciated good beer and a nice Gewurztraminer or Riesling.

He died right before the Memorial Day holiday weekend, which pushed off the funeral activities for a few days, so we had more time than usual to fret over everything. This was my first experience preparing for a wake and funeral (when my sister died, her husband and his family handled just about everything, I think---in any event, I wasn't involved). There are certain elements of the funeral process that are a total racket, but actually, to a large extent, I think it is money well spent to pay a funeral director to deal with a lot of the details. But if I see this coming regarding myself or anyone else close to me, I will seek out a deal on a casket well before it's actually needed. In general I think the funeral people who handled my father-in-law's arrangements did a great job and I would not hesitate to work with them again, but I think my mother-in-law got taken to the cleaners with the casket.

Then, on the heels of all that activity, we had two friends come to visit over the weekend. I have a lot of great friends here in town, and I'm very grateful for that, but I've also had a lot of very good friends who have moved away. So it just so happened that two of them, to whom I had issued vague standing invitations to visit, came to town at the same time, and rather than have to tell one of them that we couldn't put them up, we had them both come over. I was a little concerned but they got along fine. So from Thursday night to Sunday morning we were pretty much on the go a lot, including a group outing to the Roller Derby Saturday night, which was a good call because both bouts were fantastic---in the first bout, we saw the no-longer-hapless Manic Attackers come back from a 45 point deficit to beat the defending-champ Hell's Belles, and in the second bout, the heretofore-winless Fury ("our" team by virtue of our friend Kelly (aka Mel Content) being a member) took control early on and managed to hold on and eke out a victory in the last bout of the season, which besided being a great bout (a real nail-biter) was great to see, and I'm glad we were there.

Then a few hours after our guests left, our book club met. This month's book was Lady Chatterly's Lover by D. H. Lawrence, which unfortunately I didn't get to read because, you know, I was sort of busy. But it prompted a pretty active discussion.

Meanwhile, another one of my friends has a kid who has taken up Magic: The Gathering, a game I once was a minor master of. So I'm hoping I can go visit them some time soon. And the Xylenes are working towards another performance---we found a single weekend in July when everyone seems to be available, so I sure hope we can get a gig set up then.

Not a dull moment around my house. I'm hoping for some, but I'm not sure when that can happen.

Fun at WhiskeyFest

Last week my dad and I went to WhiskeyFest Chicago. There are two aspects to WhiskeyFest: first, there's the big room where lots of distilleries have booths at which you can sample their wares, including often rare and expensive spirits that might be impossible to find in bars and prohibitively expensive to gamble on buying a bottle of. Over the years I've kind of figured out what I like and there were largely the usual suspects present (the show this year was smaller than it had been in the past) but I still found some pretty cool stuff I hadn't tried before (Aberfeldy 21-year-old single malt Scotch, for instance) and some interesting new expressions of old favorites (Highland Park15-year-old Scotch, or Pappy Van Winkle 20 year old bourbon). The whiskey world is not really that big, and after a while one gets to recognize a number of usual suspects. The other aspect of WhiskeyFest is the speakers. This, to me, is the real attraction. Various figures of the whiskey world talk about what they're doing or aspects of whiskey production.

Dad and I caught two of them: first, we heard Craig Beam, master distiller from Heaven Hill (and part of the same family that gives Jim Beam its name) talk about extremely old bourbon. Whiskey goes through a process as it ages whereby for some period of time it gets better, but eventually it reaches a "tipping point" from which it goes downhill. Many ancient Scotches are "ooh-ed" and "aah-ed" over, at ages of 30, 40, 50 years, but conditions differ between Scotland and Kentucky, and whiskey ages a lot faster in Kentucky, resulting in it getting "too old" sooner. So bourbon distilleries don't generally plan on keeping whiskey for that long, but with dozens of rickhouses and hundreds of thousands of barrels aging, sometimes some can get "lost". Recently Heaven Hill found some barrels that had been aging away for 27 years or more.

Craig said he would not have expected the whiskey inside to be drinkable, but they tapped them and, lo and behold, it was not bad! Actually it was pretty good. So they released a limited-edition 27-year-old whiskey, which we got to sample. We compared it to Heaven Hill's regular production Elijah Craig 18-year-old bourbon---and it was good, but I don't know that it was better enough to justify paying a LOT more than the 18-year-old, which is a bargain if you like Heaven Hill's house style. But in any event, one of the points to be made was that it makes a big difference where in the warehouse the whiskey is aging. Heaven Hill's whiskey warehouses are seven stories high, and the aging effects on the upper floors are a lot more pronounced than on the lower floors---temperature swings tend to be more extreme, and the lower floors tend to be damper. The 27-year-old whiskey came from a lower floor of the warehouse. But to demonstrate the difference most dramatically, we were provided with two samples of whiskey, both aged 30 years, but one from a lower floor and one from the top floor. The sample from the lower floor was pretty good, but the sample from the top floor was undrinkable! It was easily the worst whiskey I have ever tasted. And, the most interesting factoid from that presentation was that after 30 years, evaporation will have claimed almost all the liquid in that cask---out of a 60-gallon barrel they only get a gallon or so of whiskey, and it was concentrated to something like 170 proof! Fortunately, it's so horrible that nobody would want it, so it's scarcity is hardly a problem.

So, the lesson of that presentation: older does NOT always mean better when it comes to whiskey.

The next presentation we hit was a panel discussion by a group of craft distillers. When I first got interested in whiskey about six years ago, these guys did not exist. Being a lawyer naturally I looked into the laws and regulations about distilling, and I couldn't see any reason why you couldn't run a small-scale distillery making small batches, but people told me it couldn't be done; you couldn't get licensed. It's probably just as well I didn't have the wherewithal to pursue that aspect of the hobby, but the intervening years have shown that hey, you can indeed do small-scale distilling, and a number of people are doing it. Given the need to turn work into cash quickly in a start-up business like that, most of them are making unaged spirits: vodka, gin, brandy. But some are making whiskey, and we heard from several of them on the panel.

A brief digression into the history of whiskey: up until prohibition, whiskey-making was a cottage industry in lots of rural areas in the south and east. It was technically illegal, but not vigorously opposed when it was done on a small scale. Prohibition turned what had been a craft and hobby into a deadly serious business and brought the wrath of the government down on moonshiners in a whole new way, and pretty much destroyed that tradition of whiskey-making. Prohibition meant that illicit distilling was about making as much as cheaply as possible and that is whence came the popular conception of moonshine as horrible head-splitting fire-water.

But there was a time when people made and drank young whiskey because they liked it, because it was good. A lot of the character of the whiskey you find in the stores today comes from being aged in oak barrels, but it is possible to make a very good spirit without aging. It's not the same as vodka because vodka is distilled to a very very high proof multiple times to remove as much of the flavoring elements as possible, where whiskey---even unaged whiskey---is distilled out at a lower proof, leaving more of the things that give it flavor in there. A few years ago at another WhiskeyFest, Fred Noe from Jim Beam had a bottle of "white dog", which is bourbon distillate straight out of the still, with no aging, and I got to have a taste. It was amazing! Although Bourbon is made from mostly corn, it doesn't really taste like corn. But this white dog did. It was like liquid, highly-alcoholic corn on the cob. It had a kick to it, but not in a bad way.

So I thought, as a craft distiller, I would make a young whiskey that was designed and produced to taste really good in that form. It's a legitimate form of American whiskey that's not really made today, and it would get around that pay-for-it-now-but-can't-sell-it-for-several-years conundrum that faces a startup distillery that wants to make, say, bourbon. (There are of course commercial corn whiskeys, which are unaged, but for a long time the only one readily available was Georgia Moon, which comes in a canning jar and is, I think, intended to be an "ordeal" drink---you give it to your friends and laugh at the faces they make when they drink it. I have a jar, and you can get used to it, but the point behind Georgia Moon is not to make a great-tasting corn whiskey. The same distillery takes the same stuff, ages if for a while, and sells it as Mellow Corn, which is purportedly a much better whiskey, but that's not available in stores around here. Just today I saw another corn whiskey, Virginia Lightning, in a store, which is intriguing but I have not tasted it.)

So anyway, you can imagine my pleasure when several of the craft distillers brought young whiskeys for us to taste. A couple of them, from Stranahan's in Colorado and Templeton Rye in Iowa, were not commercial products, but, a distillery in Wisconsin called Death's Door is making and marketing a product they call White Whiskey, which was quite tasty. I'm hoping I can find a bottle of it here. (The name comes from the name of the channel between the Door County peninsula and Washington Island, from whence comes the organic wheat the Death's Door guys use in their spirits. The actual distillery is in Madison, which has caused consternation to tourists who get all the way to Washington Island---which is way past the middle of nowhere---looking for the distillery.)

One of the other things I would do if I were a craft distiller is experiment with non-traditional mash bills. The world of spirits is driven by traditions which are nigh-inviolable. Whiskey can be made (theoretically) from any grain or combination of grains, but until a couple years ago there were only a few variants. Among American whiskeys, bourbon is mostly corn, with a smaller percentage of either rye or wheat and a little malted barley. Rye is mostly rye (duh) with a generous percentage of corn and the malted barley. Corn whiskey is basically a high-corn bourbon mashbill that is not aged in new oak barrels, and anyway it's so uncommon as to hardly count. There have been only two exceptions to the rules that I know of at least since prohibition: Anchor Distilling in San Fransisco made (and as far as I know still makes) whiskey usng malted rye, which has a very different flavor from unmalted rye. And a few years ago, Heaven Hill introduced Bernheim Straight Wheat Whiskey, which was made from mostly wheat with a generous percentage of corn.

So I was excited to learn that the Death's Door White Whiskey is made from almost entirely wheat---no corn at all. That's amazing, if you geek out on those kinds of things like I do. And I believe some of the wheat is malted, which would contribute a flavor to the whiskey that no other whiskey on earth (that I've heard about, anyway) has.

I go back and forth on whether WhiskeyFest is worth the money---it was nearly $100, although if you bought shots of all the whiskeys you can taste there in a bar, you would probably spend more than that, since some of those old and rare whiskeys can be pretty steep, so I suppose if you want to try a bunch of different whiskeys, it's a good way to do it. But this year I really enjoyed the presentations, and thinking back, I've seen some pretty cool presentations other years too. I'll probably go back.

R.I.P. Maria King Peters, 6/26/68-2/5/09.

My sister died on February 5, 2009.

She was two years younger than me. We got along generally well through childhood, grew apart a little during adolescence, but got pretty close during young adulthood, particularly when we were both freshly out of school and finding our places in the world. Eventually we each got settled in our respective communities---me in Chicago; her in Champaign-Urbana---and got married, and then she had a couple children, which kept her busy. But we kept in touch.

About four years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time, she was pregnant with her second child and her first was only about a year old, so it was a bit of a blow. But Maria had always been the embodiment of robust good health, and I knew or had heard of many people who had fought breast cancer with some success, so I wasn't too worried. She had surgery and started chemotherapy; all would be well.

Some months later, an unfortunate pattern of events began. At the conclusion of her treatment she had a scan that was supposed to confirm that it had worked. But no, it turned out, the cancer was still there. So began a new different treatment regimen. That happened several times: just when everybody thought she was on top of things, it would turn out that no, it was still there. New treatment after new treatment, and while she didn't seem to be getting much worse (from what I could see, anyway), the cancer was still there, like a time bomb in her chest.

It finally went off. Unclear exactly when this happened, but the first strong indication came towards the end of 2008 when she started having bad back pains. Initially we thought it came from sleeping on a bad couch (and that may have been part of it). The weekend after New Years our family got together at my parents' house in Springfield for a couple days, and she had to spend most of the time in bed or in a recliner.

Shortly thereafter she had a scan done that revealed that the cancer had moved into her lymph system and was now in the bones of her hips and back and possibly her liver. I called that next weekend (the second weekend in January) to get the most accurate account of what was going on, and we had a really nice conversation. We hadn't really had much of a chance to talk in Springfield, and I was glad to make that up. (Not too much later, I was REALLY glad!) She told me about the test results and prognosis, but she seemed positive, and we talked about things we would do in the upcoming year---she had planned a trip to Chicago with her daughter in May, and we talked about the whole family coming to visit over the Fourth of July.

Less than a week later, however, she took a sudden bad turn and was hospitalized. My father called me when it happened and my wife and I went down to Urbana to visit her. She had reached a point where she couldn't move her body without agonizing pain, and she was not thinking clearly. This may have been partly due to an electrolyte imbalance or drugs, but it turned out that the cancer had also moved into her brain and she had a tumor there that was interfering with her thinking. When my dad called he had said, "If you want to see your sister again you'd better get down here," but actually by the time we arrived she was relatively stable. She was sort of out of it but she knew the people who came to see her, and we were able to talk a little bit.

The doctors' goal at that point was to come up with a medication program that would keep her relatively comfortable, and they were giving her radiation treatments for her brain and hips. After the first couple days it looked like that would work. I spent several more days down there over the following week, and she seemed to be getting better; it looked like she would at least be able to eventually go home, and nobody was talking about her only having a short time to live, although neither was there any more talk about recovery, either. The paradigm had shifted: it was no longer a question of when or how she was going to beat the cancer. She was not going to beat the cancer.

Over the next week-and-a-half or so, I kept in touch with my parents, who for that entire time slept at the hospital in reclining chairs, so that someone would be there with her if she woke up in the middle of the night and needed something. Things seemed to be going okay, and plans proceeded for moving her home.

Then on the night of February 4th, again more or less out of the blue, my dad called again stating that if I wanted to see her again, I should get down there. I took the next train and got there the next morning. She looked a lot worse, and I'm not sure whether she was ever conscious or knew I was there. Towards the middle of the afternoon, the nurses saw something that to them indicated that she was going to go soon, and called everybody into the room. We gathered around her---me and our parents, her husband and his parents, and her best friend---and I ended up holding one of her hands. I don't know exactly when she died---her breathing was erratic; I would think it had stopped but then I would hear her take another breath. But I do know that, towards the end, I felt a brief, slight pressure from her hand. I dont' want to read too much into it, but it did seem like a good-bye. At least, IF she was aware, she would have known we were there with her. I hope that was a comfort to her.

I felt very sorry for her, for what she went through those last weeks of her life. I think she was in a lot of pain, and she was having trouble thinking clearly and KNEW she was having trouble thinking. But at least, the time she was in the hospital gave everyone else involved time to get used to the idea of her imminent death, and when it finally came, there was a sense of relief that she was free from the pain she had been feeling. I was glad that she was finally at peace. That was my recurrent thought: "Be at peace, be at peace."

A very interesting phenomenon occurred just after she died: over about half an hour, her appearance slowly changed. I think it must have been due to fluid draining from her extremities, but all the stress and strain left her face, and the puffy blotchiness it had previously exhibited. She looked calm, and better than she had looked in years. That, more than anything else, really drove home to me what she had been going through up to that point. Since then I have often wondered to what extent her condition was always worse than she let on, and she just didn't tell anybody. It would have been in character for her not to burden other people with that.

The next few days told me more things I hadn't known about my sister, or more properly, reminded me of things I had forgotten. There was a memorial service/wake for her a couple days later, and I was amazed to see the number of people who came out to pay their respects. People from her job, from former jobs, from the neighborhood, from school, from women's groups she was in...the line just didn't stop. I don't know how many people there were but there were 200 cards printed up and they ran out. I thought about how my sister had touched all these people's lives and earned their respect, friendship, love. I was a little jealous because in recent years we rarely saw her at her best, and as in any family there were decades of baggage attached to all our interaction. I was reminded that, fundamentally, she was a very positive person, full of love and happiness, even amid all her troubles. During her last stay in the hospital, that was a big part of her conversations: telling people that she loved them.

It had been many years since anybody close to me had died, and I was unaccustomed to grieving. Sadness as an emotion doesn't get a lot of attention, because it's doesn't really engender drama, but it is a very powerful emotion. It's different than anger, or despair. Sometimes people who suffer losses of loved ones are portrayed as railing against God or injustice, and I can see how that might happen---I can see how it might apply in my sister's case, with her, who never did any harm to anyone, having been plucked from life with so much still to do and so much still to give, leaving her two little children. But that wasn't how I felt. I was just terribly, terribly sad.

As I mentioned, in recent years, although we had a good relationship, we only saw each other occasionally, and talked on the phone every once in a while. So Maria wasn't part of my day-to-day life the way she was for my parents, who went over there just about every week for a couple days to help take care of the kids. But now that she's gone, I find myself missing her at unexpected times---I'll think of something that maybe we would have done together, or see something that I think she would have liked, and then suddenly realize, oh, she's not around anymore. For several years we hadn't really been able to interact much as adults when we got together, given the attention demands of two toddlers, and we had sort of assumed that a few years down the road, when the kids were older, we'd be able to do more together. Now that won't happen.

I'm sorry she's gone, but glad she's at peace, finally.

Rough month, with a few bright spots

This past month, and particularly the last couple weeks, have been pretty tough. My sister, who has been fighting cancer for several years, recently took a sharp turn for the worse. She appears to have reached something of a plateau for now, but she's in pretty bad shape still and I don't think anybody knows what is going to happen, or when. So, that has been putting a fair amount of emotional strain on the family. I went down to Urbana, where she is in the hospital, for most of last week, and then a soon as I came back, I developed what I think is a sinus infection which has had me out of commission for a few days. At least I didn't get sick while I was down there.

But there have been a couple bright spots, mainly having to do with my band, the Xylenes. First, we finally put up a recording of a Xylenes original on our MySpace page. "Furlough Day" was written by Mort Ames and me---Mort wrote lyrics, and I put them to music. The subject matter may be of limited interest, but it's a catchy song, and we played it at our office Christmas party to a very warm reception.

We also recently recorded a couple versions of an old standard, "Tonight You Belong To Me", for a compilation CD that a friend of mine is putting together. I should have the final version of that song within the next few days and when I do I'll put it up on the MySpace site as well. In the mean time, Mort posted a video of Crystal and Kelly recording vocals for the "feline" version of the song on his Facebook page.

This Saturday is opening day for the 2009 Roller Derby season---I hope I'm well enough to attend! I'm going to the doctor this afternoon and hopefully some antibiotics will have me back in the pink by the weekend.

Looking back, I started this blog on New Years' Day 2008, and for all the bad things that have happened recently I still feel fairly hopeful for the future. I will try to blog more often! Have a happy!

Christmas cards: a humble plea

As those of you who know me are aware, I've always been a pretty atrocious card-sender (well, until I got married---any diligence now is due wholly to my wife's efforts). But I do like getting cards; in many cases they are the annual contact with friends I don't see or talk to much but still like to maintain a relationship with.

The ubiquity of cheap photo technology has resulted in many people sending photo cards, a picture with a little holiday border and a festive seasonal message. That's nice, and it adds a dimension to the "annual contact" missive. But I've noticed an unfortunate trend in this practice, and although I may be fighting an un-winnable uphill battle here, I must make this plea:

If you're sending out a photo card for Christmas, please, DON'T USE A PHOTO OF JUST YOUR KIDS.

I have nothing against your kids---they're cute kids, and I'm sure your pride in them is fully justified (even though no kids on earth are, in reality, as cute/charming/special as their parents think they are). But here's the thing: your kids are not my friends. YOU are my friends. My interest in your kids is, generally, through their derivation from you, not on their own merits. And frankly, if you think about it, that's the way it should be, and probably the way you want it.

So, if I'm getting a picture from your household, I'd like a picture of YOU. I'm far more curious to see what YOU look like than your kids. (Seeing how nobody seems to send pictures of their pretty college-age daughters, ho ho.) Sending the picture of just the kid seems to say, "We are not interesting; our child is the most interesting thing we could put in this card." Well, if you're friends of mine, you by definition ARE interesting, and worthy of being the subject of your own Christmas missive.

And I strongly suggest this applies to just about everybody to whom you send the cards. The few people who probably are more interested in pictures of the kids than you (i.e., their grandparents)---let's face it, they already have albums and albums of pictures of the kids.

Now, in case you just sent us a card with a picture of your baby on it, and are thinking, "That ungrateful asshole," please, I am always happy to hear from you, and I never mind seeing pictures of your children. I'm just saying that, maybe next time, use a picture of the whole family.

And, Merry Christmas!