Last Saturday, SFUC had a make-up day. Various teams that weren't able to play during the normal schedule because of rainouts were able to make up the missed games. My team had three makeup games on Saturday morning. Fortunately, Kris' team also had three makeup games and the two of us were able to carpool up to the City.

One of the reasons I've been playing SFUC all these years (I've been playing for I think four years now, might be three) is to become less intimidated by players I don't know. Growing up a non-athlete, I've been known to psych myself out before games even start. Ooooo, look at how well that woman throws! Wow, check out how fast she runs! Look, she carries herself like an athlete, she must be good! It's very easy to assume the other player is better, and give up right there.

Since I've been working out with G at ASA, I've become an athlete (I can say that now. I'm not a geek/nerd/brainiac pretending to be an athlete. I'm an athlete. And the recognition of such is a Good Thing™). And since I've been reading the Mental Game of Baseball, my mental game has also become much stronger. An even better thing.

Because of the workouts G has designed for Kris and I, my quickness has increased. I suspect my top speed as also increased. My core is stronger. I weigh more (also a good thing, actually). And, surprisingly, my endurance has increased. This one surprised me a bit, actually, because many of the exercises are explosive ones, giving more quickness, but at the expense of all day endurance.

But I digress.

I started Saturday morning off playing as hard as I could. My team's record was 2-6 going into the morning, having lost 2 of those games by 2 points, 3 of those games by 1 point. One point. Which means they could have gone either way. I figured, if I played hard and we lost by one point, then there is nothing more I could do. But if I played hard, maybe that would be enough for a win. I think other team members thought the same, because we left the day with 3 wins. Whoo!

The first point I played on Saturday set the tone for the day for me. I marked up against their top woman, but was open on every cut. The second game was against the only team to beat the top team in the league with an 8-1 record. I kept up with their top woman in all her cuts, I caught up whenever I was poaching and had to scramble back to mark up. I was terribly surprised when I was back 3+ yards when my woman went deep, yet still caught up to her after 30 yards.

I threw no turn overs that I recall (though I did have an turn over assist when a teammate dropped a catch that hit him in the wrist), but had two brilliant turn-and-fire throws to brilliant continue cuts by Liz and Nate. Knowing I could go in when I wanted to go in, and stay out when I needed to, and have the confidence to keep up with my players was so wonderful. There was no intimidation. There was no oh-my-god-this-woman-must-be-good. There were no head-cases.

Just run, catch, fake, pivot, throw, repeat. And that feeling made all the 3+ hour workouts worth every minute.

I think George Cooke may have had it right when he told me, "I think this will be your year."

My latest "hobby" of late has been the "Next Blog" feature of blogger.com. When I need a moment to unwind, I wander over to a blog I know about (Wook's is my usual starting point), and click the Next Blog link to see another, normally random, blog and see if it is anything interesting.

Some of the blogs I wander to are mildly interesting. But I have to say that 99.4% of the blogs I wander past are crap. With a capital C.

Now, wait a second here, what the hell? How do I get to say what's crap and what's not? I mean, hell, this site could be the king of crap (or maybe the McQueen of crap). Aside from the fact that I don't care if this site is crap or not (my site, my thoughts, for me, not you), I figure if I immediately want to click someplace else, the site is crap.

So, I was saying, "99.4% of the sites are crap."

After a while I started wondering what made me stop to look at certain blogs, but skip right over all the other ones. Because some I'd actually read a few entries, and click around to a few pages, but others I wouldn't even wait to load the first page. So rather than going ADD on the blogs, I came up with these suggestions for making a good blog:

1. Engage the reader

   One of the really nice things about blogging for oneself is that you can put down your thoughts without really caring who is going to read it. If you have permissions on the site to hide the entries/pages you really care about, even better. But if people other than you are going to read the site, it better be engaging.

   Engagement can happen in several ways:

   You could tell me a story. Those are usually good. Tell me an entertaining story about the day, your life, your struggles. When you do, however, for the love of whatever god you think exists, vary your sentence structure! When you tell me about your day, use it to illustrate a point. What moral, insight, example does this story tell me?

   You can illustrate a point. Here's what happened to me, and all of this serves to illustrate this statement. Stories can work well as an introduction, but get to the point. "Bush is an idiot. Tree is a moron. Together, we've determined any plant with bark on its trunk is incapable of higher level thinking. Point made." Something like that.

   You can teach me a lesson. What can you tell me about MySQL, jazz music, Infinity cars, early Christianity, second order partial differential equations, MacOS applications, Java, baseball or cold fusion that I can't figure out with five minutes with Google? Tell me, and make it interesting.

   The worst thing you can do, however, is to tell me in the same sentence structure about your day cleaning the house. Or how depressed you are (and how you're not doing anything to help the problem - depression isn't the problem, not getting help is), or how angry with the world you are (like the world owes you anything, yeah, right). Neither I, nor 99.9999999999999999% of the world care about either of these things. I would venture to say if you're writing for the Internet®, none of your audience cares about the previous three things.

2. Stick to the point

   When an article starts out about deer pellets and ends up proving the speed of light can vary and the theory of relativity is inaccurate, I get frustrated. Were you talking about deer shit or physics? Pick one and stick to the point.

3. Don't use filler

   This works with the above one about sticking to the point. A story can be used to introduce a topic, that's fine. But don't make an entry longer than it needs to be. Similarly, include what you need.

4. Skip the cute l33t-sp34k

   And the text speak. Then learn to spell close to correct. The occasional misspelling isn't a big deal (everyone misspells a word here and there), but multiple gross misspellings are annoying. Oh, and if you can't take the time for the extra Y and O in "you," you should take typing lessons.

5. Write and post consistently

   Either use the tool or don't. Get hooked on it, or walk away. But posting once every two weeks, and apologizing for not posting? Don't do that. If every two weeks is your posting schedule, then it's your posting schedule. Very few people will read your post if it's not good. And fewer still will read if you're apologizing for not posting.

   Post like you mean it. (That's a good motto for life in general: "Live like you mean it.")

6. Lose the annoying graphics

   If your page takes more than 5 seconds to load all the images and music crap on your first page, I'm not waiting around for it. Next Blog, please!

You know, it's entirely possible I want entries and articles that are very similar to the five paragraph essays from high school ("Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em. Tell 'em. Tell 'em what you told 'em.").

Or maybe the elements of writing are the same here as they are in print. If that's the case, then there are many references to far better guides for better writing. Maybe a google search is a good place to start...

Everyone has embarrassing moments. Those moments in time when you desperately want to be some place (any place!) else. Oh, god, they are the worst place to be when they're happening. But, damn, they make great stories weeks, months, years later.

The trick with those moments is to make it through them. Just make it through. Humour helps, if you can manage it.

The other trick is to remember them without the overwhelming emotions associated with the embarrassment. It's easy to let feelings of guilt, anger, helplessness overwhelm the situation.

Talking about the situation will certainly help afterward.

So, here's one:

When I was 3 years old (yes, I have a memory that old, several actually), my family was helping the Brickleys move into the house 3 doors down from our house. What can you give a 3 year old to carry into a house? A bag of something or other.

As I walked up to the house, my pants started falling down. My pants were falling down! So, when I arrived at the front door, my arms full carrying the bag of whatever, I asked Gayle Brickley (the family's mom, the adult! the big person!) to pull up my pants.

Yep. "Please pull up my pants."

Her reply?

"What? What did you just say?"

I was completely mortified. I mumbled nevermind, scampered around the door, and hurried into the kitchen, where I deposited the bag, and pulled up my pants. I'm sure I didn't say "Would you please pull up my pants?" for, as a 3 year old, I'm also sure I didn't have that command of the English language.

Three years old and so embarrassed that the adult was asking what did I just say? The tone she used clearly implied that I had asked something terribly shameful. Oh, so embarrassed!

I carried that memory and feeling of complete shame around with me for another 25 years. Every time I thought about that moment, the feelings of shame and embarrassment overwhelmed me. I couldn't tell anyone about that incident. Too shameful!

Eventually, I did tell Kris about that incident. And what happened? Poof! All the feelings of embarrassment and shame disappeared. How could such a small incident of so long ago have such power over me? Because I let it. Because I let an embarrassing moment be more than it really was. And telling Kris helped me see it for what it was.

Which was nothing.

But a little humour might have helped.

Kris listed the usual suspects:

P.S.  Have we submitted a bit to DUI?  They are due Feb. 23rd.  We
should probably get on that if we haven't already.  Here's a list of
tournaments to think about in the mean time:

Spring Fling - late March
Fools - late March / early April
DUI - early April
Quincy MUD - late April/early May
Cal States - late May
Potlatch - 4th of July
Chico - August
Hot Valley - August
Labor Day - early September 

These are all pretty local.  There is also Flower Bowl in Vancouver
which is typically in June, Kleinmann in Oregon in August I think, and a
host of other tournaments that are short plane rides away.

I received a bad performance review today. I'll admit it to being a bit of a shock, though in retrospect, not surprising.

In the past two weeks, I've had food poisoning (-2 days), a migraine (-1 day), traveled to Virginia for my father-in-law's open-heart surgery recovery (-4 days), and to Pasadena to deal with a condo flooding (-2 days). I desparately want to say, "Look! I'm not making shit up! I'm not making up excuses!" but the end result is that I'm behind in a project and it's affecting not only one client/customer/project, but also other projects.

And I don't like it one bit.

I'm going full tilt (20 minutes work, 5 minutes pause, 14+ hours today) to get this stuff done, but I don't feel like I'm getting any closer to the end. The more I do the more I see I have left to do. Geez, does it ever end?

Ta-da!

I have officially posted my most boring, I'm whining post ever. This is why blogs suck. It's someone whining about a life that is actually pretty damn fucking good, with just a hint of stress in it.

The good thing about today? I didn't cry. I realized that, well, you know, crying isn't going to help a darn thing. When I'm done, I'm still going to have all this work to do.

Nothing to be done about it? Then don't worry about it.