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Growing up, I was never great at sports. I wasn't bad either, but I was never the star. I was small, but I made up for it by being really slow. :)
I was what is known as a role player. I came in, played hard, and tried to out-hustle the person or team I was playing against. And from time to time, I managed to make a somewhat spectacular play.
It's still the only way I know how to play. I continue to play sports because they're fun. I play the best I can, and hopefully I contribute to my team winning. And if not, I just hope they don't kick me off the team. :)
Of course, at my age it can lead to an injury here and there. I've bruised ribs, twisted ankles, and separated shoulders by trying to make diving catches or by running into a fence or two. Or I end up covered in dirt and chalk after making a headfirst slide into third base, as shown in the picture from last Monday.
(Click the thumbnail to view the full-size image)
Life should be approached the same way. Every day should be an opportunity to work hard and do the best you can. The world is full of people who fail in life even with incredible intelligence, superior athletic skills, or vast wealth (and sometimes all three), while the "role players" impact the world around them through dedication, hard work, and commitment.
They might run into a fence or two, but from time to time they do spectacular things.
The Fourth of July. A time for cookouts, a time for fireworks, and a time to celebrate American independence. And for my family, a time to ride in an ambulance.
Back when my incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and I were in our early teens, we were spending the July 4th holiday at Lake Nocona. Our family had property in the Nocona Hills Country Club, and Ron and I were spending the day at the country club swimming pool. It was a pretty nice pool, but there were times when the chlorine levels were so high it made the water very murky. This was one of those times.
I had just executed a perfect 1½ somersault off the low dive and was heading back to the surface. Ron, who was next off the diving board, decided this would be a perfect opportunity to splash me, and he attempted a jackknife. As mentioned earlier, the water was murky, so he landed too close to me as I was surfacing and the back of his head hit the top of my head.
At this point I was unaware of what or whom I had hit. I just felt a stabbing pain in my head, so I let forth a curse or two and swam to the side. Apparently, the curse wasn't under my breath because a little girl told me to watch my language. I replied, "I just hit my head, so mind your own darn business." (Not one of my finer moments.)
I climbed the ladder with one hand on my head. I looked at my hand and saw that it was covered in blood. (Mike, the lifeguard, told me later that at this point blood was spurting out of my head.) After seeing the blood, I decided it would be a good time to lay on the concrete.
Mike came to help, yelling for someone to call an ambulance. At this point, I realized that I didn't see Ron anywhere, so I thought he might still be underwater. I tried to tell Mike that I thought my brother was still in the pool, but he kept telling me to calm down and not say anything. I finally gave up when I saw Ron surface and swim to side.
Ron managed to get partially up the ladder and collapsed on the concrete. As he lay there bleeding from the back of his head, someone yelled, "Oh my God, there's another one."
The ambulance arrived a few minutes later. Since my injury seemed worse, I was put on the stretcher, while Ron got the board. As they were wheeling me to the ambulance, my mom ran up to see how I was doing. Since my mom had a tendency to overreact, she was crying and blubbering, "Are you OK?" I calmly replied, "I'm OK. I just cut my head open." I paused, and then continued, "But you should see Ron. I think he almost drowned!" Of course, that caused my mom to run off crying to go check on Ron. (Again, not one of my finer moments.)
The ambulance ride was mostly uneventful, mainly because they refused to turn on the siren even after we repeatedly asked them to. One eventful part was whenever they turned a corner, because the board Ron was on would go sliding into the side of the ambulance.
Upon arriving at the hospital, we were taken to the emergency room where the area around the injury had to be shaved. My nurse was very upset that we were interrupting her dinner break (like we had any control over that), so she proceeded to shave a large portion of my head in a few seconds with no concern to how much pain she was causing. Ron's nurse took her time, making a concerted effort not to hurt him.
We were then given shots to deaden the pain. (Perhaps that should have come before the head shaving.) A few minutes later the doctor arrived.
Like any small town, Nocona probably didn't get the pick of litter when it came to doctors. I'm not saying the guy was bad, but his nickname was Malpractice. (Sadly, that's not a joke.) As he was putting the stitches in my head, I felt every bit of it. I pointed out that apparently my head wasn't dead, but my happy nurse told me to be quiet because my head WAS dead. (What did I know, I was just the patient.)
After 5 stitches for each of us, we headed back to our lake property. We weren't allowed to get our stitches wet, so we couldn't go swimming the rest of the holiday week. And since we had parts of our heads shaved, we spent the entire time wearing baseball caps.
All-in-all, it was an eventful holiday. And from that point on, we were very well-known around the country club.
As a kid, I didn't have a family doctor. Because my dad was retired from the military, our "family doctor" was the nearby Air Force base. The cost couldn't be beat, but sometimes you ended up with a doctor who was a little green.
My freshman year in high school, my chin was busted open during football practice, so my mom took me to the base to see if I needed stitches. The doctor decided I needed some, so he let the student doctor deaden my chin with some shots. As the student gave me shot after shot after shot, the doctor finally asked him with a little sarcasm, "Do you think his chin is dead yet?"
The student replied, "I'm not sure." The doctor told him, "Well, why don't you ask the patient?"
When the student looked at me, I said "Is my chin dead yet? Are you kidding, I can't even blink."
And sometimes, it's not the doctors who are green. A lot of the student pilots were from other countries, and they hadn't been to the doctor much growing up. So naturally, they were a little uneasy when they had to see the doctor.
One time, when my incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and I were in elementary school, we had to go get booster shots. As we stood in line with our mom, I overheard one of the foreign pilots nervously asking the other pilots about the shots. And as you would expect, the American pilots were making up stories about the doctor breaking needles off in people's arms and needing to pull them out with pliers, which just made the foreign pilot more nervous.
The foreign pilot was behind me in line, so when I was leaving after my shots, he asked me how it went. He probably thought a little kid would give him an honest answer. (He obviously didn't know me.)
With a deadpan expression, I replied, "Well, it was fine until the doctor broke the needle off in my arm."
Even as a kid, I was evil. 
Yesterday, I stopped by the ATM to pick up some cash. On the machine was the following sign:
Audio instructions available for the visually impaired.
So my question is this: who exactly was the sign for?
This past weekend I decided to visit my incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and his family. (After all, I am my niece's favorite uncle.) A few weeks ago, Ron asked if I wanted to come up on Thursday so that I could go along with him on a field trip with Shayla's school. Naturally, I said yes.
Well, he found out a few days prior that he misunderstood. It wasn't a "field trip"; it was a "field day" where the kids get to do various outdoor events to celebrate the coming end to the school year. Even so, I still planned on being there.
Ron failed to mention that he volunteered us to work one of the events for the morning shift. We ended up running the obstacle course. Every 10 minutes, a group of kids would arrive at our event. Ron would go over the course while I demonstrated, and then we had the kids start. Occasionally, Ron and/or I would be challenged by the kids to race them, so we HAD to comply. (And yes, we let the kids win. Most of the time.) Once their time was up, they moved on to the next event, and we got the next batch of kids.
Once the morning group was done, the kids with parents there had the option of going home for the day. Shayla decided she wanted to eat lunch in the cafeteria, so we stayed. I enjoyed a hearty lunch of milk and an unusually-colored hamburger made of a meat-like substance.
After lunch, Shayla again had the option of going home, but one of her classmates was having birthday cake later that afternoon, so she wanted to stay. We watched a movie and then headed to the playground for recess. After recess, things got interesting.
As we were walking back to the classroom, an alarm bell sounded and an announcement was made that the school was being locked down. All the kids and teachers (and dads and uncles) had to rush to the classrooms, lock the doors, and turn out the lights. The kids each sat in their individual cubbyhole.
While sitting in the dark, we adults found out that a man with a gun was within a 30 mile vicinity; thus, the lockdown. He apparently had shot a police officer and stolen a car. He abandoned the car in a nearby town and took off on foot.
In an ideal world, the kids were supposed to sit in their cubbyholes in the dark until the lockdown was over. However, after about 30 minutes they started to get antsy, so they quietly had the birthday cake in the dark, and the teacher read them a story.
After another 30 minutes, the school started letting kids out of the classroom if their parents were there to pick them up, so we headed home. We planned on swimming at the nearby community pool that afternoon but decided to stay inside until after the gunman was caught. As far as we know, he never was.
Thankfully, the rest of the visit was much quieter.
This is my fourteenth season to coach boys soccer, and it's been a difficult one. The coaches in our soccer association decided to play against other teams in the Austin area (I voted against it because I didn't want to travel), and because we did so well last season, we were placed in the hardest bracket for our age group (U12). Unfortunately, the people making that decision didn't take into account that I lost almost half of my team to other sports, and I had several new players this season with much less soccer experience.
And the season hasn't gone well. So far, we haven't won a game. We played well in a few of the games, but in the others we didn't play well at all. Sometimes it seemed like we were back in U5 when all the kids just ran to the ball, not worrying about positions or passing. Herd ball.
(And just so I don't just pick on the kids, part of the problem was me trying to figure out where to play some of the kids. It took me several games to decide where everybody should be playing.)
In practice, it's hard to work on aggressiveness and playing positions because we only have half of a field to practice on. The other half of the field is used by a U14 girls team. So last week, I asked the other team's coach if they would like to scrimmage against us. That way, we could play on the whole field, and we could work on playing positions.
And it helped. In our game last weekend, we played much better. We still lost, but other than a few defensive lapses in the first half we outplayed the other team. In fact, we didn't allow them to score the entire second half of the game.
So at practice last night, we scrimmaged the girls again. As noted earlier, they're bigger than my boys are, and they foul a lot, but we don't call most of them because I want the boys to learn to deal with bigger opponents.
One of the smaller boys on my team was playing midfield, and he was battling with a couple of bigger girls for the ball, and he was getting fouled and knocked down a lot. Usually, this is very quiet and polite boy. However, he'd had enough fouling and told the girl, "Stop pushing!"
To which the girl replied, "Maybe you shouldn't be so small."
There was a pause, and then the boy retorted, "At least I don't have a fat ass."
No, not the nicest thing to say, especially to a self-conscious teen-age girl, but in all fairness, she did start it. And it wasn't the worst thing to happen in the scrimmage. A couple of my players had to leave early, so I ended up playing defense. I tried to clear it up the field with a good, hard kick and ended up hitting one of the girls in the face with the soccer ball. We decided then that it was a good time to end the scrimmage for the day.
At work, I sometimes have early morning meetings. Usually, these are conference calls with my coworkers in India, and I'm just in my office by myself. On some mornings I'm running a little later than normal. Instead of rushing to get cleaned up and driving through traffic, I just head into work right out of bed. (Well, first I change out of my Spiderman pajamas.) After I'm done with the meeting, I just use the showers we have at the office.
That's how my morning started yesterday. The meeting was over quickly, and I headed to the bathroom that has the showers. The showers are in separate room from the bathroom, behind a badge-access door, because you're supposed to pay the monthly fee for the fitness center in order to have access to the showers. The shower room has several showers, some lockers, shampoo and soap dispensers in the showers, washcloths, towels, and a counter with a hair spray dispenser, a mouthwash dispenser (with little cups), shaving cream, and disposable razors.
However, there isn't a sink in that room. If you want to shave or brush your teeth, you have to take the shaving cream or mouthwash into the main bathroom where all the sinks are. It seems like a poor design to me.
But I digress.
After showering and getting dressed, I took a cup of mouthwash to the sink area with my toothbrush and toothpaste. I brushed, rinsed, and was gargling the mint-flavored mouthwash. I'm not sure how it got into the mouthwash, but I also detected the slight aftertaste of hair spray.
For those that don't know, hair spray is not a taste you can get rid of by drinking a huge glass of water. I'm sure alcohol will work, but since we don't have a scotch machine at the office (and I don't drink), a Coke did the trick.
For my birthday last year (Oct. 7th, in case you needed a reminder), a friend of mine gave me a lovely t-shirt. One of the things I like about it is that it's a nice simple design: not too flashy, not too bright. Kind of like me, I guess.
Another thing I like is that it's tagless. It has the care instructions printed inside the shirt where the tag would have been. So there's never a tag poking you in the back of the neck, and you never have to push the tag back into the shirt.
However, the one thing I don't like about the shirt is that it's ... tagless. Because sometimes it takes me until after lunch to realize that I've been wearing it backwards all morning.
Dancing is something I enjoy. If you've ever seen me dance, you know I'm not great at it, but what I lack in skill, I make up for with enthusiasm.
Many, many years ago I had a girlfriend whose name started with the letter Teresa. She was a few years older than me and was constantly fretting over what she perceived was my immaturity. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was immature.
A month or so into our relationship, we went to a wedding. The groom was actually the younger brother of one of her ex-boyfriends --- a boyfriend that she lived with for four years --- so she was very concerned about making a good impression. To that end she decided that we weren't going to dance to any fast songs at the reception.
We danced to the slow songs, but she wouldn't dance to the fast ones. And I sat through some really good fast songs. Heck, I even danced the Hokie Pokie just to get out on the floor.
Finally, Young MC's Bust A Move started playing. And I literally begged, "Please, can we dance to this song?" And she replied, "Fine, but if you do anything crazy, I'm walking off the dance floor."
And I did really well at first. Both feet were on the ground at all times. My hands stayed below shoulder level, and not once did I do any sort of spin ... up until the part of the song where Young MC sings, "Break it down for me fellas!" and the bass and drum interlude kicks in.
And I broke it down for him!
After a few spastic arm moves and a spin, I looked up and Teresa had already stormed off the dance floor. She sat at our table, arms crossed, glaring in my direction. When I walked back to the table, another couple sitting at our table gave me high-fives and congratulations, while Teresa remained in the "glare" position.
As you might expect she ended the relationship a few months later. She said it was because I was "too immature."
To which I replied, "Am not! Am not! Am not!"
Earlier this week, my grandmother turned 91. Even at that age, she's still very sharp (at least compared to the rest of us in the family). However, she doesn't hear that well, and she won't wear her hearing aids, so you have to talk to her VERY LOUDLY.
She also gets me and my brother confused. I've been known to get Christmas cards from her to "Don and family" even though Ron is the one who is married with a kid, and I'm ... uh, not. She also thinks Ron lives in Austin. I don't really fault her for that since we are twins, and she's not the only one who gets us confused (see My brother Ron is a PIG!).
I sent my grandmother a birthday card, and I was trying to call her to wish her a happy birthday. Normally, you have to catch her near the phone or someone else has to be there to hear it, but I couldn't get anyone to answer all morning.
I called my brother to make sure I had the right number, and I did. He said he had talked to her 10 minutes earlier, and although no one was at the house when he called, he said Dad was up there visiting so I might be able to get through when he's back at the house. He also said she thanked him for the birthday card, but since he didn't send one he assumed she thought he was me. He said he just went along with it and told her she was welcome.
I kept trying to call and finally got through later that afternoon. I wished her happy birthday (loudly). My niece has the same birthday as my grandmother (just 85 years apart), so she asked me if my daughter had received her card yet. I planned on going along with her until I heard my dad yelling in the background, "You've got the wrong one again!"
It didn't matter anyway. She didn't hear me still talking, so she said her goodbyes and hung up on me.
Of course, at my age it can lead to an injury here and there. I've bruised ribs, twisted ankles, and separated shoulders by trying to make diving catches or by running into a fence or two. Or I end up covered in dirt and chalk after making a headfirst slide into third base, as shown in the picture from last Monday.
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