Buttercups 4, Sharks 1

The Buttercups picked up right where they left off last spring in league play, scoring two goals early and two goals late for the win.

This year, the girls have 10-person teams and play eight at a time on a larger field with larger goals, so everybody’s getting plenty of playing time — and plenty of running. As a team the ‘cups both were a little rusty and acclimating themselves to the larger field, so the passing, beyond short range, wasn’t all that crisp. But the offense got the job done and the Buttercups keeper came up with some big stops late.

Victoria didn’t score, but she got off two good shots on goal. One was blocked, and the other, otherwise bound for a spot high in the net, hit a Shark in the head. She took a foot in the side of her right ankle during the second half that was hard enough to go through the pad and injure her. She had to be carried off the field, but she returned late in the game.

Memo to self: Always bring sunscreen. Always.

One other note: Last spring, the girls voted to seek a name change for the team, to the Wildcats. Apparently the league said no.

Hanna 1, Fusion 0

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.

Storm a-comin’

August, come they must
September, remember

Can’t sleep, so here I sit. It’s dark, and the only sound in the house is Radio Disney playing softly in Victoria’s room. There’s a tropical storm coming tomorrow, although at this point the only real damage it may do around here is to the kids’ soccer schedules. (I could be wrong. We had flooding rains from Gustav, and for all I know the ground’s still pretty saturated.) Farther out, there’s a Cat 4 (as of an hour ago) hurricane, although who knows where it’s going to go at this point. (At the moment NHC has it spending most of Monday over the Bahamas before hitting south Florida Tuesday night.) Greensboro hasn’t been hit really hard by a tropical storm that I can recall since Fran in ‘96, and before that you have to go back to Hugo in ‘89 — wow, hard to believe that was almost 20 years ago.

Just not much to say, recently.

You may not know his face or name …

… but you know his voice. And now it has been stilled.

The Empire Strikes West

Death Star over San Francisco

(h/t Chip, who breaks a long drought in style with this one)

Panthers 47, Redskins 3

I only watched long enough to see the score get to 41-0. And that was enough: Wow.

That’s my first reaction. My second reaction had to do not with the Panthers, but with the Redskins: Both of their lines have major, major problems, and to the Redskin D-line add the problem of depth. That does not bode well for their season. The figure 6-8 comes to mind, and that record will leave you out of the playoffs by four games in the NFC East.

The Panthers’ O-line, on the other hand, looks very good, a dramatic improvement from last year. And between Jonathan Stewart, who has impressed as a rookie, and DeAngelo Williams, who showed flashes late last year and has only come on since, the Panthers might just run the ball all day, all season. This would not be a bad thing; for one thing, it’ll help keep Jake Delhomme healthy.

On the other side of the ball, everyone keeps saying Julius Peppers is back. He’s certainly looking better than last year, which is, for the moment, making me look stupid for having said they should release him. Let’s hope this roll continues into the regular season. Deep into the regular season. And then into the playoffs. He’s in a contract year, so he’s got everything to play for. The rest of the D-line looked good as well.

Elsewhere on the offense, Steve Smith’s most dramatic moment came on the first play from scrimmage, where he landed hard on this shoulder and left the game. This team won’t be entirely one-dimensional without him, and with that backfield, third-and-long won’t be the occasion of desperation it was last year, but for this team to play into January, Smith has to stay functional. He’s already had a concussion this season, and a separated shoulder would be misery. Muhammad is out, although he should return for the season opener. D.J. Hackett, who will have to carry the load while Smith sits out his two-game suspension, hasn’t shown much in practice (he sat out last night). And TE Dante Rosario is looking like an upgrade on Jeff King, who, with 47 catches last season to rank second on the team, wasn’t that bad to begin with.

The linebacking corps looked solid, and in Ken Lucas and Chris Gamble, the team has one of the league’s best corner tandems. Chris Harris continues to come on at safety (but also sat last night). And the special teams looked very good as well — four field goals, one from 52 yards; repeated kickoffs into the end zone (short kickoffs were a problem last year) and excellent coverage on those that got run back.

Injuries, or lack thereof, will be key. Knock wood, the Panthers haven’t lost anyone key for the season, which is a departure from recent preseasons. One big key to their Super Bowl season in ‘03 was that the O-line played the same people in the same positions almost every game (and had Stephen Davis in the backfield).

Snoop says he’s “excited” about the Panthers’ chances this year. I won’t go quite that far, but then I never do. I will say that the team had glaring weaknesses at the end of last year, and with one exception — the jury is still out on backup QB, so let’s hope we don’t have to find out about that — the team appears to have addressed them all.

The final preseason game is meaningless for the starters; it’s mainly for the coaching staff to decide whom to keep for special teams, whom to keep for the practice squad and whom to cut outright. The opener at SD will be a strong test, particularly without Smith. That game should show us what we’ve got.

Escaping with most brain cells still intact

Hooper and I saw The Wiggles earlier today. A couple of my worst fears went unrealized. For one thing, although the show was held in the 20,000+-seat Greensboro Coliseum, the configuration was half-house and I’m guessing the crowd was 4,000, tops. For another, the set was over in a neat 75 minutes. Sops for the adults were sadly lacking. The closest they came was prior to “Play Your Guitar with Murray,” when the aforenamed Wiggle “warmed up” by playing a brief intro to “Stairway to Heaven.” One of the other Wiggles punctuated that with, “Did somebody say ‘Freebird’?”

My favorite part was before the show, however:

Hooper’s friend B: They don’t look like they do on TV.

Hooper: They don’t?

Hooper’s friend B: No, they’re all winkly.

No more paying taxes. Sweet.

” “People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said.

Mouse out of the house?

Could Disney be losing copyright to early versions of Mickey Mouse? It could be.

Return of the Fusion

Remember the Fusion, Hooper’s soccer team when he was a 4-year-old? It’s back.

Hooper decided after his first season that he didn’t really like soccer very much, so since then it has been his big sister’s thing. But this summer, he decided he wanted to play again, so we signed him up and lo and behold, he got put on the same team he was on three years ago. Only two of the five who were on the team with him back then are still there, but one of them is his best friend from that team. Their first practice was yesterday, and he did well and said afterward that it was a lot of fun. I met both coaches, and they seem like really good guys.

Their first game, as is Victoria’s, is 9/7 9/6.

“We have a hostage situation …”

Best. Lolcat. Evah. (Scroll down a bit.)

An appreciation for the finer things in life

Hooper: Daddy, do they still use a ball to break things?

Daddy: I don’t understand your question, buddy.

Hooper: You know. The metal ball that hangs from the crane?

Daddy: Oh, yeah! Yeah, they still use those sometimes. But sometimes they do something different. They use dynamite. They can set the dynamite in a special way so that when the building blows up, instead of pieces going all over the place, they all fall into one neat pile.

Hooper: Sweet.

Well, THAT sucked, too.

We’ve got the house almost back to normal now. What about the house, you ask, was abnormal? Why, I’m ever so glad you asked.

Weeks ago — I can’t even remember when now and I don’t want to go digging around in the files to find the receipt — the air-conditioning guy came out to the house to give our two units their annual servicing. Somehow, in so doing, he managed to break the line that carries condensation — that’d be water — from the unit in the attic down to the outside. That water instead flowed down the inside of one of our walls for about five days, until one night I happened to look up near the stairwell ceiling and noticed a pancake-sized blister in the wall paint.

Fearing the worst, I went downstairs and looked in the closet underneath the stairs to see if I could find any sign of water. I didn’t find anything damp, but I did find a fair bit of mold that I knew hadn’t been there before. Certain members of my household are allergic to mold. Like all but one of us.

It was another two days before the A/C people could get someone else back out to the house, which annoyed me no end. But I’ll give them props for this: They didn’t for one second try to claim it wasn’t their fault. And the manager swore up and down they’d get it all made right.

He just didn’t say how long it would take.

Part of the problem was that until the mold remediation people started ripping wall down, they had no idea just how bad the problem was. We lost the entire stairwell wall, one full wall and parts of two others in the laundry room, which adjoins the stairwell, part of the laundry-room ceiling and the bottom three steps on the stairwell.

Oh, and the floor and first level of subflooring in the laundry room. Our washer and dryer ended up in the living room for quite a while.

The mold remediation kept us from being able to get upstairs for several days. We had a beach vacation coming up, so we packed for the beach the night before the mold guys got there, figuring
we might not get another chance. We were wise to do so.

No work got done while we were at the beach, obviously, and no work got done for the first week after we got back (although we could go upstairs again). Once the restoration work began, it took seven full working days. They finished this past Monday. We spent most of yesterday and today cleaning up the fine film of dust that drywall work always leaves elsewhere in the house no matter how carefully you hang your plastic sheets. Fun.

A new business blog

My mother and stepdad, who have a management consulting business called AlexanderHancock Associates, have started a blog for managers and other professionals. It’s here. Go check it out.

Simple answers to simple questions: Social Security

How do we ease Social Security’s problems? Cracking down on employers who don’t pay Social Security and Medicare taxes to the government would help.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions.

(h/t: Mom)