More August News

Well, we made it back from Montana in one piece. That was NOT a relaxing vacation. It was a ton of fun, don't get me wrong, but relaxing - NOT. So we've had a couple of semi-boring days and now we're off again.

We leave tomorrow for Alex's soccer tournament in Snohomish. Snohomish is like two hours away, short enough that we could just drive it every day. But we're staying in the hotel with the rest of the team. Spending money on another hotel room makes me sick thinking about it, but then with gas prices, it's probably kind of a wash.

Then I find out the other night that when we registered for the tourney, they asked us some random questions, and when the brackets came out, we got stuck in a bracket with all P-1 teams. That means Premier 1 league teams, one of them being the team Alex was on last year. We are a P-4 team. So the coaches pulled the parents together to let us know that they were working on trying to get to another bracket, but if not, it's up to us to keep the girls up and ready to play. I just want to, you guessed it, VOMIT. Everyone else is all, Oh, it would be great to play them; we can kick their butts. When I was growing up, I played tennis for years and years. My whole summer was organized around tennis tournaments all over the state (which was a BLAST, by the way). But I remember people always saying, You can beat anyone if you just believe you can. Well, I did then and I do now call bull*$#@. I remember thinking, So you people honestly believe that if I put my mind to it, I could beat Rainey Lamey (the #1 girl in the state from Billings, who had an indoor court and played year-round) or Berrit Burton (the girl who came up every summer from Nicaragua and kicked all our asses) or, for that matter, Chris Evert. So I've always been skeptical of that, Believe it and you can mentality. I don't think we'll actually end up playing them, but we will be playing at least one team that beat us last year 10-0.

Tonight is my Girls U7 soccer team's first practice. For the love of god, I'm not sure what I was thinking when I volunteered to coach. It's not that I don't think I can do it. I'm just not sure I want to or have the patience. Yesterday Eric kept asking me if I had a plan and what I was going to do. Well, yeah, at that point my plan was just to show up, hand out soccer balls and have the girls kick up and down the grass for a while. Finally, his constant bugging me got to me and I got out the drills my friend gave me to work on. Then I called Alex down and we actually planned out practice. She's even sort of excited. I think she'll be great. We already know four of the five girls. It might even be fun.

My sister gets to house a 21-year-old Scottish soccer coach for a week. I mean, unless he's a total dog, the accent alone is worth it. I told her that I'm sure any sort of sexual activity with any of the people housing them is probably seriously frowned upon. I don't know, some of those soccer bodies (i.e., David Beckham - how can you argue that), boom chicka wah wah.

Also, my sister, after seeing Samantha pass songs on Easy on Guitar Hero, finally got into it. I told her that if she ever gets up to Hard songs, she has to let me know so I can come out of retirement because I can't have my little sister beating me at GH. She posted this morning on her blog that she hit Raining Blood, which I'm not even sure should count as a song. I know a lot of the good people that make up heavy metal fans would argue with me, but I don't get it. And I think I'm fairly open-minded. But if there's no discernible beat anywhere, how is that a song? I've passed it, but I'm not a fan of Raining Blood!