Boys at play

I love softball. It's one of the few activities grown men can play and still feel like they are playing a real sport ... while drinking beer.

Last night, our team was booted out of the tournament after a horribly bad day in the field and at the plate.

But the experience was interesting for me as I watched some of the other teams playing. First, you need to know I play in a men's novice league. Parapalegic gerbils are more competitive than my league. Despite this, just about every game a big fight breaks out over a blown call, a rule or somebody bringing the wrong beer brand.

That's where I figured it out. These are grown men playing a kid's game. The minute we step on that field, we are just boys again. (It's when we get off the field and our backs are hurting that we realize we're old men again).

Soggy ending

Well I am still wringing out from the rain that ended the last baseball game of the year for our household. It's been a fun season. Both boys hit really well. Andy has become a lead-off hitter for his team and Alex is surprisingly fast on the basepaths (if you know ANYONE in my family, you'll know why I said it's a surprise). Alex had the strangest bat of the year last night before the rain came. The pitcher threw at his head. Alex ducked, but he forgot to bring the bat down, too. The ball hit off the bat and actually went into fair territory. There was about two seconds of absolute silence because nobody knew what to do. Then everyone yelled at Alex to run. He made it up the line just in front of the throw.

This was actually the first game of the year to get rained out. We've had amazingly great conditions this year. (Not always playing as well as the conditions, but always having fun!)

I have a softball game tonight. Our team lost the first game of the season tournament, but we came back to kill last week. We're hoping to work through the loser's bracket. Stranger things have happened. I almost hope the pitcher throws at my head so I can try Alex's trick.

Strange world

I went to a seminar last week where they basically told all of us colleges that the only way to communicate with the youth of today is through myspace.com. So, yesterday I decided to check it out.
It was here that I read about the intimate details of other people's lives. Just seems strange. Seems like they should leave that to the professional humor columnists.
But I guess that isn't all that strange. My wife has several notebooks filled with the notes the daycare gave us when our boys were going there. I asked her why she was keeping them. She said (A,N,IANMTU), "If I ever want to know what the boys were doing on June 12 and I know exactly how many bowel movements they each had."
Like I said, we live in a strange world.

Movies

So, we were gonna go see the new Pirates movie last night. Three shows in a row were sold out. There were more people in line for the movie than for the ride when we went to Disneyland a few months ago...

Instead of waiting, we decided to go see "Click" and it was surprisingly not crappy.

Since I'm going off on movies, here are more of my condensed reviews:

• "Superman Returns" ... Crap. Christopher Reeve dead and paralyzed has more life than this new guy.
• "Cars" ... Awesome! The credits are the best. Not better than "Finding Nemo" but WAY better than most kid fare.
• "Garfield 2" ... Bill Murray and Tim Curry doing voice overs ALMOST saves this.
• "The Breakup" ... ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz
• "The Lake House" ... DON'T GO! Trust me. Just don't go!
• "A Prairie Home Companion" ... I don't listen to NPR, but this one was pretty good. Great actors and a fun story. Woody Harrelson and John C Reily should really work together more!
• "The Devil Wears Prada" ... I knew this would be a chick flick, but I think I actually liked it more than my wife did. Very funny and reminded me of some of the crappy bosses I've had.
• "The Da Vinci Code" ... Not nearly as exciting as the book.
• "Over the Hedge" ... Not better than "Cars" but WAY better than most.
• "Poseidon" ... Why do they need to remake classics and make them worse? Skip this and watch the classic on TV (it's on every other hour on AMC).
• "Hoot" ... I'll admit I went there to see Jimmy Buffett. Other than that, I had a nice nap while my kids watched the movie.