Sunday, May 11, 2008

Common Sense - Not So Common Anymore

Yesterday, my daughter had her last softball game. Nice day for a game, a bit overcast, but the weather was on the cool side. Her game was at 8:30 AM, so most of the parents either bought coffee at the snackbar or brought their own. I had a cup of the snackbar coffee, which I set down underneath my chair in the dugout (I bring a chair because I cannot sit in a bleacher seat for any length of time without serious pain). Since I was the bench coach for the team, I get to sit in the dugout.

One of the assistant coaches set his thermal mug of coffee down on the bench seat in the dugout at the bottom of the second inning of play (we were the home team) with the admonition, "don't spill my coffee."

These are five and six year old girls. They climb up on the ledges, climb the chainlink "walls" of the dugout, and otherwise do NOT stay still for more than 3 seconds at a time. I was busy keeping my lineup going, making sure the girls got helmets on and ready to bat. All of a sudden, at the end of the inning, one of the girls... you guessed it, knocked over the coffee. It spilled all over the place, but mostly in my daughter's "street" shoes (she wears cleats when playing, but her regular shoes were under her seat in the dugout), coffee also spilled all over my daughter's glove, etc. etc. etc.

So in addition to trying to get the catcher's gear on one of the girls, I had to wipe down K's glove, and while I was doing that, Mr. Coffee comes back in and starts complaining about how his coffee got spilled.

It took everything in my being not to yell, "You were the [insert curseword here] dumbass who put a cup of coffee on the bench with energetic children. You could have put your coffee in the corner of the dugout and a can guaran[insert curseword here]tee you that it would not have spilled, and I would not have had to wipe your sticky-ass coffee off my daughter's glove and out of her "street" shoes!"

The stupid, it hurts.

Monday, May 5, 2008

Air Show

We went to the airshow at March AFB yesterday. The weather was beautiful (a bit cool even, which is saying something for Riverside County CA). The Thunderbirds were the headline act, and there were several biplane acts and two parachute acts. There was even a wing walker (not enough money in the world to get me to do that - I have difficulty even getting on a commercial jet).


Here are some photos I took of the Thunderbirds.







Here is one I took of the C-17 demonstration.



I really need a good digital SLR camera with a fast lens to get better shots of the planes and stuff. My point and shoot digital's shutter lags just a bit too much to be able to do the feats of aerodynamics justice.