2009: A life odyssey

I’ve never been that big on resolutions. Sure I’ll work on losing weight, but I think (know) I need more…fun challenges.

Thus and therefore, I resolve:
*to play more backgammon. I’ve been playing online quite a bit in 2008. But I have an actual board with actual pieces in my cubicle, and I haven’t touched it, except to dust it off, in the nearly three years we’ve been in cuby land. This MUST change. I have one opponent lined up, and a date for next Tuesdayand a novice ready to learn.
* to play more cards, specifically hearts. I may have played once in 2008. Not acceptable.
* to see more movies. The wife and I may have to go to the virtual date plan, where one of us sees the 1 pm movie while the other watches the child, then the other sees the 4 pm movie while the first watches the child, then discuss later. It’s not optimal, but neither is seeing five movies/year.
* to play more racquetball. Actually, more correctly, to continue to play racquetball. This year, the daughter goes to kindergarten. There appears to be no preschool at her school. Since the wife can’t take her to school because of timing, it would default to me. But that would mean that I’d almost NEVER play racquetball, which might, quite literally, kill me, since it is both my primary form of exercise – especially in the winter, when I don’t ride the bike – and something with which the competition provides a joie de vivre that riding on a stationary bike or running around a track simply doesn’t generate for me. To that end, we’re investigating hiring someone to get Lydia up, dressed, fed and taken to school, perhaps a student from a nearby college. We’re paying for daycare now, so that’d be the source of the payments.
Oh, jeez, I almost forgot: come spring, I need to BUY a bike to replace the one that was stolen.
*read more books. I’ve started literally dozens that I simply never finish.
*listen to more music at home. This will be facilitated by the fact that the daughter got a boom box for Christmas. This means that the other boom box, which technically belongs to the wife – my matching one got stolen from my office a few years ago – can reside in the living room. My stereo, specifically the CD player, has ceased to work, despite taking it into the shop. So until I buy a new one, the boombox will be the primary form of entertainment in the living quarters.

I think that’s enough.

Do YOU have any resolutions that you’d like to share?

Oh, and I had one of those reminders why I do the blog this past week. My mother, sister and niece made an impromptu visit to the Salisbury National Cemetery where my father was buried, but they couldn’t find the grave site. They knew they were close, but lots of folks have been buried there in the past eight years. So my sister calls me on her cellphone; did I have a record of where he was buried? I went to my trusty blog and found the citation, section 8, grave 358. Yet another notation that while I like to provide the best of the psychodrama in my head for your entertainment, I have to do the blog for ME.


ROG

March Madness

For the past few years, I’ve been involved in picking the winners of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. For the last couple years, my #1 team lost in the finals. The winner of the pool last year was a five-year old boy, who had also won two years previously, when he was three. He picks based on school mascots, nicknames, and geography, which is obviously more successful than reading everything I can from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, USA Today and CBS Sportsline. I suppose I could just WATCH THE GAMES during the season, but truth is, the only game I watched this season was the six minutes of the Albany-Vermont game. That’s six minutes more than I watched LAST year.

Anyway, one gets one point for getting the games in round one, two points for round two, four points for round three, etc. Even if NO one picks the ultimate champion, someone will win the pool, which is not for money but for pride. I’ll be sharing my progress, but I won’t give you the blow-by-blow. I will tell you, out of sheer civic pride, i’m picking Albany to win one game. I also have Georgetown beating Ohio State, Florida beating UCLA and Georgetown beating Florida in the Final Four.

I was playing Internet backgammon with someone this week, and he or she seemed to leave their pieces intentionally vulnerable. Even if you’ve never played the game, what you need to know is that two pieces on a space are safe and one is not, and that this person seemed to intentionally want to get hit. Strange, and not that much fun, winning handily like that. Reminds me of an old girlfriend who was playing a card game called casino. Aces are worth a point apiece, and she was playing first, but didn’t pick up the aces on the table even though she had an ace in her hand to do so, which soon became evident. She did it so I could win; this did NOT make me happy.

Anyway, my posts for the next couple days will be short, because my back’s been killing me. I seem to have pulled something trying to right myself on the ice, the old melt-and-refreeze stuff. I didn’t fall; almost wish I did. So I stayed home Tuesday and watched the Grammys; yeah, only a month late. The highlight for me had to be Mary J. Blige doing Stay with Me, a song by Lorraine Ellison which I have on vinyl on THE 1969 WARNER/REPRISE RECORD SHOW. I LOVE those LPs, as they were wonderfully eclectic. – I have 32 of the 37 listed.

The Ellison song was the last of a quintet of songs I used to play when romance would go sour:
Remove This Doubt-Supremes
Sweet Bitter Love-Aretha
Gone Away-Roberta Flack
First Night Alone without You-Jane Olivor

ROG

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