Friday, September 26, 2008

Octoberfest has a whole new meaning

I'll be celebrating the start of October - not with a big festival of beer tents, but by cheering on my favorite team as they enter the postseason. I'm hoping the number 100 will be a lucky one for my Chicago Cubs. Perhaps this will be the last season we'll have to utter the words, "Wait until next year."

There have been some seasons where they've come so close. The gateway to the playoffs opens, but another shuts before they the world series is within sight. There is a generation, now gray-haired and collecting social security, who can recall a time when the Cubs did make it to the world series. The number of people who were alive the last time they held a world series title is small and dwindling by the day.

As someone pointed out to me the other day, the Friendly Confines (aka Wrigley Field) have never been home to a world championship team and despite laborous maintenance and planned improvements, there will be a day in the not so distant future when the bricks and ivy will exist no more and the team will be marching out onto a field in a high-tech, yet much less charming, ballpark. How sweet it would be for that title to be won while the team is till playing in its historic home.

One other piece of the story I would truly like to see is a World Series match up of both Chicago teams. At present, the Sox are .5 game behind the Twins, but I really am hoping to see them make it into the playoffs. It has happened once before many years ago (102 to be exact) that the two faced eachother in a world series. Why not again in 2008?

Some say there would be absolute mayhem in Chicago if it came to that, but one Sox fan I know suggested to me that it may not be all that bad. After all, you wouldn't see Cubs fan rioting in the streets and flipping over cars. That's because when they won a world series they would have had to flip over horse-drawn buggies. Ha! Ha!

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Live life instead of writing about it

Well, there have been several topics and happenings that I meant to write about in the past few weeks, but life has kept me busy. I remember my mom once reciting a quote by Jacqueline Kennedy - "I was always too busy living my life to write about it." My mom, who always jotted things down in journals said it with a tinge of longing, envy and admiration for Jackie Kennedy. I'm sure there were a lot of things my mom has always wanted to do that she never got around to. I guess that's true for all of us.

I always have things in my mind that I mean to write down and I'm often hard on myself - plagued with guilt that I've haven kept up with writing every milestone in baby books. I come back to that quote when I'm beating myself up and remind myself that I'd rather be living my life with my kids than writing about them while they are just an arm's length away. And just an odd coincidence - my oldest one was born on the day of Jackie Kennedy's death.

So, the past few weeks have been filled with summer activity. Lots of days at the pool, visits to the parks, trips for ice cream and barbecues in the back yard. We took another family vacation and school has started. I got to a concert with a former co-worker that I really enjoyed (Martina McBride, Jack Ingram and Chris Young.) This past weekend we visited friends at Bass Lake and I tried tubing for the first time, which was a blast, but left me quite sore. Today, I met a friend for breakfast and a round of tennis. I was hilariously horrible. I told my friend I hadn't used a tennis racket since I was 10 years old. She was very patient and tried to humor me by complimenting me on the serves that actually went where they were supposed to go.

The past two weeks since school has began, I've had the first opportunity in over 14 years where I've actually had a little span of time completely to myself. My oldest four are now in school all day and my youngest is in preschool three mornings a week. So, today I made good use of that two hours to see a friend and get a little exercise. Then I blew those few burned calories with biscuits and gravy. It is strangely quiet on those few mornings I've been at home alone, but there's always work to be done. I'm not quite sure how I'll take it in a couple more years when my baby is also gone all day. Maybe then I'll have more time to slow down and write about it ~ or try to improve my tennis game. :)