The List of Fifty – White Water Rafting

“Go white water rafting” has been on The List of Fifty since its inception.  And finally this past week, I was able to check it off!  Woo Hoooo!  And it was a Woo Hoo adventure!  My brother Phil is in town with his kids and we decided to take the two oldest up to Buena Vista for a little WW Rafting on the Arkansas.

We went with an outfit called “Noah’s Ark” and it was GREAT!  Having never gone before I really had no idea what to expect.  We chose to go on the kind of raft where the guide does the lion’s share of the rowing and steering and to do a half day trip on a class II and III stretch of the river.

Once an item on “The List” has been checked off, a new item needs to be added to keep the list at fifty.  After this little adventure, I’m putting “go white water rafting” BACK on the list, only this time it will be to go on a trip that includes class IV rapids.  AND next time I want to do more of the rowing and maybe make it an all day sort of trip.  Good times.  If you are keeping your own “list”, and it doesn’t have “go white water rafting” on it, may I recommend that you add it????

Here we are, going through the “Seven Steps” rapids!  (I’m in the far back where you can’t really see me!)

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Coach

This coming Saturday the life of John Stevenson, Coach Stevenson, will be remembered and celebrated.

I grew up in a sleepy little town in Southern California.  A town called El Segundo.  A town sort of lost in time, a regular Mayberry.  The main street through town is called Main Street.  Flanked by the Pacific Ocean on the west, LAX on the north, aerospace industry on the east, and a Chevron refinery on the south, El Segundo is an enclave of relative safety just miles from Los Angeles.  When I lived there the population was somewhere around 12,000.  There is still only one high school and when I attended El Segundo High School it had less than a thousand students.  Not the kind of town that you’d expect would routinely turn out brilliant baseball players and winning baseball teams.  But that’s exactly what has happened there…and it happened for decades.  And that was because of the leadership of one man who loved the game…Coach John Stevenson.

Coach Stevenson dedicated his life to the youth of El Segundo for 50 years.  He was never my coach, but he was my teacher.  I took freshman social studies/history from him.  However, the biggest lesson I learned from him wasn’t learned in the classroom.  Have you ever heard of Scott McGregor?  George Brett?  They are just two of the Gundo boys who went on to play professional baseball.  There have been six of Coach’s players who have gone on to play in the major leagues.  Many more played in the minors.  The lesson I learned because of these players was that if I worked hard, and played well, I could be as successful as anyone else…that being from a small town and not being particularly privileged was not something that should hold me back.  This lesson was one of two great gifts he gave to me.

I’m not gonna lie…Coach kinda scared me.  He was intense out on the field and he wanted his players to play good baseball.  I don’t know if it’s true to say this or not, but it seemed to me that he’d rather his players play good baseball and lose than to play lousy baseball and win.  The game mattered to him.  Sometimes I would cringe when he would yell at the players that made mistakes.  Everyone in the stands knew when Coach wasn’t happy.  But if he felt that his players were on the receiving end of bad baseball, like a bad call from an umpire, he was out there in the face of the offender to make sure that the same standards applied to everyone on the field, not just to his players.  Coach is California’s winningest baseball coach of all time.  A record that is likely to stand for a long time.

The other great gift that Coach gave to me was the gift of baseball itself.  My favorite high school memories revolve around baseball.  I loved going to those Friday night games at rec park.  I still love a really good game of baseball.  I don’t even care who is playing.  To me, the sound of a wooden bat squarely contacting a baseball is one of the most thrilling sounds in sportsdom.  I was privileged to have two brothers play Eagle baseball for Coach.  To this day I am proud of the kind of ball they both played.

Thank you Coach, for investing your life into the lives of other people’s children and for helping them, helping me, learn that in life, as in baseball, you get out of it what you put into it.

El Segundo, and baseball, will miss you…

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John On Jeopardy!!

A forever family friend of ours, John Goodreau, (since he is making himself public in what he’s doing, I am feeling free to use his last name), is going to be on Jeopardy tonight!

I sure hope that someone tapes (or Tivos or DVRs) the episode (and hopefully many subsequent episodes) for me so that I can see it!

GOOD LUCK, JOHN!  I know you’ll do well!  Represent!! 

And I have another Happy Birthday send-out, too.  This time I’m wishing a happy one to my niece, Natalie!  Happy Birthday, Nan.  I love you and miss you and hope to see you soon…

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(Posted in absentia)

Photogra-bee

Yep.  I know you’ve seen this picture before.  I had asked for advice on which photograph to submit to a photography competition.  The majority voted for this picture, so I submitted it.

Lucky day, I was one of the first 20 people to submit their photo and was given a 20 dollar gift certificate to a local restaurant/coffee bar!    I’ll have to wait until I get home to cash that puppy in though…

Wish me more luck.  I’d like to win a new camera.  The Butterfly Pavilion is accepting submissions through July 30th, so I’ll be back in the states in time for the announcement of the winner, which I’m sure, with all of your support, will be me!

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(Posted in absentia)

Help Me Choose!

I am thinking of entering a photo in a local photography contest.  The subject matter is “Pollenators” and we are to show them in the process of doing their thing.

I have a few pictures I am considering and would love your feedback!

There are three.  The third picture is simply a “brighter” version of the second.

Which do I enter?  Help me choose!!!! 

Or are none of them even good enough to enter.  Dunno!

Your thoughts?

(I took these pictures in my brother’s yard this past week in California…he has a most wonderful garden.  The entire southern wall of his home sports rose bushes – many taller than I – simply loaded with roses of many colors.  The bees on this day seemed partial to these vermillon blooms)

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The Beach Bot Update

My nephew Richard’s robotics team took second in their division, and 8th overall in the FIRST nationals in last week’s competition in Atlanta.  Not bad for a little team of homeschooled kids from the beach cities of Los Angeles!

Congrats team 330!  Well done!

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Before and After

I haven’t been blogging much lately.  I’m on vacation and just haven’t had much quiet time in order to do so.  The problem with NOT blogging regularly is that my head just gets filled and I end up with so many thoughts that I doubt most of the things I want to write about will ever get written.  (In addition to the dozens and dozens of things I want to write about that I haven’t even started, I have 118 drafts currently sitting in my draft box in varying stages of completion all waiting to be posted.  Yikes.)

Yesterday was event day here.  My nephew Mitchell had a soccer game.  So did my nephew Jonathan.  And my nephew Richard had a robotics event.  I did get to see both games, and part of the robotics event.

At Mitchell’s game, I just happened to have the camera trained on him when he did a knee kick and I was able to capture it on film.  Here it is:

Too bad it was filled with people and dirt piles and fencing.  I wondered if I could photoshop any of that stuff out.  I figured that I could at least try.  So I pulled it up in Photo Impact and gave it a try.  I am so tickled with the result.  Mind you, if you zoom in on it, it looks TERRIBLE, but from a distance, it looks like (what Richard calls) a Mitchell Trading Card!

I don’t usually manipulate my photos except for cropping.  But I’m delighted to have learned this new skill nonetheless.  Here’s my Mitchell Trading Card…

Never trust any photograph that you see in a magazine!  I’m not even sure you should trust any photograph you see at all unless it has some sort of disclaimer swearing that no manipulation was done to it.  Heck, if I can do it, who can’t???

The house is momentarily quiet.  All have gone to church.  I need to pack while I have the place to myself.   But I HAD to post something! 

Now that I’ve gotten one post out of my head, I best get to that packing before the house fills back up with kids!

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Way To Go, Bots!

Woo Hoo!

 

I had hoped to put a YouTube video here.  I videotaped some of the games using my camera and my computer.  However, when I played back what I had recorded, all the footage had both auditory and visual distortion!  It didn’t matter what application I played it back in, all of it sounded and looked the same.  I guess maybe NASA didn’t want people taping their webcasts, huh?  Ah well, here’s a still shot of the Beach Bot’s robot on the field!  And it is scoring, by the way!

Welcome home Beach Bots and congratulations on being in a Final Four that I can truly appreciate!  J  Oh.  Get this.  Here it is just a few hours after the competition (I wrote this last night!) is over and I googled “Team 330″ to see what would come up.  One of the top results was the Wikipedia entry for this year’s FIRST competition, “Rack ‘n’ Roll”.  It listed the Division Champs already!  That’s just crazy!  How’d Wikipedia DO THAT?   

The award that the Beach Bots won was the “General Motors Industrial Design Award”.  Pretty great.  Here is the FIRST official post event press release with all the results:  Click HERE to read.

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Team 330

Team 330 is my nephew Richard’s robotics team number at the national FIRST robotic finals.  I woke up bright and early this morning and downloaded a nice fresh version of Real Player so that I could watch the webcast from Atlanta today.  At 11:00 Atlanta time the Beach Bot and Team 330 is announced.  They play three teams against three teams (the three teams work together and are an “alliance”) and Team 330 was on the Red Alliance.  I watch the whole match, and then, just as they are to announce the final score….my finger on the screen capture button and ready to capture the results so I could post a picture here…the feed freezes up!  Sheesh.  Am I the only one who has no end of trouble with technology?  Does technology regularly fail other people like it fails me???  Any how, here it is, thirty minutes later, and the feed still doesn’t work.  There are four fields that are being webcasted.  My nephew’s team is scheduled in the Curie field.  ALLLLLL the other fields’ webcast feeds are FINE.  But the Curie field feed isn’t working!  Just my luck, I’m tellinya.

BUT!  The Red Alliance (along with Team 330) won their match.  I just checked the standings.  There are two teams which are undefeated in the Curie field, and Team 330 is one of them!  They are ranked 2nd right now in their division!!!!

This is all terribly exciting… 

More later today, I’m sure!

UPDATE:  The winners from each division have now picked their alliances for the quarterfinals.  Team 330 picked two teams that were fairly low in the rankings.  That must mean that whatever they do WELL is something that the BEACH BOT maybe doesn’t do so well.  There is a break in the action in Atlanta.  Must be lunch time.  I found a pdf file that explains all the rules of play for this year’s competition.  It’s called “Rack ‘n’ Roll”.  Here’s a link, just in case you are interested. 

“Rack ‘n’ Roll” Rules

ANOTHER UPDATE:  The Beach Bots and their alliance teams just won their quarterfinals and are on to the semis.  In their last match they scored HUGE!  They scored nearly 286 points while holding the other alliance to less than 18.  I think that 286 might be close to the highest score so far in this competition.  Again, this is all terribly exciting! 

Ah!  YET ANOTHER UPDATE!:  The Beach Bots and their alliance have won the finals of the Curie division and are on to the FINAL Finals!  There were awards handed out to the three teams on the winning alliance.  Some of these teams have more than 50 kids on them!  The Beach Bots have ten.  Yup.  Ten kids.  Pretty cool to be on a team of ten and be winning like this.

My last, at least I THINK so, UPDATE:  The Beach Bots won a design award, but sadly, were eliminated in the semi-finals of the Final Round.  They were in the final four, but I don’t know what place that means they came in.  I guess that means there is one more update yet to come!  Besides, I need to post a video of one of their games, now don’t I? 

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Through the Fence

When I was in Southern California last week, I was lucky enough to be able to watch my nephew Mitchell play in one of his first Tee-ball games.  His team is the Dodgers.  And they wear uniforms that are nearly real!  Mitchell is number 14.  The numbers are assigned by size…the smallest kid gets 1 and the numbers get bigger as the kid gets bigger.  The highest number on Mitchell’s team is 14.  He’s only just turned five, but he’s a big ole kid!

I’m not sure what you learn about baseball by playing Tee-ball.  They hit off of a tee, they aren’t old enough to really comprehend strategy, most of them have horrible hand-eye coordination, and they can’t really even throw.  There’s no winning, no losing, and no outs.  Everyone hits, everyone scores.  It’s pretty much a feel good proposition all the way around, but they seem to have fun doing it, so no harm done. 

I took these pictures from the stands.  I liked the look of the fence in the foreground.  I superzoomed to get pictures of him all the way in the outfield.  I’m very happy with how the pictures turned out.

I grew up in a baseball town (El Segundo, California) and in a baseball family and I graduated from a high school where baseball is legendary (graduating George and Ken Brett, and Scott MacGregor to name a few).  I’d sure like to see one of the kids in the next generation of my family grow to love baseball and to be able to play well.  Just to be selfish really, because I love going to baseball games and have missed it since my brothers stopped playing.  Looking at Mitchell’s stance here, I think he just might have it!  During the entire “game”, and despite there not being official “outs”, there were a handful of plays made that WOULD have resulted in outs had that been part of the rules.  There was a kid who was tagged out at home with the significant help of a coach and there was a kid who lapped another kid running the bases, and I think there was one kid who chased down a runner for three bases and tagged him out.  But, while playing on the pitcher’s mound, Mitchell made three plays to first that beat the runners!  I was impressed!

He looks a bit like a major leaguer, donchathink? 

Mitchell’s personal style includes wearing his cap down just as far as he can over his eyes.  Nobody can say why for sure!  (And that mitt has been in our family for generations!  Not that you probably couldn’t tell!)

So, little man Mitchell, enjoy playing!  I sure enjoyed watching!  Go Dodgers!!

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Go BEARS!

Where’ve I been for the entirety of football season?  Just this week I was informed that this Sunday is SuperBowl Sunday.  Not a huge football fan, I generally am at least *aware* of this huge sporting event and of who is playing.  But, this year, I had to ask…. “Really?  That’s THIS Sunday?  Who’s playing?”.  I don’t have a team of my own, not really.  I am a Packers fan just because I at least sort of need a team, on principal, to call my own.  As the entire world knows, the Packers didn’t make the Bowl, but the BEARS did!  I am delighted for all of my friends in Chicagoland, especially those who are rabid fans.  So, for them, Go BEARS!