How not to spend time on your vacation

It's after 11:00 P.M. on a Wednesday, right in the middle of my vacation, and I'm getting upset because I can't seem to get the wifi to work so I can check e-mails.

I don't have a job that requires me to check e-mails while on vacation, but it is a job that necessarily means I will return with over a thousand e-mails when I return July 6 if I do not check them and delete the deletables. My Outlook inbox is likely already filled to its limit, which is stressing me out more than any subject matter I may find once I do get in.

It's weird stressing out over something that will really not matter one bit once I return from vacation. My July 6 return will be filled with catching up regardless of whether I stress about it now, and whether I do anything about it once I get into the wifi. If I ever do get in, that is.

It's also frustrating that I drove over a half-mile to do this, as our room does not get wifi.

If only my golf game was good enough to relieve the stress.

Opposites attract

I hate slow walkers. My wife is a slow walker. OK, I don't hate her, nor other slow walkers really, but I hate getting stuck behind them in places where I'm not even trying to walk fast - just at a nice, lively pace.

My wife hates slow drivers. I am a slow driver. OK, she doesn't hate me, nor other slow drivers, but she hates getting stuck behind them in places where she only wants to go 5 mph over the speed limit. I don't really drive slowly, either, just typically 1 mph slower than the normal flow, unless I'm in a hurry, which isn't often.

She really gets stressed out over other drivers, which causes her to tailgate, cuss, etc. And that stresses me out even more than she already is.

But you know what's good for stress? A nice, lively walk. It's supposed to be, anyway.

World Cup

At the risk of sounding like another ignorant American, I just can't get into the World Cup. But to all those worldly, smarter-than-I fans of the game, who "get it" like I "obviously" do not, I have a few things to say, in no particular order:

1. Because I don't enjoy the game as much as the "Big 4" American professional team sports does not mean I do not enjoy the game.
2. Because I would like to see more scoring in an average game, does not mean I do not "get it."
3. If soccer is such a pure sport, why is the most important game of the "best game in the world" allowed to be decided by the luck of a goaltender's guess? (Oh, that's right, I know the answer...because I just don't "get it.")
4. If soccer fans do not have the same short attention span as we glib Americans, and fully understand and enjoy the beauty of the game as it is, why must they blow those vuvuzela's from start to finish, in a game that takes a mere 2 hours total time to complete? (What's to "get" there?)
5. Because I criticize the game as I do, does not mean I do not enjoy it.
6. I greatly appreciate what soccer players can do with the ball without resorting to their hands. Because that does not entertain me to the same extent as many other sports, does not mean I do not "get it."
7. Soccer, like many other sports and games, is great fun to play. It just ranks lower on my list of sports and games I enjoy watching. Which, again, is not the same as my saying I do not enjoy watching it at all.

OK, I think I've made my point(s), although I admit there may be some straw man arguments in there. I probably will watch the World Cup final for the same reason I watch the college women's softball finals, and other sporting events I otherwise don't regularly follow. That is, when something is truly on the line, I enjoy pretty much all forms of athletic competition.

I'd just rather clap along with an organ than blow a vuvuzela.

Yes, I do see the potential for the sophomoric innuendo joke in that last sentence. Have at it, if you wish.

Duct tape: It really can do anything

We took our four-year-old to the doctor today to look at what appeared to be a wart growing on his foot. Actually, his "Mema" took him, at her insistence, and it pains me to admit I'm glad she did.

It is indeed a wart (we had hoped it was merely a corn), and my wife and I had a brief discussion about whether it is a Plantar wart. She said because it is on the bottom of his foot, it is by definition a Plantar wart. I disagreed in my head, kept my mouth shut, Googled it later, learned to my satisfaction I was right, and continued to keep my mouth shut.

From http://www.howtodothings.com/:

"Plantar warts often appear near the balls of the foot or around the heel (essentially, the places that most likely made contact with the virus in the first place). You can feel the lump of a plantar wart as you walk, but when you look at it, the wart appears surprisingly flat. Due to their location on the body, plantar warts grown inward as opposed to outward. As a result, the wart won't look like a wart on someone's face. A plantar wart feels like a callus because it's covered in callus tissue due to the frequent pressure of walking. Often the planter wart will appear darkly discolored, sometimes with the appearance of a small black core (which is a blood clot, not any physical materialization of the virus itself)."

So yes, a Plantar wart does appear on the bottom of the foot, but exhibits no likeness to the wart my son has. His is outward-growing and has none of the small black cores explained above, which I once experienced in my early twenties.

What I did not expect to learn was the home remedy for it: duct tape. It kills the virus I guess, and eventually the wart goes away. It is supposed to work for "real" Plantar warts, too. I was very glad to know my son didn't have to have it frozen off, for his sake and mine, as I'm not sure my insurance covers the procedure.

I used a daily regimen of a prescription cream, Band-Aids, and a razor blade to remove mine back in the late '80s. It was kind of gross and creepy to self-mutilate my way to a wart-free foot. It was a lot cheaper than freezing the warts off, but it was no match for duct tape.

Those little marks that use their influence

(The title of this post was taken from the punctuation song from the Electric Company in the 1970s.)

I think it was in seventh grade when I read "Flowers for Algernon." It's a story about Charlie who gets smart because of new, experimental drug treatment, but then reverts to his below-average intelligence and eventually dies. A real heartwarmer.

Sorry, perhaps I should have put "spoiler alert" first.

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of the book was when Charlie wrote in his journal, "Punctuation; is fun!?!" Or something like that. While he was getting smarter, he was learning about punctuation, but had not yet learned how to use it correctly.

We all have our grammatical and spelling pet peeves. Misuses of "they're, their," and "there," for example. One of mine is how the period and the question mark seem to be interchangeable in e-mails, particularly at work.

I get that it's just e-mail. I support people keying their message quickly for efficiency's sake, which might mean a little carelessness. It isn't a college theme paper, after all. I hope people afford me the same leniency in judging some of my blog posts.

I guess I've just seen it so often, and many times from the same offenders, that it just gets under my skin.

Do you know what I'm talking about. I don't know why they do it?

If reading the above two sentences bothered you, congratulations. If you didn't notice anything, you might be one of the "repeat offenders" of which I complain.

How Do They Keep Their Jobs?

This is beneath me, but I just need to memorialize the ineptitude of another major league baseball umpire tonight. Mike Winters, who might have been qualified to fill-in as a last minute replacement for a little league no-show tonight, was absolutely brutal. If you can find Justin Morneau's fourth inning at bat somewhere on the net, check it out.

It's not the only example, but it's pretty comical to see in a matter of seconds, with strike two on an outside pitch, and strike three on the inside, an umpire's hallucination of a 26-inch-wide plate.

Winters was so bad, I'll even forgive Brian Runge for his erroneous showing-up of Nick Punto on the pick-off call at first.

Bowling: Youth Wasted on this Youngster

On February 8, 1988, I bowled my first and only 300 game. Five days later, I bowled a 290. My name was mentioned in the late Bob Schabert's bowling column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press two weeks in a row for these feats. In the span of about two weeks, I had bowled four 700+ series. This was back when this type of scoring actually still meant something, and all before my 22nd birthday.

No, I'm not bragging. I wish I were, because then I could say how much I have accomplished since then. In a sport (or game if you prefer) that saw scoring inflation in the '90s akin to what Major League Baseball saw in home runs, and unlike baseball has not reeled it back (although I doubt steroid testing is anywhere on bowling's horizon), the question to ask a good bowler is not whether they have bowled a 300, but how many have they bowled.

I'm still awaiting my second.

I'm at peace with it, because only last year did I decide to really take advantage of the equipment revolution that began in 1992 with the first commercial reactive resin cover stock balls. I was only a casual bowler between '92 and '08.

The reason I was only casually involved was because I burned myself out. I had some talent, desire, and a world of potential. But what I failed to do to make it to the next level(s) was in the mental part of the game: both in learning the technical parts, and dealing with the emotional intelligence part.

With that, I present my season stats from the 1987-88 Evangelical Lutheran bowling league at the now-defunct Minnehaha Lanes. (I'm not Lutheran, in case you are wondering.) This was not the same league in which I bowled my 300 game, which is good, because in that league, I also bowled a 102, and I'd rather you not see it (although I did just tell you). Yes, my high and low games for the year were 198 pins apart! That's gotta be some kind of record.

You will see the same type of inconsistency, however, in the stats from this league, which show that while I had nights where I could put it together, I couldn't quite hang with the big boys. I tried to compete in the local CBA and other scratch tournaments the following year, but failed miserably, and was too emotionally unintelligent to handle it. I quit for a couple years, made a return to league bowling again in the early '90s, and was pretty much done after that. You could say I peaked at 21, and was washed up at 22.

One thing is for sure with regard to my recent attempt at a "comeback": I'm going to have fun doing it, results be damned. One way I will make sure of it is to coach my four-year-old son as he joins his first bowling league next year.

Bowling with my kids always puts me in the right frame of mind...except when the two-year-old runs in front of the people two lanes over.