Confession #753

Here it goes....

I have a frienemy.

Well, actually I have more than one, and in this case frienemies beget frienemies...quite literally!

I've tried to untangle the crazy way we became frienemies, but I really can't. All I can say is that Patsy Clairmont was involved, I fell hard for a frog picture, we started following each other's blogs, then became friends on Facebook, then ended up in a fantasy football league together.  And THAT'S when I became frienemies with the one I'm writing about in this post. I'll call her *Willa McGillicuddy to protect reputations. Her mom, Labelle McGillicuddy was my original frienemy, the one with the frog picture. (It's absolutely perfect. You'd be smitten, too.) 

Anyway, long story only a little tiny bit shorter...

We discovered we had a shared love of baseball! 

Except, here's the kicker (and this is where it becomes shameful on my part):

 they're a Yankees family.

(You can see why I'd change names to protect everyone.)

THAT'S what made us frienemies. 

The Yankees (for those who don't know or care about major league baseball) are the sworn mortal enemies of the Red Sox from the origin of the sport, basically. I'm not going to delve into the history of the rivalry because that would start a brawl here on the Chronicles and that's not the point of the post. The point is that enemies can become friends and still remain enemies. Frienemies.


My frienemy, Willa, lives near where the Red Sox hold their spring training and preseason games. As my luck would have it and hers would fail, she has a friend with connections to the Red Sox. There were tickets in the family box of one of the games bestowed from a player, she asked Willa to accompany her...putting Willa in a painful dilemma.

Should she participate in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shmooze with MLB players of the sworn villainous team, thereby almost ensuring bad luck in the upcoming season for HER team? Or politely decline, knowing in her heart that she was a loyal 3 generation fan and kicking herself all the way to the nursing home when her children's children asked her "WHY, Gramma? WHY did you give up that opportunity?!"

It was impossible!
Poor Willa!

In the end, she did the right thing.
She grabbed a couple balls and a Sharpie marker, and went to the game.

Willa sent me one of the signed balls....the LUCKY BALL...and now I'm going to share photos of it with you. (This is a rare opportunity. The LUCKY BALL doesn't make public appearances as a rule.)

 The first signature, and the one with the most importance to the story of the LUCKY BALL is that of Xander Bogaerts (#2)

(Photo from Yahoo)

You can look up all his stats (this year they're stinking good), but he's the one who gave Willa's friend the tickets. 

The best part about his signature is that it's right above the "Made in China" stamp on the ball. 

It's so dear and naive, and I smile every time I see that. 

This sideways signature is Brock Holt (#26)...Brockstar. 

Photo from MLB

He's got great hair.

And he's ALSO a rising star this year! (Part of the reason I call it LUCKY BALL despite the Red Sox having a rather stinky season is because those who signed it seem to be having a lucky year. It's like they were blessed by the selfless, brave choice Willa made.)

 This is precious.

It's a signature by Luis Tiant (bottom). He was one of the greatest Red Sox pitchers of all time. 

Photo courtesy MLB

He's a legend, Red Sox Hall of Fame...hot stuff.

I'm not worthy.

Directly over the top is the signature of Anthony Varvarro, pitcher on the disabled list of the Red Sox roster.

Now, THAT was intriguing to me.

So I asked Willa who signed the ball first.

I couldn't imagine the moxy of a guy (especially a PITCHER) who would sign his name above El Tiante's signature...the arrogance!

Tiant signed the ball after Varvarro, robbing me of the thought.

And Varvarro's the only guy I haven't figured out if luck is holding for him this year.

Finally, John Farrell's signature.

Photo courtesy Zimbio

He's the manager of the team who is currently on the DL, I guess, with lymphoma cancer.  And for a while I wondered if the LUCKY BALL had failed him.

But actually, the cancer was discovered in a routine surgery for a hernia, so it really WAS lucky.

 LUCKY BALL sits on the shelf above my sink, next to my tiara, flamingo sunglasses, SF 49ers helmet decal, and notes from friends. (And frienemies!)

As a followup on Willa....
She's in counselling.

NOT REALLY!
Willa is still a very loyal Yankees fan, but she does keep track of certain Red Sox players now, having met them and all.  Her friend is still able to get tickets to games, so they're going to another one in a week or two. (You should also know that her friend doesn't care about baseball at all. It's a darned shame, and we chew on that quite a lot.)

Willa's mother, Labelle, continues to be my frienemy, too, but she says that Willa "stole" me from her. Just because we text daily. All I know is that I love them both and they'll just have to work that out on their own.

I hold dreams of going to "Fenway South" someday for spring training, but it's smack in the middle of calving season so that doesn't look imminent unless I win the lottery. (Which I'd have to actually play to win.)

So ends the confession.
I hope we can still be friends.
At the very least....if you're a Yankees fan....frienemies.

FREE BOOKS!

I'll bet THAT caught your attention, huh?!

Here's how you can get some:

1, Join Goodreads.com

2. Enter whatever "giveaway" looks interesting.

3. If your name is randomly chosen as a winner, you'll be sent that book.
    TO KEEP.
    FOR FREE.
 
4. Read the book and write a review on the Goodreads website. (An honest review...if you didn't like the book, you didn't like the book, and that's cool with them. Of course, they really hope you DO like it, but it's not a requirement or anything.)


Because you get to choose the kind of book you want, you won't be reviewing science fiction if you're a Civil War buff or that sort of nonsense.  And you may be wondering why in the world they'd send free books for very little return...

(The deal seemed WAY too good to me, too.)

There's a lot I don't understand about the book publishing/marketing business, but I do comprehend this: people trust other readers' opinions way more than the blurbs on the books themselves.  Readers attract readers who attract money which allows authors to buy food for their families and pets. (It turns out, authors get pennies on the dollar for their hard work, but that's another blog...) If someone reads your review and buys the book because of it, it's worth sending out the free copy. And if someone like me REALLY likes a book, they'll talk to strangers in the grocery store about it, push it on their friends (if they still have any...), write blog posts about it...you get the idea.  Word of mouth is a seriously good advert if the reader has any sort of taste at all.

Since January, these are the books I've won and reviewed:
(There were a couple more, but I couldn't find Beertopia and I wasn't sure you'd miss it...)

(If you're one who finds books by how it "looks", and the bookstores don't have the covers out all the time, here's a spine shot. I'm that sort of person and it absolutely messes me up when they change the cover of a book for marketing purposes.  I'll never be able to find it again. That's just mean.)

You can see I'm currently winning non-fiction books, which is great, but a mystery writer could nail me with a giveaway and I'd be thrilled!

I'm not going to go into any great detail about any of these, because then the post would be a mile long and no one would read past the pictures.  I'll just say that Pirate Hunters and The Underground Girls of Kabul are two that I'm obnoxiously recommending to perfect strangers, A Woman in Berlin and The Last Unicorn I'm telling certain friends about (because they're a little tougher topics and not everyone digs that sort of book), Conscious Unparenting was so-so, The Israeli Mind hasn't been read, and Mozos is one I might take to the second hand store...it offended me about 3 chapters in and I'm not keen on anyone really knowing I actually read it. (Which will automatically cause at least 3 readers of this blog post to go find it so they can figure out why.  Backwards word-of-mouth works with some people...)

Now.
Go find Pirate Hunters and read it right away.
After that, if you haven't decided to quit your real job and scuba dive for a living, check out Goodreads.
(They don't know I'm plugging them here. This isn't a marketing deal for them.  I just want more people to know about this because...hey,....
FREE BOOKS!!!)

....with whatever you have, do good.

A Hiking We Will Go...

Heigh-ho the merry-oh, a hiking we will go!

Now that the kids are older, our options for vacation activities are getting more and varied.  You wouldn't think hiking would be a big deal since pretty much everyone can do it, but two years ago when we tried, the kids were just too little to go on a trail of any length that would satisfy the Farmer. They got hot, I got grouchy, he was exasperated...
As Jerry Seinfeld so sagely observed, "There's no such thing as 'fun for the WHOLE family'."
(That oughta be on a tee shirt in the Montana tourist traps.)
(If it were, there'd be a corny moose on it. For some reason, the face of Montana tourism is the moose. I'm a native Montanan and I've seen maybe two moose in my life. Even people who live in Western Montana barely see them. And yet hundreds of thousands of tourists are walking around the world with plastic moose keychains, moose-y tee shirts, moose covered mugs, that seem to proclaim Montana is just crawling with them.)
(Moose, not tourists.)

On our hike, we saw nary a moose.

On our whole trip, we saw nary a moose, save the ones in the tourist dives.
Were we even IN Montana?!?
*sentence dripping with sarcasm*

Anyway....

The hikers set forth!

Now that they've looked at the map, they know EXACTLY where they're going. And they're going there as speedily as possible. (You've gotta make good time at the beginning of a hike, because at the end, there's sometimes crawling and whining involved.)
(We're not moderate people, my kids and I. The Farmer is. He would keep a good steady pace for the duration.)

As badly as I hate to admit it, fall is already here in Montana...

We ate wild raspberries to keep up our strength. 

And also trail mix, but the raspberries were way more fun.

Also at the beginning of the hike, we climb hills just because they're there, and examine the rocks.

The worms kill the trees, eventually, but not before leaving a mysterious, almost alien code for us...

How can something so lovely be so sad at the same time?

I guess most lovely things are, really. 

There were tunnels!
Places that looked quite batty and damp.
The rest of the family was thrilled!
I did Lamaze breathing and tried to think of nice things; not things, say, like bears trapping us in the damp batty place (because we smelled like wild raspberries) or what went crunch under my foot as we passed through.

Montana, Idaho, and Washington state were burning, thanks to the conservation efforts of bureaucrats who are opposed to logging (my other rant...moose and bureaucrats....that's whatcha get at the Chronicles).  Even so, Montana is wildly lovely. This almost looks like a black and white photo, but it's full color, no editing.

I'm always thirsty for color, so I was delighted to see the gold on the mountain! Montana's motto is "Oro y Plata" which is "Gold and Silver", but not all our gold is a mineral.

Another cave. 

(I mean, "TUNNEL".) 

Twice as long as the first. 

Most likely we'll die. 

At least Angus is armed, now.

You see how far back I am?! I was trying for the good picture. When I pulled the camera down, however, and realized I was the only one still IN the batty, damp, prisonous tunnel, things got real.
I made good time out of that cave.
(I mean, "TUNNEL".)

At the end of the hike was my other fear...
Heights!
You can't tell how very far up we were on this very long bridge, but we were really high.  And my babies went to the edge, of course, because that's what one does on a terribly high bridge....to look down and calculate whether one would live if they fell from such a height.
My palms are getting sweaty just typing this...

 And THEN we got to somehow find our way down "The Mountain of DOOM" to sit by the edge of the road to wait for the Farmer to jog back to the car to come get us because we were floppy tired by then.

(The "of DOOM" phrase was something Maggie and Angus tacked on to the end of everything at one time and found hilariously funny. And it kind of was.  Especially when they'd come to me with a kitten "of DOOM".)

We kind of wished we'd had the opportunity to do another hike this trip, but it got hot, Maggie got sick, and our prairie legs were very sore after all that up-and-downness.  

World Museum of Mining, Butte, MT

If you ever find yourself in Butte, MT on a cold Saturday in August, we highly recommend spending 3 or 4 hours at the World Museum of Mining. 

The funniest thing about the museum (at least to me) is that it really has very little to do with the actual process of mining, but focuses more on the culture of the lives of the miners and their families at the time Butte, MT was booming, when it was the richest hill on earth. 

There's an entire town, three streets worth, of stores, businesses, houses, church, school....you can walk up and down the streets peering into the windows like 21st century peeping toms. 

When you weary of that, there's a tour UNDER ground through mine shafts and everything.

(I can't tell you anything about that, because I'm desperately claustrophobic, but Angus and the Farmer went and had a thrilling two hour tour.)

Meanwhile, Maggie and I started to panic when they hadn't arrived at the surface when they were supposed to and we'd been reading about mining disasters in which 167 men died, say. It wasn't the best choice of historical lore to choose at that particular moment. When they finally DID emerge, 30 minutes late, Maggie hugged her brother in front of everyone. With no embarrassment or anything.

Here are some random pictures that don't represent the museum very well, but they're kind of the interesting things to my eye.

Angus wanted to bring the armored car home with us. It even had a bullet hole in the window and everything! We're assuming it was from some desperate, greasy criminals trying to hold up the bank, but it might have been from kids target practicing before the car was given to the museum.

In the chapel of the church....

This was NOT in the chapel of the church...

And this was just sort of creepy.

I would not want to be at the museum as a night watchman. 

*shivers*

I loved that this tool had the information "engraved" on it. 

Truly, since it was a cold morning, we had the place mostly to ourselves which lent to the ghost town effect. 

Itty bitty little train station set up for the kids! 

Oh, LOOK! Rocks!  At last!

There was a dark, musty room for the phosphorescent rocks that the kids loved, but I couldn't photograph. 

So, basically, Butte is set up on a honeycomb of tunnels and shafts.  There's really not a lot of actual land holding the town up; it's mostly timbers and air and prayers from what I can tell.  This was immensely interesting to the other members of my family, but I had a hard time thinking about that.
Also, most of the water running through the honeycomb of shafts and tunnels is poisonous from all the things like arsenic and lead leaching into it.  It's a cool place to visit, but don't spend too much time thinking about the whole mess.

There's a good museum at the college of technology right across the road, I hear, and I believe it probably has more information about the actual minerals and process of mining. 

We ended up skipping that, saving it for next time. 

One last thing...

If you're in Butte, MT and find yourself perishing of hunger, our family insists you try this little Greek shack of a restaurant:

It goes by the corny name of "It's Greek to Me" but it has the very best gyros I've tasted in my life. For $8, you can get a massive gyro, a generous pile of crispy fries, and a large drink. 

Atmosphere included. 

Honestly, you'll feel about as local as can be, and you won't need to worry about whether or not the kids are using their best manners. (Although they will, because they'll be knee-deep in their fries, too happy to misbehave.)

There are about 10 tables, one overworked waitress/cook/student, 6 menu choices, and cheesy posters from the 1980s.

We love dives, and this one is our current favorite.

Try it!

Every year I send my kids back to school, I end up looking at Calvin's teacher Miss Wormwood with great sympathy and feel I should write an apology note in ADVANCE to my kids' teacher...

Really.

First Day of School 2015!

This year, we missed the actual first day of school at Cohagen.  We were on vacation at Fairmont Hot Springs and frankly, I didn't think the kids were going to fall desperately behind if they didn't make it for the annual "look over the new books and write a paper about what you did this summer" day.  Instead, we spent an average of 5 hours a day at the pool, shopped for school clothes at the amazing second hand stores in Boze-angeles, hiked, ate nachos for supper, visited the Phillipsburg Sweet Palace, maybe swam some more, and came home with dreadful colds.

The teacher and I texted back and forth, though, and had Maggie convinced that she'd missed three chapters of advanced calculus and quantum physics, plus a 10 page cursive written paper about what she'd done this summer.
Angus was to get two cookies.
(A couple years ago, Maggie told her teacher that she was all sorts of abused...that she got in trouble all the time and had to work like a slave, but all we ever did to Angus was give him a cookie.
But she's not overly dramatic or anything...*rolling of eyes*)

Anyway, here we are on August 31st, beginning another school year.

It's already different.

This morning, they both packed their own lunches.
They were dreadfully virtuous in this project.
Spaghetti, carrots, apples, grapes, HEALTHY granola bars, juice...
I would imagine that after school there will be a desperate search for sugar, but during the day they'll be eating like 40 year old half marathon runners.
By Friday, there'll be deals being cut over whether or not Nutella and crackers constitute a suitable "main meal"....

They've given up protesting the traditional "first day" photos and now very patiently pose for their mother.

Maggie's wearing the hat she found in Bozeman, the fairy necklace from her friendly cousin Cece, earrings purchased at the farmer's market in Butte, and a Texas Tech shirt that is literally older than she is (by about 2 years). 

Ever finding her way in the fashion world, she's having a hard time with this transition into tweenager...

Angus, on the other hand, is wearing whatever was on top of the clean clothes in his drawers which happened to be his Spokane shirt, Jordan Insurance Service hat, and jeans without holes.  We stopped at Walmart and got everyone new socks and underwear, so I'm hoping, hoping, hoping he's also wearing those, but it's anyone's guess. 

Making silly shadows...

The mother photographing shadow makes me laugh!

I have to catch her when she's unaware.

It takes my breath away, how lovely she is and how stinking grown up she's getting. 

You can tell she's my girl, though, by the flower in her hair.

Country kids play cattle guard tag while waiting for the bus...

If this was the 100th day of school, I'd be able to say that this was a lunchbox that was forgotten by the wayside while the kids played tag, but being the first day of school, it will be remembered and make it to the institution of learning in good shape.

Sometimes I like pictures that show perspective. 

Two kids in a big, big country...

Here she comes!

The new bus has a sweep bar! The kids didn't know about it, and Angus nearly ran right into it. It also has a PA system so the bus driver can play music or yell at them. (BUT, as she pointed out, it came without cupholders. What gives?!?!)

It's awfully quiet here, now, and I'd better get the breakfast dishes done. Think I'll listen to a little Prairie Home Companion and drink more coffee while I'm at it...