The Delian's Commonwealth

Hey Ref! Advancement

One of the things I want to accomplish this season is to get my AYSO Intermediate ref badge, so I can work some higher division games.  This entails a class and test, as well as working a certain number of games.  I've missed a couple of opportunities for the class, but finally made it a week ago Sunday.

I'd been told that the Intermediate test was tough and that I should study a lot -- there was a review class on Tuesday and Thursday before the real class.  I only made the Thursday session, since we were in the throes of cleaning out the kitchen for the demolition team on Wednesday.

The class on Sunday was pretty good, although there are some areas (Law 11 -- Offside) that still seem to be open to a lot of interpretation.  I passed the test, with a 66 out of 74, although I think that some of my bad answers were due to some poor teaching and not my errors.  I blew some on my own, though!

Now I need to put in at least 9 more games (need a total of 25) with at least 5 in the center at U12 games.   Then there is an "observation" by a senior ref and I might actually have my badge.  I'm hoping, too, that this will get me some work during the tournament season.  One of my fellow refs told me that they were badly overworked, but nobody had called me to help!  I guess I haven't learned the "secret ref handshake" yet.  Maybe when I'm Intermediate...

Hey Ref! 2006

The soccer season started a couple of weeks ago (September 9) and I worked as a referee again.  The boys have decided to skip soccer, probably because their mom and I pushed a little too hard.  Also because they ended up on teams that didn't do very well, so they got quite frustrated.

I did two boys under-10 games and it went pretty well.  Not too many mistakes and I didn't collapse from exhaustion!  Nothing terribly exciting except that one of the coaches was brand new -- her team's coach had quit at the last minute and she stepped in, so it was a learning experience for everyone!

I did one other game that weekend as well -- my first U12 game as an assistant referee.  I should have studied the mechanics of the job before the game because I blew it a couple of times.  The center referee had come down from the upper divisions and wasn't used to U12, so he actually issued a yellow card -- we're not supposed to do that in U10 or U12!  He also had a very odd way of calling offside, so I "missed" a bunch of calls.  I was happy when one of my advisors told me that the center ref was wrong -- I was afraid I'd gotten confused.

No soccer the week following, because of G's birthday and no soccer for anyone the week after, because of Rosh Hashannah.  I'll be back in the bumblebee outfit on the 30th.

Gone Fishin'

Gosh... I'm only a bit over a week late on my posting...

With a demolished kitchen still needing some plumbing, we got to deal with G's birthday on Saturday (9/16 if you're keeping track.)  It really wasn't too bad, since his mom did the bulk of the setup, getting all of the food ready and taking it to the site and setting up.  The theme this year was fishing -- G has always wanted to fish and has only had a couple of opportunities.

They found a big park near us that has a lake stocked with fish -- when they visited a few weeks ago, it was catfish, but trout were due in on the 1st of September.  The plan was that M would bring food and stuff and I would take care of the fishing gear and party favors.

In lieu of cheap, disposable party favors, we decided to give the boys fishing rods as their "take away."  There were only five at the party, so getting $17 basic fishing kits wasn't too bad -- we would have spent twice that easily if we'd gone to laser tag.  Of course this meant running around to Target and K-Mart to try and find appropriate sets.  After a little frustration (nobody had five of the same set), we found what we needed.

The day of the party was nice -- cool and clear.  It's a beautiful park.  M got a picnic table right next to the lake and had everything nicely setup.  Cool cake, too -- she took some cupcakes and decorated them like an island chain, with little palm trees on top.

The fishing wasn't great -- nobody caught anything, but then these are 10 and 11yo boys, so they have absolutely no patience at all!  The odd thing was the two youngest (Z and his best friend) were the most patient of any.  One bit of excitement -- one of the older boys left his rod on the ground near the lake and a duck got its foot tangled in the line and dragged the rod out into the lake!  My SO, saint that she is, kept track of the duck and managed to find where it swam back to shore and left the rod, so everybody had their prize to take home.

Games: A couple of versions of 'tag' and that was it.  Very low-key and low-tech, something that I don't think a lot of these boys get to experience.

When we got back in the afternoon, my SO and I continued to paint, applying the second coat of primer.  Tomorrow, the top coat!

Painting

Friday.  Time for the plumber to come and remove that pesky pipe.  In the meantime, I've got a lab to put together for a conference, and the materials are due today, so I'm up at 5AM, slaving away.

Since Murphy seems to have set up residence here, things begin going south very quickly.  First, the software that I need for the lab isn't ready, and isn't going to be ready for several days.  The logistics people are telling me that I must deliver and the suppliers are telling me that I can't.  Oh joy.  If things get really bad, I suppose that I can just take DVDs of the software directly to the conference, but I'd rather not.

Second problem -- the plumber doesn't show up.  There was a miscommunication by the contractor and he tells us that Esteban will be here on Monday before the installers.  Let's hope that's the case.

The weekend is going to be very busy (G's birthday party on Saturday and I have a class on Sunday), so we really need the paint to get started.  The head of the patch crew recommended two coats of primer over the texture coat (and, after seeing how it went on, I agree with him.)  So, it's off to Home Depot at 11:30, hoping to be back in time for a 1PM conference call.

Yes, I am a fool.

Two guys working the paint counter.  There are at least 6 people in front of me and one of them has a 10-can order.  Grrrrrrr.  I call my manager and let her know that I'm going to be late to the call and I exercise my best patience.   Grrrrrr.

I got my paints at about 12:45 and then had to run around getting all of my supplies (couldn't do it before getting the paint because I didn't want to lose my spot in line!)  I hate HD.  It's almost impossible to find things, especially when you're in a hurry.

Finally got everything and made it through the line (no way I'm doing self checkout with this pile.)  Race home and I'm only about 15 minutes late for the call.  Of course, I'm starving by this point, but, oh well.

After the call we get started with final patching and primer.  I removed a small amount of "cottage cheese" and finished demolishing the pantry (due to become a closet) which didn't get done on Wednesday (not sure why.)  I truly hate painting -- it's back-breaking work.  At least I got an extension pole for the rollers this time.  The last time I painted a ceiling it was at the top of a ladder and that really hurt.

The boys are with us this weekend -- their mom dropped them off in the afternoon and G actually helped paint.  Everybody works in this family!

Tomorrow, G's birthday and more painting!

Patching

The patch crew showed up on Thursday, on time again.  So far, the contractor and his subs have been great.  Three guys and they quickly set to work cutting drywall to fill the various holes.  It looks like things are going to be great...

Well, maybe not.  The demo crew didn't move the refrigerator out of place, and we should have (it's going to go on the opposite side of the kitchen.)  Behind the refrigerator was a water supply pipe for an ice maker.  We don't have an ice maker and I had forgotten that the pipe was there.  Of course, it's in exactly the wrong place.  The cabine that's going to go where the refrigerator was will have drawers in the bottom and this pipe would hit one of the drawers, so it's got to be removed.  Sadly, the patch crew don't have a working torch, so we'll have to get someone else in.  The contractor tells me that they'll have someone in on Friday.

Even before we found the pipe, the schedule had the installers coming on Monday, since after patching, they will have to put some texture on the wall and that'll take a day to dry.  This is great, because we want to paint the kitchen and it's going to be a lot easier to do that before the cabinets are installed.  So, that'll be our job for Friday and the weekend.

I thought that the patch crew did a good job, and the did, mostly.  Some of our kitchen stuff got sprayed with the texture, though and we later found a couple of spots that should have been better filled in.  Ah well.  At least we're making progress.

Again, no camera, no pictures.

Demolition

Last Wednesday was demolition day.  I haven't posted until now because of the several birthdays, projects and classes that have been going on the last two weeks.  September is truly an awful month.

The demo crew showed up right on time and went right to work, breaking down the cabinets and the counter tops.  Then they asked me where to put the microwave, diswhasher and range -- oops!  They're now packed into our TV room and the TV is inaccessible for the duration.

The foreman of the demo crew also did some measuring and found another error by our designer.  Despite our telling her that we were going to replace our old (small) refrigerator, she only left 65 1/2 inches in the new space, not enough for a bigger one.  We can raise the height a bit, to 69 inches, but that's still not enough for the largest refrigerators (72 inches.)  To fix that, we'll have to get a shorter cabinet to go above the refrigerator.  Maybe next year.

The demo crew included a plumber who moved the hot water supply under the sink, since it was going to end up right between two cabinets.  We turned the water off and none of my neighbors complained, so that was all good.

No sooner had the demo crew started sweeping up but in came the electricians.  They installed four new can lights and some new outlets.  Somebody had modified the electrical stuff earlier and there were a number of lines that nobody could figure out, so we removed them!

When the electricians left, we had everything done (we thought.)  The kitchen looked like we had plaster moles, though, with holes everywhere.  The patch crew was due on Thursday so it should look a lot better then.

I wanted to post some pictures, but my digital camera is on the fritz.  I found out that most of our vacation photos are bad, so I'm pretty pissed.  Just another in the long line of things going wrong -- not major, just very, very annoying.

For your enjoyment, though, I have two samples of the shelf paper that we removed from the kitchen during demolition.  The brown plaid looks like it was original and the yellow/orange thing might have been added shortly thereafter.  Aren't they wonderful?  Click on the images to get the full impact!

Demolition - Not!

Today is the scheduled start of demolition, preparing for installation of our new cabinets.  Now, you didn't really think that it would happen on time, did you?  Not if you've ever had to deal with this stuff yourself.

I got a call earlier this week from the contractor.  It seems that they were short-handed last Friday (before the four-day weekend, surprise, surprise), so they're now behind on that job, putting a delay on us.  The new start date is September 13.  This means that I need to move the counter people to later in the week.  Oh joy!

Feeling sad

I had an experience today that left me feeling quite sad, along with feeling frustrated and helpless.  I walked down to my local Pollo Loco for lunch and while I was eating, a very scruffy-looking man walked in.  Although he wasn't filthy, he wasn't clean either and his close were very worn.  As he walked across the restaurant, I noticed that he was talking, rapidly, to himself.  He looked around, furtively and then sat down at a table where some food was laid out.  He then began to eat some of the food, looking up frequently like an animal watching out for predators.  When someone moved towards the table, he rose and left the restaurant.  Clearly he had stolen some food from someone who had gotten up to get a drink (the person noticed, but didn't do anything, so I'm not remiss in warning them.)

The man walked out about the same time I did and we stood together at a light, waiting for a walk signal -- the signal was stale, so we were going to have to wait for the red cycle before moving.  As soon as the light turned against us, he crossed the street.  Thankfully, it was a quiet intersection and nothing happened.  After the light changed, I walked some distance behind him, until I had to enter a hardware store on my route, in order to buy something.  When I got out, the man was gone.

Clearly, this man is most likely homeless and certainly has some mental problems.  He kept up his rapid, quiet self-dialog all of the time that I saw him.

I was first moved by surprise, watching him blatantly steal food, and to his resemblance to a prey animal in his actions.  Then I was moved by curiosity, wondering what confluence of fate brought him to this condition.  What combination of genes and physical and emotional environment left him as a fragment of what a human being can be?  What happened to his family, his parents?

Finally, I got melancholy.  I don't know what to do when faced with this reality.  Ignore? Intervene?  I feel helpless.

Wine

As part of our trip to Gilroy in July, we did a fair amount of wine tasting and made a few really nice discoveries.  All of the wines that we tried are local to the area, either in Gilroy, Morgan Hill or on the coast in Monterey or Santa Cruz.  Many of the wineries in this area are small, so their products don't appear in many stores.  They also don't get nearly the "play" that the wineries from the Napa Valley do.  It's a shame, because some of these could easily rival their more famous cousins.

Sadly, I can't recall the specific wines (that's my SO's job), but I can mention a few of the wineries.  The first is Guglielmo, which is a small family-run winery in Morgan Hill (halfway between Gilroy and San Jose.)  We tasted their wines at the Gilroy Garlic Festival wine tent, so we didn't visit the winery on this trip.  One of our goals for the trip was to find a decent California Pinot Grigio and we found several, including the one from Gugliemo.

We went back to Guglielmo on our longer vacation and did a more thorough tasting at the winery.  We came away with some port that I'm really looking forward to.  They also have a couple of very nice sparkling wines.  Anyone planning a wedding would do well to look at the Extra Dry -- it's very good and the winery price is $7.95/bottle, which is pretty reasonable and it's far superior to the cheap swill that so often is served.

Another winery is Bargetto.  We visited their tasting room in Monterey and there we found another good Pinot Grigio, a Viognier, a Syrah and another good Port.  They also carry Chaucer's Mead and we got some of that as well.  I brew mead myself and wanted some commercial ones to compare with.

All in all, it was a very productive trip.  I strongly suggest that if you like wines, you try some of these small wineries.

By the way, the Governator has declared September 2006 to be California Wine Month.

Garlic

Back at the end of July, my SO and I took a weekend trip to Gilroy, to enjoy the Garlic Festival.  We both love garlic and Gilroy is the "Garlic Capital of the World," so this was a bit of a pilgrimage for us.  It was also an opportunity for us to get away, before we went on a longer vacation with the boys.

Garlic is one of those things that people either love or hate — you seldom meet anyone who is neutral about it.  It's such a fundamental part of some many cuisines that I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a region that doesn't make use of it.  Well, maybe not Norway — I don't think even garlic can fix lutefisk!