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Ayudame Por Favor

I hope I've written that correctly--help me please.

My dad gave me the email address of my cousin in Spain. When I last saw her, she was 7 and I was 17. Now she's 25 and with a long-time boyfriend. She's the web expert in her family, and she passed along her email to him because of some legal stuff going back and forth between my parents and her family in Spain.

I haven't communicated at all with anyone on my mom's side since I was last there, so it would be nice to catch up with life on that side of things. What I know comes from my mom, and though I appreciate that, I know I'm missing out on a lot, so I hope I can cobble together enough Spanish (I'm not sure how much, if any, English she knows, and even if she does, I wouldn't mind working a little on my Spanish) to write a coherent and understandable letter.

I remember her as an adorable little girl who liked to be carried a lot.

Should be interesting--I hope I don't butcher the Spanish language.

Ready To Ditch Old Hardware

I'm ready to ditch every single computer I have--desktop and laptop.

To review, three of the CPU's I have are ones my boss didn't want to take home from work when we closed our office and started to work from home. I have two of those going unused. Then, my regular CPU (an HP), is malfunctioning badly now. Then there's two pieces of junk I have, otherwise known as laptops, that need significant work to get them running normally again. In other words, I have no one computer that functions the way I need it to function.

I can get my work done (I'm using one of the work CPUs), but it's nowhere near ideal for work, or home use, and my frustration with all of it is leading me to the idea that I should just junk them all and start new with Apple. I've never used them, but there's enough about them I like that make me want to consider them. No computer is complaint-free. There's always going to be someone to offer a complaint about something.

I'd like one powerful desktop unit, and then one I can take on the road, and then match it up with a photo iPod. But since all that is a signifcant investment, it'll have to wait, and i'll have to make do with what I have for the time being.

*sigh*

Mini Beach Break

I secured Friday off from work, so I plan to take a break this weekend, spending three days down in Virginia Beach. I'm actually going to take in a couple of soccer matches (Friday evening and Sunday afternoon) and meet with someone while at one of the games to work on a story. But I'll get in plenty of much-needed beach time too. I know a couple of areas down there that usually aren't as congested as the main part of the city, so I'll likely hit those places.

Classmates

I did something I wasn't sure I'd ever do.

(Well, I still want to do that, but I'll have to wait there.)

In the middle of checkng out my old yearbooks Friday night, I got curious about a couple of people from my past--people with whom I lost touch.

AM Radio Check

I used to do this a lot when I was growing up. I'd tune into AM radio at night to find out what stations I could pick up. It didn't really matter what was actually on the radio at the moment--a baseball game, talk show, the news, music. I was curious about other places, and to be honest, I always wanted to find the station furthest away from me. Tonight, I revisit that time. So, when I hear a station identifier, I'll note the station and location, and whatever programming I hear on it at the time.

So far I've only heard snippets of stuff--a Matt Drudge radio show, someone with diabetes talking about insomnia.

Okay, first station picked up that has identified itself: WCBS out of New York City. Now a local one, Sportstalk 980 WTEM from DC, and another New York City station, WIMS 1010, giving a traffic report--the Hudson River bridge crossing still a problem at 11 p.m. according to this, as well as a news report about a new game, 25 to Life, allowing people to choose their own gang colors while trying to take out cops.

Jimmy, I Enjoyed The 'Date'

That's a few words from one of the comments in my high school yearbook, freshman year. I thought with this being graduation time and all, I'd post the comments from the yearbooks that I have from my freshman, junior and senior years. I skipped my sophomore year because I protested the misspelling of my last name on the engraved copy of my freshman yearbook. With all that, here are the comments. I may or may not clarify anything, depending on whether I feel like it or not. And, to the extent that I can, I'll keep things the way they were written.

97, 98

97 degrees yesterday, 98 degrees expected today. At least I'm not talking celsius! Overnight, it only got down to around 80. Almost snow weather there. And the humidity drops below 80 percent at night too. It'll likely be well over 90 percent by the middle of the day. Lots of haze as I drove by the Washington Monument yesterday and more haze expected today. There is a cool streak coming that'll drop the temps during the day to around 80 Friday. That's supposed to last a few days.

Don't ask me why I'm up this early. I woke up at 2 a.m. on the couch, went to bed and woke up at 3:30 a.m. having to go the bathroom. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I turned on Early Today and watched the news and heard about the offshore Pacific earthquake. I'll probably need a nap sometime today.

Padding Doesn't Always Help

I guess I should probably be thankful for the unmowed soccer field and the padding on my soccer jersey, but I'm not sure how beneficial those things were to me in the 90 degree heat and humidity yesterday.

Both knees scraped, a lump, bruise and scrape on my right forearm. On the same sequence as the forearm bruise, I landed stomach-first on a soccer ball after one of the other team's players plowed into me from behind. Like I told my parents after I showed them the lump on my arm, it wasn't malicious, but it wasn't exactly pleasant either.

It was too hot to wear long sleeves, but I wear goalkeeper shirts with padding on the forearms (and I wear padded goalkeeper shorts as well). The padding didn't prevent what happened to my forearm, though I'm sure if I had been wearing short-sleeves, it might have been worse. The knees don't have any protection against them, so those get scraped almost weekly.

Oh yeah, I had my right foot stepped on inadvertently by a teammate.

All this, and we won 3-0, which means the team I'm on finished our regular season 8-0-2 and we'll be promoted into the next higher division this fall. Now comes the playoffs, and we play the team we defeated yesterday. ...

Oh (again), I guess my first radio appearance talking about soccer wasn't a total disaster, as I've been asked to help co-host on the same show in-studio next Sunday for the show's entire two hours. The regular co-host will be out of town covering a game. I have limited experience doing this kind of thing, but I think it'll be a fun challenge.

Indictments

Talking to someone who said he was just indicted on cocaine possession can be interesting.

The guy's 47, gruff and thin, a mustache and rough face, and has been playing soccer in the adult league here about the same amount of time as I have.

"I'm a pot-head," he said. He said a few times he had no problem admitting that. Been one for a long time.

The cocaine possession?

He said someone had apparently gotten hold of a bowl he used for his pot, where traces of cocaine were detected in it, thus the indictment.

"Everyone's done some kind of drugs at some point," he said from the driver's seat of his beat-up, late-model car.

I told him I hadn't. Then he revised the count to 70 percent, something like that. He told me he doesn't mess with cocaine--"I have kids, man." It had been 25 years, he said, since he last did cocaine--in his wilder days.

He said he's told cops plenty of times that he's a pot-head, that he's not ashamed of it and he doesn't feel the need to hide it. The court will probably appoint him a laywer. He doesn't have money for one. He works for himself, in construction or as a day-laborer, not entirely clear on that, except that he doesn't have any insurance to cover going to the doctor for a messed-up knee.

A guilty verdict in court would mean almost-certain jail time for him.

He's 47, and his wife, he said, has gotten on him for volunteering his drug-dependency. He said, as for the pot, he doesn't really care who knows about that, but he says he's innocent of the coke.

We've chatted a few times before, as many people in our league have been playing for awhile. He figures that soccer gives him something to do and keeps him out of trouble. He's loud and brash on the field, certainly not shy.

But he also complimented me on a goal I scored against him awhile back.

"That's the best goal anyone's scored on me. I mean that," he said as he shook my hand.

He'll be out of action for awhile. Seems he's got more important things on his agenda.

Electocromatic

Sounds like a term from Grease--it's systomatic, automatic, electrocromatic. But that last word is what's holding up my windshield repair. I need it done so I can pass my state inspection and get that lovely pink slip off the old windshield. When I talked to them about the repair, they asked me whether my rear view mirror was was electrocromatic, and I told them I didn't know. I was told I would know if I did have it.

Uh, no.