From The Sports Desk – Best Friend Edition

 

Five games scheduled, four attended.

Matthew Soccer: The two back-to-back games conflicted with the first basketball game of the weekend, and given the playing-time issues of the last two or three weeks, this choice was easy for Suzanne. The team won 5-2 and 2-0 to pretty much seal up the league title. No goals, didn’t play on offense (I think), spent about half of each game in goal. From Suzanne’s texts, the pattern seemed to be the tried and true OnGoal philosophy, have Matthew on field at start and put him in goal at the end to preserve the lead. I think he spent more than half of the second game in goal and unlike other games was tested pretty frequently. Am glad he’s getting to play goalie; he likes it but it’s probably not where he wants to be when we get back to outdoor.

Matthew Bball: The team won without him 34-27 on Saturday. Sunday’s game was against Haslett and his best friend Henry….this game is the last ‘tough’ game the team would have before the playoffs.

(most often seen on a soccer field together)

And they struggled; down by six a couple of times before pulling away late to win by ten, 46-36.

No video will be posted here; Matthew, when he played, didn’t do much of anything offensively. At times, seemed reluctant to even dribble the ball. And then he didn’t play at all in the 2^nd quarter and only 30 seconds of the fourth. This time the coach said after the game to the kids that he messed up playing time and sent out an email to the parents too…..and promising to ‘make it up’ in next weekend’s game.

Whatever. Glad he said it and emailed it. Not too excited about it otherwise. Wish Matthew had played more against Henry (who had a big game, 10 points I think…).

Cpher: Won 56-26. Took what looks to be about 8 shots and didn’t make one of them; fouled once and went to the line, didn’t make either of those either. So there will be no video here either.

Travel Update

 

Work: It goes. I visit a school up near Hoboken on Thursday that was completely flooded; the school now holds class in 40,000 sf of modular space. So there’s that.

My office mate has left; he has been grousing (that’s too strong of a word, but, it works..) that he wanted to go home, never should have come here, ready to really retire for good. Had even asked about leaving before the minimum 90 day commitment was up…and been rebuffed. But, his mother-in-law (his 93 year old mother in law) fell and broke her hip, and he used that as a “family emergency” and left today. Which is too bad, we got along fairly well. I will miss him.

NJ: I did venture out away from the hotel for one meal worthy of writing about; lunch last Sunday at JBJ’s Community Soul Kitchen. That JBJ is Jon Bon Jovi, and his restaurant has an interesting premise; no prices on the menu. No money? Ok, you can work / volunteer for your food? Suggested price is $10, $20 if you want to donate towards someone else…

I had money, so, didn’t take that option. The seating is ‘community-style’ which left me sitting with a middle-aged woman who shared entirely too much of her life with me in the twenty to thirty minutes we were there (really, I don’t need to know how you husband died and left you in massive debt)….

Pork Wrap ‘slow cooked pork w/peppers & onions”

The meal? Good, not great. You get three courses; the salad had this way-too-sweet Italian dressing (it was served with clementine slices; more sugar in the dressing than the fruit). Entrée, for me this day, was a pork wrap (not much flavor in the pork but I thought the beans and sauce were pretty good). And the carrot cake was good (the top half was good, the bottom half was great!)…..

Hotel follies: I’ll be switching hotels on Friday. This will require some explanation…..

For this work I am governed by federal per diem and hotel rates; when I came here hotels were in short supply, so, everyone jacked their rates (as I’ve said, hotel stock after major disasters is the place to be) and the government issued a temporary ‘uplift’ to 150%. That uplift expires Jan 31.

When I heard this was coming a week back I went out and found new reservations for the rest of my stay (2-1 through 2-8 and 2-18 through 3-14); couldn’t find anything at the approved rate where I was at but about 3 miles further away there is another Courtyard, and I made the reservations there, thinking I could cancel them when Red Bank lowered their rates. When the official announcement was made, Red Bank did lower their rates for current reservations but refused/wouldn’t do it for future reservations (my 2-18 through 3-14 one). A good reminder that even though I’ve spent the last 7 weeks there, I am nothing to them.

So, since I want/need to be in the same hotel on either side of my rotation home so I can park my luggage , I’m checking out early from Red Bank and heading down the road. There look to be more food choices right near the hotel (my major complaint about this hotel; there isn’t a restaurant you can walk to) but Red Bank had really fast internet…I hope that the Eatontown internet is just as good.

I know there is an Applebee’s adjacent to the hotel; I imagine I will be expert on that menu by mid-March!

Today: Am missing a birthday at home; Cpher seems to be ok with it, or, at least understands why I had to put my trip home where it is in February instead of now. But it still kind of sucks.

In the news….

 

The play is getting closer!  This was in the paper today……

“OKE — All is not quite as it seems on a cold, clear, mid-winter night in the mythical town of Almost, Maine.

Residents find themselves falling in and out of love in unexpected and often hilarious ways.

Oke High School’s drama students will present "Almost, Maine," a romantic comedy by John Cariani, on Feb. 7, 8 and 9.

Shows start at 7:30 p.m. in the OHS Auditorium, 2800 Jolly Road. Tickets are available online at www.okemosdrama.net, or at the door,

The costs are $5 for students and senior citizens; $8 for adults.

With 22 OHS students in the cast and crew, the show is directed by Holly B., with director Brian U.serving as technical director.

First performed off Broadway in 2006, Cariani’s comedy is a series of vignettes that explore the mysteries of the human heart with laughter, heartbreak and hope in an imaginary up-north place.”

From the Sports Desk – “I’m Home” Edition

 

A light weekend; three games. And I get to see two in person!

Cpher: Beat Eaton Rapids 43-34; beat East Lansing 55-29. These two wins basically seal our fate as one of the lower seeds in the top half of the bracket for the end of the season tournament; we have two games to go, but, they will be walkovers.

Click the picture below for highlights from the Eaton Rapids and EL games; Cpher had six points in the ER game and only two in the EL game…..the offense was set up ‘different’ in the EL game and had Cpher way away from the basket. Which is too bad, because we were really hoping to see more of what happened against ER!

(about to score his first basket of the day)

For years, Cpher has been this big guy in the post with no moves…he would get the ball and shoot, or, he would get the ball and pass. Period. He has been encouraged, repeatedly, to take a dribble or two and then do something. That Has Never Happened. Until Saturday, where he got the ball in the low post, took two or three dribbles and backed his man back towards the basket, turned, shot, and scored.

Maybe the best part of that video is me laughing afterwards….just couldn’t believe I had seen that! Sadly, the ref is in the way and my view (and the camera’s view of Cpher) is blocked for the end of it. But the head coach said the same thing I thought when Cpher came off the court….we’ve been asking you to do that for 2.5 years! Hope he can find himself in another situation where he can do it again before the end of the year. Never really had the ball under the basket against EL on Sunday except at the end, where it was just shoot the ball (and he did, for the last two points of the game).

(gets completely shoved in the back on this attempt at a rebound and doesn’t get it.  Does come back to block the shot of the guy who pushed him and take the ball back.  Justice is served.)

Matthew: (the video from the last soccer game is now linked to the earlier post, if you are curious). His soccer team won 21-0. Not much to say here. He scored a goal, but, it would have been hard not to score a goal given how things went.

Weekend Getaway

 

Working out here in NJ has given me a new appreciation for how screwed up some organizations can be. For example, on Friday at 4 pm before the MLK three-day weekend, the powers-that-be sent out an email…work for Saturday is cancelled.

Now, many people here did not make plans to do anything over those three days because we were working Saturday. And not 2 weeks earlier, there was a very public announcement; we will be working on Federal Holidays! So, a lot of unhappy souls that Friday afternoon; way too late now to make travel plans to do anything but sit in the hotel in NJ.

But not me…..I had long ago assumed we would be off MLK day and made plans to scoot home for the weekend. The only thing that irked me was that the 4 pm notification made it impossible to even consider a Friday night flight out (I never got to the point of checking on what the change fee would be; couldn’t make the last flight out of Newark).

I was scheduled to leave at 4 pm on Saturday (I figured I would work the typical half day on Saturday and then bolt)…..but after calling Delta realized I could catch the 6 am flight out of EWR….the only problem with that was a 4.5 hour layover in Detroit. Convinced my oldest son to get up early and drive down to Detroit to pick me up. That worked out well, Kevin didn’t sit very long at the airport waiting for me and we had time to talk on the way home…I arrived home early on Saturday, 9:30 am. Basically added 12 hours to my weekend!

Saturday started with Cpher’s basketball game (sports will be discussed in the next post) and then an impromptu trip to the North American International Car Show in Detroit. The boys have been obsessed with cars recently, and, it is a big event we’ve never gone to, so, let’s go!

Super Crowded!  To me, the coolest thing was the various companies’ concept cars.  So that’s what I took pictures of. 

Not a concept car; Matthew sitting in a 2013 Beetle convertible.  Got punched a lot by the boys as we encountered the ‘bugs’…

Toyota Tron Car?  They literally had a video game set up where it seemed this car was doing Tron-like things…..

Honda electric car….

The biggest crowds were around this bad boy, the 2014 Corvette Stingray.  Three or four deep all the way around the perimeter; Matthew and I waited our turn….

Cpher in that other concept car; the 2013 Volt.  Hah!

Saturday night was pretty quiet; dinner and then watching TV. Getting up at 4 am to get to the airport took its toll; I was literally falling asleep sitting up while watching Wipeout with the boys at 9:30 and gave up. A little sad I couldn’t make it up longer (and I tried to sleep on the plane too!). Oh well.

Sunday was another Cpher basketball game, this time it was a 30 minute drive. I had hoped to get back from the game in time to see Matthew’s soccer game, but, that didn’t happen. Had lunch with some friends and then hung out at the house and watched football. Should have made much more of an effort to see the movie I had suggested with Suzanne instead of football. Oh well.

Monday was errand day; haircuts for the boys, tires for the CR-V (more and more referred to as Kevin’s car) and an hour at the gym with all three boys playing basketball. Had to be at the airport at 3 pm for the flight back. Ran into some nasty weather driving south from EWR back to the hotel, the last part of the trip took about 40 minutes instead of 10……lots of cars off the road.

From the Sports Desk – Playing Time Edition

 

For the most part, I tend to avoid issues where Suzanne and I have differing opinions out here….just not worth it to put up even mildly dirty laundry for people to randomly encounter. But, this weekend’s sports events require me to go down this road a little bit.  Suzanne and I disagree when playing time issues come up; I tend to take the long view, she is more immediately upset.  Of course, I’m not the one schlepping two boys to sports for over 16 hours this last weekend….

Cpher: Lost, 42-41, to Haslett. Lost, 40-18, to Williamston. Neither game was as close as the score indicated.

For as long as the boys have been in sports, Suzanne has been more cognizant of the boys’ playing time in games than I have. Or better said, Suzanne is more disturbed when it seems to be unfair (although I am the only one to ever confront a coach about it, when Kevin played two minutes out of 48 in a soccer game way way back). Even when I was coaching the boys I didn’t start them all the time (unlike a lot of other coaches, especially the ones that the boys have now for basketball) even when Matthew was clearly one of the best out there. And Suzanne would express her displeasure at that, or when I would slight either Fric or Frac in playing time.

I know I’ve written here how in fourth grade Cpher would play 90% of some basketball games. That’s steadily evened out….and now it seems like, especially with me gone and not helping to coach, he’s not even getting the time that is the general guideline of the league. I think, on Saturday in the Haslett game, it was pretty close to what it should be EXCEPT that he got pulled early in the second quarter because the coaches weren’t happy with his boxing out and rebounding, and he never came back into the game in that quarter. I don’t have enough video to tell what happened in the third quarter (video/Kevin/computer difficulties are a subject for a future post!), and, in the fourth quarter there is no guideline, do what you have to do to win. And when we are down in the fourth quarter, Cpher is not going to play much…the team will sacrifice his defense and rebounding for scoring and the ability to press the other team to get the ball back. And we were down most of the game to Haslett, only two 3-pointers in the last 30 seconds made it as close as it was.

But we got hammered by Wston on Sunday and we were losing 18-4 at the end of the first quarter and 28-6 at the half. 38-10 at the end of three. No reason for him not to play; that game was over early.

Conversations about playing time have been a constant theme on Cpher’s basketball team for years; I have tried to suggest to the head coach that in games when we are getting blown out or blowing people out that we should do a better job of benching starters and letting the reserves play so that when it slants the other way to try and win a close game, at least you can say for the season you are doing ok. But the head coach does not share this long view; and I think sometimes he tires our best players out playing them so much. Two or three kids aren’t going to win games; the team is going to win games.

I understand not playing kids who don’t show up to practices. I understand kids getting pulled out of the games for not performing; don’t have an issue with why Cpher was pulled in that 2^nd quarter I saw against Haslett.

Don’t understand why Cpher wasn’t playing as much against Wston…..because we certainly weren’t mounting a comeback.  The video I watched of him in the first quarter I was pretty happy with how he did; held his own against their very big kid, grabbed two or three rebounds in his three minutes, one guy fouled him as he was battling.  He probably played the ‘right’ amount in the first quarter; it never was as much as two minutes per quarter the rest of the game.

the big kid for Wston is very very good; he’d be the one player I see every year that I think could play for a long time.  Most kids, including Cpher, have no shot against him one-on-one.  Cpher does what he needs to do, gets his hands up and slows him down…when the guy gets the ball the smaller guard towards the camera immediately comes in to double him.  And most times that doesn’t even work well…

Matthew: Won 37-31 against Williamston on Saturday, won 41-27 against Eaton Rapids, won 33-21 against Perry on Sunday.

Wston was going to be the game of the year, and it was, we were up by two at the half, five at the end of the third quarter, and the game see-sawed back and forth until we made free throws at the end to put it away.

Matthew’s team has eleven players; this is not an optimal number for basketball. The coach, I think, has done a nice job this year of rotating kids in, and, at times, with eleven, one kid is going to sit for an entire quarter.

Matthew’s quarter off was the 1^st quarter against Wston.

Wston is strange, they only have 7 players, and against us, that seventh player didn’t even show up until halftime. I think they must have made the decision, or must have had the kids at tryouts to make the decision, to take the top seven and not fill up the ‘A’ team. And our coach changed the entire approach to substitutes for this game because of the opponent…he put arguably the best 5 on the floor to start and subbed in when he could with the others. Those other six, including Matthew, probably only saw six to 8 minutes of time in the first three quarters (when it should be twelve) and very limited duty in the fourth. Kind of surprising to me; never really seen this coach shift away from the playing time guidelines like this.

As I said, this really infuriates Suzanne. I have a longer view about it, basketball isn’t his sport, heck, it’s not even in his top three, although he goes after at it as hard as he does the other sports. He gets more than his share of playing time at soccer and football; I’m not going to get upset by an occasion or two of not-so-much playing time. Especially in a game like Wston, where, it wasn’t just him, it was half the team that was slighted. I’ve watched too many other kids get slighted at soccer or football to really get excited about Matthew not seeing ‘playing time’ here…especially when the situation wasn’t just him, it was five others.

Suzanne was irked enough about this development to specifically tape the clock in the games on Sunday as Matthew came in and came out (probably an outgrowth of last weekend, she told me Cpher didn’t play at all in one quarter and I was watching the video and there he was, on the court, for almost half of it! Had to ask what game she was watching…..). Sunday’s games were back-to-back; surely the playing time was going to switch back to the norm for the year to date.

Not so much.  I think one quarter out of the eight (back-to-back games!) he hit the league-suggested half.  Most times it was less than two minutes.

(maybe some video of Matthew later; he scored a few baskets)

So what does this all mean?: I’m home this coming weekend and will be with Cpher for his 2nd game this weekend; will probably have the opportunity to ask the coach how Cpher is doing and probably will have the opportunity to ask is there some reason he isn’t playing him.   None of which will do much I am sure but I will feel better about it.  I’m certain of this; if there is any game more than 30 minutes away (and the last game of the season is…) that the likelihood of Suzanne driving all that way to that game to come away frustrated is pretty low.

I’m less bothered by Matthew’s situation; won’t say anything.  Matthew would be fine stopping basketball and freeing up some weekends to get better at snowboarding.  Don’t get me wrong, he has gone whole-hog into basketball and really enjoys it (dribbling the soccer ball has been replaced by dribbling the basketball around th house).   But he is having fun now, so, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  I know there is a basketball / soccer conflict coming up soon (either go to one basketball game or two soccer back-to-back games) and we talked last week that it would probably be basketball. 

Not anymore.  *grin*

Oh, speaking of soccer, Matthew had a game on Saturday.  Played goal in the first half, had an adventure where he came too far out, bobbled the ball, and almost gave up a goal.  Played some midfield in the 2nd half and scored an absolute beauty of a goal!  Click below for the video….three sequences of passes (more on that below) and then the goal is near the end (edit; video won’t post tonight.  Will try and get that done later but am going to publish this post now…)

I like the evolution of the go-left, fake-back-right move.  See it in basketball, see it here.

When I was watching the video during the first half I was a little big frustrated that his team was just getting the ball and shooting wildly, there was no passing.  So I was very happy (VERY HAPPY) to see Matthew, his first three times up the field as a mid with the ball at his feet, make sweet passes to set up opportunities (but no goals…)

New Jersey – Day Something Something

 

So, what’s a typical day like? I think Suzanne would like to believe it’s a party at night while she is busily getting homework done and boys to practice and dogs doing dog things…..

But I am boring. Very boring.

6:30 am – 7:15 am Get up. Rarely as early as 6:30 am. Rarely as late as 7:15. But 6:30 is the first alarm…..and when I grab the phone and ‘check-in’ via text. Have to do this every morning; if you are late they start calling…if you don’t answer it will escalate to the police checking on you at the hotel.

Somewhere before 7:30 am. Eat breakfast. The Courtyard offers free breakfast for F-EMA workers, so, I’ve been taking advantage of that. Made to order, 2 eggs over easy, sausage, potatoes, sourdough toast. Eat better breakfasts here than I do 99.5% of the time

8 am. At work. Until 6 pm. ½ hour lunch. Unlike other assignments, I am office-bound 95% of the time. They have a cafeteria on premises; I have a vow not to eat lunch there unless truly desperate….would rather run out to one of the deli’s nearby. Usually one ‘hero’ will last me two meals, whether that’s a dinner or the next lunch varies from day to day.

6 to 6:30 pm. Get back to the hotel, and, most nights, get my leftovers down to the microwave in the lobby, heat them up, and come back to the room. Goal, sadly, is to be back for the NBC news at 6:30 pm. Unless there is some sporting event on, this is usually the only ‘network’ TV I will watch on any given night.

Somewhere after 7 pm. If it’s Monday or Tuesday, it probably means I have some video to watch, so, plug the computer into the TV, turn up the sound, create a Windows Media Player playlist and away we go.

7:30 to 8:30 or 9:30 pm. Go back to computer and accomplish whatever enviro work from back in Michigan that I need to keep up with while out here in NJ. If there isn’t a lot of work, consider blogging. Or, as a last resort, Hawaii research (I have been prompted to do more of this…..)

10:30 – 11:30 pm. Read. Go to bed. Been trying to reunite with my CPAP machine after a separation; have never had a lot of success with that thing and it has been about the same as normal. Hotel walls are very thin, so, that can be an issue some evenings.

College Spam

 

Kevin’s PSAT scores must have been reported to the collegiate world at large sometime on January 14^th. Why do we think that? Because there have been a virtual flood of emails from colleges congratulating him on them in the electronic home mailbox.  From who?

Rochester Institute of Technology

Carleton College

University of Evansville

Champlain College

Colorado State University

St. Olaf College

Macalester College

Oberlin College

Williams College

Sadly, for all of these schools, the likelihood of Kevin even looking at their email is slim. We forwarded them all to his personal mailbox (the recent flood has made me rethink which address we should have given) but knowing Kevin I’d be surprised if he even glanced at them.

(edit).  Typed that before Kevin knew about the emails…he was pretty motivated to see them.  I guess I should restate that….the likelihood of Kevin giving any of those schools more than a quick glance is slim…

KMO

 

Lost in all of my Quizbusting quizbowling blogging was the last event of the fall, Knowledge Master Open.  Kevin has been doing this since Chippewa; anyone can participate, you get a room full of kids and attempt to answer as many questions you can (the same questions as all of the other schools) over a 90(?) minute period.  Highest score wins.

We did not win.  The team, when they talk about DCC, talk in awestruck tones about a team that practices every day at lunch for two hours and an advisor who is absolutely dedicated to quiz-type-dominance. 

So how did they do?

11 out of 551 is not bad!

You may be curious how other schools of note did….

would have finished 2nd overall in PA. 

and would have been first in FL.  would have been first in GA too, but there were no recognizable schools on the list.

From the Sports Desk – Last Weekend Edition

 

Wow, fell behind here. Having “A Memory of Light” show up on the hotel door-step helped. But I’d better catch up on last weekend’s sports since this coming weekend is a big BIG weekend.

How big? Boys have five games (Cpher 2, Matthew 3). Combined record of the five opponents? 23-3. Yikes!

Last weekend:

Cpher: Beat Mason 32-28. Click on the picture below for video:

Wondered, as I received text updates from Suzanne, why we weren’t beating this team by more….we should have been killing them looking at the standings. Watching the video made it clearer, we were missing the kid I’d call our best scorer and missed almost every free thrown until the fourth quarter (where we had to go on a 12-2 run to put the game away!).

Cpher played hard, played well. A bunch of rebounds, went back up with a few shots but didn’t make any; got fouled twice as he fought for rebounds or moved with the ball, no shooting fouls though.

Cpher ripped the ball away from this guy…if you watch the guy Cpher’s ‘rip’ basically sends the guy spinning to the ground…

last rebound of the game…All Cpher…you can see the Mason’s guy hand up near Cpher’s face, he actually scratched him…no foul called this time.

Prediction for this weekend: Gotta be honest, would be surprised if this weekend were anything but two losses for the team. They can win, I know that, but, those other teams are good and we haven’t shown that we can score consistently this year.

Matthew: Indoor soccer first; crushed some team 15-1. Talked with Matthew later that night and he was a little discouraged, always back on defense, his teammates are scoring tons of goals and he’s not. And it does kind of suck that the parent-coach can’t/won’t rotate him up every now and again…

If you look at the team standings we’ve played one less game than the other teams, everybody has scored about 30….but we are the outliers, we’ve only given up four goals. Our goalie is ok, he’s not great. The reason we are blasting these teams is Matthew and the other good kids in the back; they stop the offense (who are on breakaways even, because our offense is cherry-picking and not coming back to help) and pass it up to the offense.

Annoying in some ways, but, I know I’d rather have my kid be good at offense and defense than just offense. Our talk seemed to make Matthew feel better anyway.

The one soccer game that Matthew will make it to this weekend is against the other league leader. Have a feeling we are going to crush them.

Absolutely blasted East Lansing in basketball, 37-7. Would not have expected that, EL looked to be halfway decent by the standings. 27-3 at the half. Click on the picture below for video.

Missed both his free throws; wouldn’t have expected that times two! Did score four points and had just a great assist on a fast break.

I included the 10 seconds of official call and crowd noise after this play…EL turned over the ball at half court and it bounced over there, Matthew rushed up and got to it first and then (almost at the same time) the EL guy barreled into him…

Of course, the foul is on Matthew(!)

two of his four points on the day….

Matthew’s team plays the two other undefeated teams in the division this weekend. The first one, against Williamston, is the biggie….they were the only team to beat us last year in the finals of the tournament. I expect they will handle the other undefeated team pretty easily on Sunday. I eagerly await text updates during my meeting tomorrow!

Prediction: Will be really surprised to hear this team loses. Ever. Another’s team starting five might be able to hang with our starters for a little bit….but the other six players on our team are just as good and that’s what happened to EL…the second group buried them.

Kevin’s Schoolwork

 

I decided to bring a USB drive out here to NJ with me; just knowing how things work there’s a lot of file transferring going on AND I didn’t want to keep a lot of my files stored on the govt computer.

I noticed that the drive I chose at home had been used by Kevin back in 2010 to save some schoolwork.  So thought I’d post some of that here……

I saw the title of the presentation on the drive and wondered why he was doing something on the TV show….

I had to check…took two sentences from each and dropped them into the google search to see if he copied this….

couldn’t find any proof of outright plagiarism.  Very similar to Wikipedia though…

not sure what class this was for, but, he did up this mini-newspaper….

the end of the interview made me laugh!….

Basketball Video

 

Sundays at the hotel in New Jersey provide lots of time to get caught up on video….

Click above for Matthew’s video from the win against Portland

Click above for Cpher’s video from the win against Owosso.  A lot more Cpher video than Matthew video this go round…..

Facebook Archiving

 

Since January is when I go into archiving mode (create the .pdf of the blog; get videos and pictures from the year just past onto portable hard drives AND back them up as well) I got to thinking…what about facebook?  And I discovered that Facebook will create a copy of your page; wall, photos, comments, other people’s comments, everything.  So I requested a copy.

Turns out they give you a version with some version of embedded html code that you can set up on your computer.  And that it takes them about 8 hours to create it.  Both Suzanne and my archive clocked in at about 250 MB (I fear Kevin’s archive, that we also requested, will be a lot larger…it bombed out during the first attempt).

But it is pretty cool. Not sure how long they will offer this functionality, but, it is now on my list of ‘things-to-do’ every January.

New Jersey – Day 23

 

I guess that’s right, the 11th will be 31 days since I left home.  Today, Saturday, is Day 25, Thursday would have been Day 23.

Journeyed out to Bay Head to see some facilities that had been damaged.  Not really worth describing those places, but, I did stop and take a few pictures afterwards that are worth talking about.

Bay Head is a one square mile municipality right on the shore that ended up, at least in the places I looked at on Thursday, with about two to four feet of water everywhere.  There’s a really cool video that some guy took during and after the storm; it’s worth a watch.  Click on the picture below to go to Youtube and watch it.

I think this picture roughly matches up to the shot that I took from the 0:18 second spot in the video.  What has happened since then is that all of the sand (and the crap that has been picked up with the sand) has been bulldozed back into place on this bluff that overlooks the beach.

I, like a stupid, thought the beach just ran up to the houses, maybe similar to what I’ve seen in Destin or in Hilton Head.  You can see it pretty clearly in the picture from the video; there’s a bluff there that’s about six to ten feet in height.  I don’t know, but doubt, that there were gaps in it to get down to the beach, I’m going to assume stairs.

So, for four feet of water to inundate Bay Head, that four feet had to be on top of the eight to ten feet to get over that bluff….

The 3:32 mark in that video shows that bluff right after the storm.  That vegetation you see in the first picture? long gone…..

…looking the other way (to the north)….

looking back to the west….you can see there’s a lot of sand and debris here.  I understand that there are still negotiations going on about sifting sand before returning it to the beach…..

Literally, at 3:36 in that video, that guy has his camera taking close to this exact shot.

I’m surprised, looking at more of that video, that this area isn’t completely underwater.  A lot of the shots from the day after in the video show areas that are completely submerged.

The houses on the beach?  aside from the flooding on the first level, the damage seems pretty hit or miss depending on the level of protection installed before the storm hit and the general age of the building. 

At about four minutes in the video you can see him looking down this street.  If you head down this street now, in about half a mile you’ll meet the National Guard, the sheriff, and a big highway sign flashing “Trespassers Will Be Arrested”…

Skylanders

 

One day last spring, I think after the Cranbrook lax jam, Cpher and I were having dinner with some friends at Five Guys before heading home.  The dinner included a discussion of Skylanders, which Cpher’s friend Sean has, and had been playing, and Cpher did not have, and had been wanting.

Almost 9 months later, Cpher’s acquisition of Skylanders is almost complete.  And as a surprise for him a few months back, I bought one of the ones he didn’t have and started trying to learn the game so that I could play along with him.

“The Beam is Supreme!”….each Skylander has their own catchphrase when they are added to the game…..kind of cute but it gets old fast.

Short version of the game:  you ‘port’ you character into the game, and he earns levels and rewards and upgrades, and you can ‘port’ him out to other games and ‘port’ other characters in to beat specific challenges.

Playing with Cpher has revealed a few things to me:

1)  Play level – I started my game at the hard level, and like to go all the way through and find all of the hidden stuff.  Cpher is used to playing at the medium level.\

2)  Play strategy – Cpher plays like a banzai warrior of old, straight at the enemies, and either they will die or he will die.  Which works ok in the easier levels of the game.  Not so much in the hard setting.  As we’ve gotten further into the game the ratio of death to life has steadily risen, and finally (finally!) Cpher has had to adjust his strategy to take advantage of some of the characters long range weapons.  After I sat back and killed enemies while he cycled through Skylander after Skylander by rushing up and getting wiped out.

3)  Levelling Up – Cpher, thinking he was a big help, has led me through these stages at times.  I haven’t really said much even though my little character isn’t going to level up if Cpher keeps doing everything.  But after Christmas he got a new character and came up and told me ‘Dad, I got this guy way past you in one day” and we had a little talk about why that occurred….

4)  Battle mode – Cpher wanted to show off for the family while I was home and wanted me to play battle mode.  And not surprisingly, his level 14 dudes destroyed my Level 4 Prism Break.  One time, he swapped in this Level 7 sprocket type girl…and I won!  That didn’t happen again and I think I lost 11 of the 12 matches.