Las Vegas 2013 – Part One

 

I guess I’ll do this in two posts…..

Sunday:  Pack everyone up (but Kevin) and head north to drop Fric and Frac at camp (a few posts coming on that front as well).  Arrive early, but the camp sticks to the schedule and we really can’t register until 2:30 pm.  Not a big problem, but, our flight for Vegas leaves at 7:40 pm, so, we are a bit rushed.

Tell the boys things will be a bit rushed…drop Matthew (and we don’t even see his cabin!)….drop Cpher (do have initial pictures of this) and head south.

GPS and google maps say the quickest way to go is down I-75 to the east.  Mistake…get caught in lots of traffic and construction multiple times and any advantage we hoped to have gained by dropping Fric and Frac early is gone.  Make the airport at 7 pm but do get through security very quickly and are at the gate before boarding starts.

Arrive Las Vegas at 9 pm local time….since we only have carry-on luggage (I’m happy…Suzanne isn’t) we can quickly clear the terminal to the rental car facility.   Get car, drive down the strip, go to Robertos’s (Don Tortaco here in Vegas now) and head back to the Bellagio to check in.  Catch the last of the fountain shows for the evening.

Monday: Beep.  Beep Beep Beep.  (long pause).   Beep.

That’s what happened at 4 am….this beeping noise started.  After spending 30 minutes making sure it isn’t any of our stuff we call the front desk and maintenance.  And have to all back at 5:10 when they don’t show up.  And sure enough, it means the mini bar has issues and the guy just turns the whole thing off.

But Suzanne is wide awake and I’m not…so she goes down to play in the casino while I sleep.  She comes back in 2 hours and sleeps a little more while I read….

(Suzanne and I have our ‘staples’ on trips to Vegas…visiting the Bellagio conservatory is one of them)

Part of the deal that had us staying at the Bellagio for two nights was that we received $100 in food credit.  We hit the buffet around 10 am to have brunch…..and then spent 30 minutes and two separate requests to managers wondering why we couldn’t get refills on drinks.

So, Beeps, Drinks, and then Suzanne sees on facebook that the show we were going to see Monday night (Human Nature) has been cancelled….and we get an email on Monday saying that the cruise we had booked for next spring break had been cancelled and, well, Suzanne is wondering why the travel gods have it out for her over the last few days!

These are the penguins slots….they are Suzanne’s absolute favorite and there was a little squeal of delight when we walked by them in the Bellagio.

Went over to the Cosmopolitan to check that out Monday afternoon….no pictures but took advantage of the player club sign-up deal…..if you lose $100 playing slots they will give you $100 in free play.

I play blackjack and the new Star Wars slots and end up ahead by about $70….the Star Wars game comes with this highlight

Suzanne:  “I never do well at Star Wars slots”

Scott:  “The force is not with you”

Suzanne:  “I’m just not geeky enough!”

Suzanne ends up losing $100 so we go over and get the free play….she uses my winnings to play slots, and I use the $100 to play video blackjack (that free play doesn’t work on the nice new penny slot machines).  And I do well enough to turn that $100 of play into $100 of real cash and collect the ‘winnings’. 

The Jasmine restaurant at the Bellagio….a different view of the fountains then we’ve ever had before.  My dinner was pretty good, Szechuan roasted chicken…there was a lot of it and it tasted great.  Suzanne had the Kung Pao and was almost instantly hungry after dinner ended….

Superman slots at Bellagio.  Did not do well here.  Oh well…

Since Human Nature was cancelled we decided to see La Reve at the Wynn.  Not a Cirque-brand show, but, it is totally Cirque-y…

But…they let you take pictures.  Which is good, but, no mostly dark Iphone photo is ever going to turn out great…

The show was good….it wasn’t great…I think one of the things I like about Cirque shows…other than the absolutely breathtaking costumes and aerobatics, is the humor.  Thought that was missing here…

Ended the night with our second late-night Mexican run….we were pretty (BEEP) tired as we made it back to the Bellagio. 

Tuesday:  Hung out pool-side Tuesday morning and then checked out and headed to lunch….

Suzanne had heard about this place…from reviews and from her friends.  And it certainly was hopping; had to wait for 15 minutes for lunch and that line never got smaller. 

The other side of the menu…..we watch a fair bit of cooking shows but none with this guy (Suzanne knows him, I am passingly familiar with his name, that’s it).  Lunch was good; again, I enjoyed mine more than Suzanne liked hers.  Fries were too soft, but they were tasty (especially with the different dipping sauces).  I ended up choosing the chicken burger (hot mayo, blue cheese, some celery/carrot slaw) that was pretty tasty!

Headed over to the Venetian to check in….split up the stay to take advantage of the different deals.  Will continue the story in the next post….

Things done poorly; things done well.

 

As described earlier, there are certainly things I could have done better in the long and arduous processing of deciding where Matthew was going to play soccer this year.  Figured I’d close out the posts on that subject by talking about some of those things here.

Suzanne:  About 2 to 3 weeks after tryouts and the decision had been made I think Suzanne finally was comfortable with the decision that we had made.  I used that ‘we’ in the broadest sense; I recall a conversation where Suzanne asked me “is there anything that could make you go back to ( T ) at this point?” and I said “no” and she said “well, I guess the decision is made”.  I took that conversation as acceptance of the decision, but, probably shouldn’t have.

In the end, I think all is good here but, well, like husbands and wives everywhere, I should have paid more attention to the things that mattered most to Suzanne. 

Verbalizing the decision:  I think I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t here….if I hadn’t said anything to our friends that we were unsure of what we were doing this year and they had found out at tryouts on Saturday when we weren’t there, well, I’m reasonably sure a few people would have been irked that we never said anything.  But, on the other side of that, we did say something, and I think that there are some people who were irked that we said something…..because the idea that we were leaving and others hearing that we were leaving could have swayed others to leave (and weaken the team they were staying with).

Well, in the end, I don’t think we convinced anyone of anything.  The only other ( T ) player who left was leaving for their own varied reasons….

Pigs.  Mud.  Wallow: Enough said on this subject earlier….

For that, there are a few things I’m happy with in the process:

Make the decision early and stay with it:  We decided three weeks out from tryouts what we were doing.  We did not get in any type of discussion with (  T ) coaching or ( T ) management about staying.  I know two other families that left…..one had a face-to-face meeting with ( T ) management to hear compelling reasons to stay for her two children (they ended up leaving) and one didn’t make a decision until after tryouts were completed on Sunday, having multiple conversations with the new ( T ) coach that grew increasingly uglier.  I’m very comfortable to have avoided both of those situations and outcomes. We know one other family who went to both teams pre-tryout training sessions and said their decision was going to be completely wide open….and then made the decision to only attend ( T) tryouts on both Saturday and Sunday….and got completely screwed over when ( T ) only offered them a spot on the lower team as tryouts ended on Sunday.

Do the research necessary to make the decision:  I certainly can say that I did this!  

Do what Matthew wanted to do:  For all of the extraneous stuff, Matthew wanted to do what we ended up doing.  To be completely fair, Suzanne is right…if I had really wanted Matthew to choose the other route, staying at ( T ), I could have presented the facts in a way to appeal to Matthew there as well.

From The Sports Desk – Bath 4v4

 

Haven’t been in a big hurry to do this post; a) the tournament ended poorly and b) the pictures aren’t all that great.  Oh well….

Went with the same Panda shirts, changed the name this time to ‘Panda Express’ since we were missing two of our players from the last 4v4.  I was happy, am happy, whatever verb tense is most appropriate, with the ‘replacements’ but knew that they hadn’t done a lot of 4v4 soccer.  And it is different….

Game 1:  We play 4+1 (how do you cheer for that team?  saying ‘four plus one’ is awkward?  to you say ‘five’?)

Anyway, they are a team of kids from travel soccer around here….this team won ‘our’ age group in the Williamston 4v4 we played in a few weeks back where we played up two age groups.  And we started slow but ended up pulling away at the end to win 6-3.  Affirmation that I made the right decision to play up a month ago?  Who knows?

: 

The best picture of the day, the two teams shaking hands.  Sadly, Matthew is the one kid you really can’t see all that well in this picture.  For the record, for the Panda’s it is Matthew, Zane, AJ, Drew, and Levi from left to right, for 4+1 it is Jayden, Jesse, Nick, Nick, and Isac from right to left.

Game 2:  Against some green team that I did not get the name of.  I did watch one of their early games and they were down 10-0 at the half….I knew going in we were going to cruise through this. 

Might as well talk about 4v4 soccer ‘difficulties’ here….I’ve said it before and will say it again, it is hard for me to get Matthew out of that defensive spot when we play these tournaments.  It’s not just the defense, which he is good at, and other members of our team are good at also.  It’s everything else…on a small field you have to distribute quickly, which he can do.  On a small field you have to be ‘man-up’ and be pretty physical in near your goal, he can do that.  In this tournament, you could score from everywhere….so big long kicks from our end are a good thing, and we figured out that, well, there is one Panda who can do that accurately most of the time.  So, in Game 1 he is mostly back there…I try something different twice and we give up two goals.  In Game 3 he was back there almost all of the time.

Really not a discussion point, but, I found out pretty quickly that one Panda was as I suspected, pretty much limited to the forward position. 

(he can boot it, pretty consistently, 3/4 of the field.  I wish we had done a better job of controlling the balls that he booted forward….)

But here in Game 2, he started back on defense and moved up to forward as we got going…..we were up 5-0 at the half, and Matthew had his only goal of the day.  Discovered, at the half, that all of the pandas had scored but one.  Told that Panda that he was the only Panda that was allowed to score in the second half and that after he scored we would not score again…just kick the ball out of bounds and let the other team have it back….

So we score on an own goal…the ball deflects in off of one of their players…it is 6-0.  I tell that Panda that the goal didn’t count…he had to score (he is a Panda who plays defense primarily in real soccer and almost never scores).  He finally scores and it is 7-0 and the team goes into stall mode.  The game finishes 7-2 (they score when we touch the ball inside the arc and they are awarded a goal as the penalty…and score on this long shot when I have one of the new kids back on defense)

My decision to stall and have the kids not play to ‘demolish’ is not greeted with enthusiasm by the parents, who think I am sabotaging the chances of doing well in the next match.  So let me discuss that a little bit here…

The case for holding back:  Well, it is good sportsmanship.  The 4v4 is supposed to be for fun and not deadly serious.  The team we were playing only scored two goals are day; both against us.  If we hadn’t held back that never would have happened.  They wouldn’t have even had possession of the ball like they had in the 2nd half.  The absolute opposite of this was what the team they played in the first game did…they scored 13 goals (only 10 count) and were bragging that the green team didn’t touch the ball in the 2nd half.

The case for not:  Well, if your kids come out flat in the next game it is because they weren’t “playing to win”.

I said it there, I’ll say it here:  I was not going to bury that team.  I’m glad they scored.  And if we come out flat, that is on the boys.

Game 3:  The first two games determined your fate in the seeding for the single-elimination….we were the #2 seed (giving up those goals early in the first game sealed our fate….if we had a chance to be the one-seed my instructions in the second game would have been different…hold up but do NOT let them score).

So we play the #3 seed, a team with travel kids from Ann Arbor and Jackson.

And even thought I had warned them that their parents thought they would come out flat, they came out flat, and slow, and let the other team be first to the ball almost the whole game, and we lost 4-1.  Feel bad, I should have gotten a picture of the team afterwards and I was so disappointed and mad afterwards that I didn’t do that.  Feel bad, let my disappointment show with the boys as we talked after the game, but, man, was just an ugly game.  Matthew was very pissed off at me afterwards, he thought all of my talk to the boys was directed straight at him….which wasn’t true at all.  I forget sometimes how personally he takes these types of games.

So, after next week, the sports swing back into full throttle:around here:  Upcoming events (and posts) for July and August include:

- that things I would do differently post I haven’t gotten to (next post!)

- Fric and Frac at Spring Hill

- Scott and Suzanne in Vegas (not sure if we’ll go day-by-day here or not)

- FTSD: A tennis preview

- FTSD: Tennis Quads (Kevin will have five quads in by the end of August…think I have figured out the best way to get the results out of the paper and out here now!)

- Olympic Developmental Program try-outs

- FTSD:  Rush Kickoff Tournament

- FTSD:  Football preview (with a discussion of double-sporting complications for the soccer-minded…)

- FTSD:  Dewitt Ox Roast 2013 (defending champs!…shirts are ordered!)

(shirts are inspired the song Inner Ninja, which Matthew and I have heard on the radio a lot this summer….click on the picture below if you want to watch the video….)

 

FTSD – GR Crew Cup (did this tournament last year with ( T ), will do it this year with ( C )).

Let’s get physical….

 

Friday was annual physical day.  Forgot last year’s lesson that it might be better to schedule Fric and Frac separately….still think that might be the best way to go in the future but it seemed to go ok on Friday.  Also provided a few of the high comedy moments of the appointment.

Heading in, we were pretty sure Matthew was due for a shot and that Cpher would be off the hook. 

The big takeaway from the visit was the doctor pointing out that when she first saw Cpher that she thought he was in the middle of his growth spurt….but after she finished the exam she realized he really hasn’t even started puberty.  “There’s a lot of growing left to go!” was the quote of the day…..and he is still moving along, 5’-8 1/2”….another inch and he is the 2nd tallest around these parts….

Again here we are not heading in the right direction….

but it is not as bad as it looks…..doctor again was very unconcerned…he’s tracking where he’s been.  We have been trying to be better about his weight in this ‘dead period’ of the summer where there are no sports going on and he’s done a good job of shedding a few pounds since school ended.

Turns out Cpher needed the second of the HPV shots.  Cpher does not like shots and is completely freaked out by it…the nurse put the cold swab with alcohol on his arm when he wasn’t looking and he literally jumped off the table!  Matthew and I could not stop laughing…..

There is nothing more constant than Matthew’s steady march up the 90% height curve. 

and after a blip back there, he has again continued his steady march up the 75% curve in weight. 

And the trend here is good.  Cpher was first up for the exam, and asked if he was getting a shot.  Doctor said no, she was giving his shot to Matthew!  The look on Matthew’s face was priceless! 

Poor Matthew needed three shots!  The first two didn’t hurt more than a pinch, but, that HPV shot that Fric and Frac must have a wider needle or something…both boys were commenting that it hurt quite a bit.

Mid-Michigan Tri-County Academic League

 

Found one more partial set of stats….from Spring leagues….

Team Overall Standings:

#	Team	W-L	%	Points	TUH	P	TU	I	PPB	PP20TH
1	Okemos	13-0	1.000	4640	-
2	Lansing Eastern	11-3	0.786	2965	-
3	Haslett A	10-3	0.769	3585	-
4	East Lansing	5-8	0.385	1850	-
5	Ionia A	8-6	0.571	3010	-
6	DeWitt	10-3	0.769	3430	-
7	Lansing Catholic	11-3	0.786	3855	-
8	Holt	7-6	0.538	2790	-
9	Jackson	6-8	0.429	2005	-
10	Haslett B	7-7	0.500	2335	-

Individual Game Results:

Round	Opponent	Result	Score	TUH	Team					Opponent
					P	TU	I	B	PPB	P	TU	I	B	PPB
-	DeWitt	Win	315 - 260	-
-	East Lansing	Win	315 - 120	-
-	Everett	Win	355 - 130	-
-	Haslett A	Win	365 - 175	-
-	Holt	Win	285 - 200	-
-	Ionia B	Win	470 - 70	-
-	Lakewood	Win	370 - 140	-
-	St. Johns	Win	440 - 75	-
10	DeWitt	Win	325 - 195	-
11	Jackson	Win	495 - 120	-
12	Ionia A	Win	320 - 165	-
13	Haslett A	Win	280 - 275	-
14	Lansing Eastern	Win	305 - 225

Quizbusters Statistics

Stumbled upon this tonight….stats from the Quizbusters season…
Team Overall Standings:

#	Team	W-L	%	Points	TUH	TU	I	PP20TH
1	Okemos	6-0	1.000	3070	360	197	5	170.6
2	Jackson Christian	5-1	0.833	2440	360	170	5	135.6
3	Hillsdale Academy	4-1	0.800	2390	300	157	5	159.3
3	Lansing Eastern	4-1	0.800	2070	300	136	5	138.0
5	Everett	3-1	0.750	1520	240	122	4	126.7
5	Haslett	3-1	0.750	1330	240	103	2	110.8
5	Kent City	3-1	0.750	1500	240	108	5	125.0
5	Lansing Catholic	3-1	0.750	1750	240	118	4	145.8

Here’s my guess on the columns; TUH = toss ups heard, TU = toss ups won, I = interrupts, PP20TH = points per 20 toss-ups heard
Team Performance:

Players

Player	GP	TUH	TU	I	PPTH	PP20TH
Emily B	6.0	360	39	1	1.06	21.11
Abhijit D	5.0	300	38	2	1.20	24.00
Martina F	1.0	60	5	0	0.83	16.67
Kevin H	6.0	360	34	1	0.92	18.33
Mayank P	6.0	360	81	1	2.22	44.44

Games

Round	Opponent	Result	Score	TUH	Team		Opponent
					TU	I	TU	I
1	Linden	Win	450 - 240	60	29	1	16	4
2	Owosso	Win	380 - 180	60	29	2	15	1
3	Kearsley	Win	670 - 100	60	40	0	10	2
4	Haslett	Win	560 - 210	60	32	0	19	2
5	Lansing Eastern	Win	490 - 340	60	34	1	21	1
6	Jackson Christian	Win	520 - 310	60	33	1	23	1

 And Kevin:

Round	Opponent	Win/Loss	TUH	P	TU	I	PPTH	P%	PP20TH
1	Linden	Win	60	0	7	1	1.00	0.000	20.00
2	Owosso	Win	60	0	0	0	0.00	0.000	0.00
3	Kearsley	Win	60	0	3	0	0.50	0.000	10.00
4	Haslett	Win	60	0	8	0	1.33	0.000	26.67
5	Lansing Eastern	Win	60	0	12	0	2.00	0.000	40.00
6	Jackson Christian	Win	60	0	4	0	0.67	0.000	13.33

The Whole DA Saga

 

Another of those posts that I’ve been meaning to do for some time but just haven’t gotten around to it….and the saga, as it goes, only came to an end today.

DA, as I’ve mentioned here before, is a new program by the governing body for soccer here in Michigan.  Before this program, the youngest age that kids could compete during the regular season at a state-wide level was U13…with this, it is now U11 and U12 for the next season.  The state will pick the 16 teams that will compete in each division.  How will they do that you ask?

“When reviewing club applications, the DA Advisory Panel will be looking at the club’s player development programs and coaching education initiatives, as well as prior DA history, prior league play history, team composition (ODP players), prior tournament history, and adherence to submission/payment deadlines.”

You would think this would be a straight-forward process….how hard could it be to pick the 16 best teams in age group in the state and move forward?  Well….

The first time ( T ) mentions DA to our team is in the ill-fated soccer drama meeting in early March…..it struck me as wrong then how quickly the president of the club went from talking about the disaster of winter session programming to the promise of being in DA next year.  Thought it was odd at the time how the guy talked about it, that ( T ) would be the only team in mid-Michigan in DA and that he was on the DA Advisory Panel and so that was the way it was going to be.  But didn’t think too much of it then…..still irked about the winter sessions shenanigans and, hey, DA was months away.

So May comes around and the DA teams are announced.  It goes about as expected (as discussed in the ‘switch’ post), ( T ) gets teams in all 4 divisions.  We still hadn’t made up our mind at that point on what we were doing, but, ( C ) did not get in at Matthew’s age group. 

If you go back and read that italicized quote above, you can see that there is a ton of wiggle room for the DA board to be as subjective as they want during this process….and take teams that may not deserve to be there and exclude teams that might deserve it.

We had come to the decision (I had come to the decision…let me be clear, I drove this part of the choice for next year….but I think Suzanne has come to agree with me) that while what DA is what we think Matthew needs the idea of the current ( T ) team playing in DA is not what Matthew needs.  The team has struggled, we ended up finishing sixth in the 2nd division in our league (there are four main leagues in the state).  ( T ); in the talk in March, and the parent meeting in May, was ‘selling’ the pitch that with a new coach and a focus on training everything would be fine….they would back-load the schedule to give the new coach a chance to catch up.   After thinking about that (and I don’t believe it; I expect improvement but the whole premise is that the other teams aren’t improving at the same time) and thinking about what is going to happen when the ( T ) team, with or without Matthew, plays those DA teams, well, I’d say that was 50% of the decision to switch.  ( T ), over the last three years with Matthew, has only ever beaten one of those DA teams and more often that not, games against those teams have been crushing defeats.  I’m just not sure how ( T ) can think that is going to work next year as a positive developmentally for that team.  There has been a lot of ( T ) talk about new kids, bringing kids down from other teams…..but in the end, there was only one new kid added to the ( T ) team as it heads into their DA season next year. 

( C )’s team in this age group had a much stronger record against the DA teams; they had beaten 6 of them and even when playing the best of the teams could compete, only lose by one or two goals instead of being down by four goals in five minutes in the one example I’m thinking of.  If you can compete with these teams you can utilize what you hopefully have learned at practice and it is a good experience. 

So ( C ) is rightly pissed that they didn’t get in at this age group (many of our friends on the ( T ) don’t understand it either…they seem to have the better team, not club, qualifications); they have heard rumors that the ( T ) president said in March that ( T ) would be in and ( C ) would not….which to them (and in hindsight, to a lot of people) seems like the whole process was biased to begin with.  ( C ) chooses the-not-often utilized option of appealing the decision.

Right after the decision, right after the last tournament where we lost to ( C ), I set up a lunch with the ( C ) coach to answer a few unanswered questions I had as we/I tried to figure out what to do…..one of the topics was the DA appeal.  They didn’t expect much, but, were doing it, and their first meeting with the state seemed pretty positive…the staff members who sat down with them were also befuddled that they didn’t get in, how they could have the level of success they have had against some of the teams selected for DA and not be in?

It’s a good lunch, I learn what ( C ) is going to do if they are not in DA…and that is about it.  I send the coach an email late that afternoon, politely thanking him for having lunch with me.  The last thing I say is to let me know how the DA appeal goes.  Oh, if I could take back one thing over the last 3 months, it would be that email and that last sentence…..

A day later I’m at the last lacrosse game of the season and I get a call from a number I don’t recognize….answer it and it is the president of ( C )!  Asks me what I know about the appeal (and it takes a moment to break through that I know nothing more than what his coach told me…and apparently relayed to him) and then proceeds to tell me more about the appeal, that it has turned into this big deal with the president of the state association and well, it is much too mundane to go in to here.  The more relevant part is that he asks me if I had heard about ( T ) saying in March that ( T ) would be the only club in the region in DA…and I reply, yeah, I was there.

So he asks me if I would send him an email stating that……

I tell him I’ll think about it, we hang up, and that’s that…..

Thinking about was quite an exercise.  I know one parent who outright told me he wouldn’t do something like that because it would damage any chance of his son playing with ( T ) in the future.  I’m not even sure ( T ) did anything wrong here….that’s not for me to decide.  But simply passing along a statement of fact, well, that’s all that it is.  It could have some very negative ramifications.  In the end, I fall back on a few things…1) I’m not judge or jury here, I’m just providing a fact and 2) the ethics part of my Engineer license kind of says I have to do the right thing here.

I send the email.  Ask one other parent who was at the meeting to help me remember what was said; his recollection is the same as mine.

I ask to be cc’d if he does anything with the email.

( C )’s DA appeal goes on….they are told at one point they are 100% in and there has been a mistake made.  They are told at one point that they were denied because 20 pages of their application was missing.  They are told their appeal has been denied but that the whole thing will be reconsidered after tryouts.  And as of today, they are told that at least in Matthew’s age group, they are officially out (they did get an additional team, the boys team that is a year younger, in….another team withdrew).  So that part of the saga is officially over….

( C )’s owner used my email to bolster their appeal….and did sent it along to most of the executive board.  Not a big fan of this, but, can’t say I didn’t expect it.  Wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t willing to stand behind it (and I’ll again say here that unlike the ( C ) owner who looks at the facts as an admission of guilt I don’t know that….my email is simply the facts as I know it).  I understand that there is a hearing in a week to straighten that part of it out.

Summary: 

1) Especially playing in the tournament’s the last few weeks Suzanne I think has a better understanding of what really was the deciding part in our switch….( T ) had to add players to play 11 v 11 that have no business playing at that level….and we think next year is going to be ugly ugly ugly.

2)  Soccer, like everything else, has it’s ugly politics. If you wallow in the mud with pigs, they like it and you get dirty.

3)  Matthew’s new team, because of the DA decision, now can’t play at the ‘highest level’, for two years (he is U12, the only path to the highest level at U13 is reserved for DA teams).  The top 8 teams in DA move up to that level at U13 (you can read in #1 above what I think ( T )’s chances of making that step is).  So, each team will most likely be in the same place in two years….but I think the developmental path that ( C ) offers is better than what we left…

4)  It will be awkward/ugly when I see the ( T ) president again.  Given that Kevin and Cpher are in the same grade as his kids, and Matthew plays, well, soccer, this will happen at some point.

5)  I would do the same thing again.  With the DA email.  And with the decision for Matthew.

Next post (one of these days)….things I wouldn’t do the same way again!