Melodrama & muck

I've never been able to get into Desperate Housewives, but I do enjoy BBC's Footballer's Wives. It's a really crazy show.

I started watching near the end of last season, maybe because there's not much else to watch on Sunday at 10pm, but partly because of all the great melodrama. Even more than American soap operas, FW is full of glamourous women (Tanya!) and crazy situations (a hermophrodite baby?)

But the new season started the other day, and talk about drastic story changes! People are just gone now! We knew that Jason got killed, but Chardonnay dropped dead from anorexia, the coach has dissapeared (gone crazy from his bad-ass daughter) along with his daughter, and where is the sexy Italian?

And what do they give us instead? A sexy pervert with his Baliwood wife?

It's a great show, though. Very over-the-top.

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Yesterday I heard a strange story about some muck oozing out from under downtown LA!

It started the night before. There was a strong sewer smell, so they called the City out, but they couldn't find anything. Then, some cracks started appearing in the street, and the street had to be closed down. Then some muck started oozing out from under an apartment building, and everyone had to be evacuated!

First, they said it was a white substance oozing out. Then it became tarlike, but it was very warm. The nightly newscast said that a neighboring business had been pumping out some hot water, and that might account for the heat. The next day the news said nothing about this neighboring business.

They did say that there are some oil fields in the area, and I think they said only lately did they stop pumping oil from that area.

So is downtown LA built over old oil fields? Are there hollow places down below where the oil used to be? In earthquake country?

This doesn't sound good to me, but what do I know?

Hooked on a Feeling

OK, this is great.

No way would he get away with this silliness in the good ole USA. I think this song was popular when I lived in Germany, so that's somehow fitting.

I started hitting the "Next Blog" button on Blogger, and found a bunch of sites that seem to be the product of random word generation, or some kind of metatag madness.

Spater Gator

I had a nice Valentines Day.

K brought me home flowers and a candy bar in the morning. All day I'd planned to give him the little gift I'd bought him at Target (a little candy tin), but when the time came I learned that J had lost it in her closet. She was hiding it for me, but I should have known better than to put anything into that Bermuda Triangle of her room.

While I was at work, I called and made a reservation at Osterio None's. I love that place. It turned out to be a good thing, too, because when we arrived there (after soccer practice in Burbank) about 7:30, it was packed!

Which is good, because I want restaurants I like to do well and prosper and stay in business, but it was crowded. K let me order, so we shared a spaghetti cruda and a pizza parmesana, and I had a glass of red zinfandel. We were remembering the time we went out for his birthday in Rome, and we ended up trading dinners and loving it!

I also made pop-up valentines cards for the whole family, since I had the leftover supplies from leading this activity for the Brownies. Plus, when J came home from practice, I had cut up some strawberries and heated some chocolate (so easy in the microwave), so we had a delicious red snack before we went out. J gets so into holidays that it motivates me to try to make things special for her. I know she appreciated it because she loves chocolate.

The kids stayed home and ate pizza when K and I went out. When we left she said, "Have fun you lovebirds!"

Isn't she the cutest?

This had been a strange and difficult basketball season.

I guess I can't even remember the summer, but everything seemed fine way back then. Coach A was the new coach, and he seemed young and cute dressing up for the games and having the team dress up too sometimes. It was like he was modeling himself after Pat Riley or Phil Jackson.

G started in the first scrimmage of the "season". Then coach started to not put him in. Then he didn't play in 3 games in a row. Then he got in and took a charge and got stitches.

Then he didn't play in 5 games in a row.

This was very hard for K and I. Everything seemed to shift before our eyes. Parents whose kids started to play more are friends of ours, and so that felt funny. Other parents started saying dumbass things like "We need a bench!" to people whose kids were sitting on the bench. Suddenly I was cheering a lot less, and caring about refs calls a LOT less. This is something we'd never experienced before, and so it was a shock.

In fact, it was a struggle not to go to the dark side and actually root for the other team because, after all, you didn't really want them to win if your kid wasn't playing. We didn't know what to say to the other parents after the games. In fact, we both got to the point where we couldn't even stand it anymore and vowed to not go to anymore games. But luckily we both got out of that mode of thinking before the next game.

Then there was the World of Warcraft aspect and K wanting G to work out more to be more competetive and G resisting because ALL he wanted to do was play that stupid game. And K not being able to not talk about it for even 5 freaking minutes! I may have mentioned, I told G he had to work it out with his dad because I didn't want to have to get a divorce over WOW.

Then our parents came out and he started to get to play more. Will we ever know why? Why did he stop playing him in the first place? And what about all the seniors who didn't get to play? What's the point of having a bench if they don't get any practice?

But all in all I'm proud of all of us for coming through it. G really took it the best of all of us. Neither K nor I actually stopped coming to the games, nor did we leave in the middle like another parent did one time. And gradually G got to play more and more toward the end of the season, so K's parents got to see him play a good amount. And he played well when he was in there, but it was hard for him to feel like he had to prove himself right away every time.

I think I feel the worst for the seniors. It about breaks my heart. This was a terrible season for them. A was a co-captain, and by the end was barely getting to play. I can see it maybe if the strategy was to win and so he couldn't play the seniors, but we DIDN'T win and in fact had one of our worst seasons ever. So the coach may be in trouble too, I don't know. My Dad said he was outcoached in the games he saw, so maybe this coach is really no good! I feel sorry for him, but I think he really screwed up this season for a lot of people.

But a couple of good things came out of it, hopefully. G is going out for track now (high jump), and that might open up more interests or options. I've stopped yelling at refs so much, to that's good. And I've become more determined to get G onto a traveling team than ever, since I can't count on High School to do jack.

After my parents left, the winds were crazy.

They left just in time. When the winds kick up, it's like living in a wind tunnel around here!Everything on the patio blew over, including the unbrella (in the down position) along with the table it was attached to!

The pool cover somehow blew ACROSS THE POOL! It was still rolled up, and was blowing up against the neighbor's house. I'd have liked to have seen that cover blowing across the pool. It must have been something.