Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Youth Soccer

My son's team has NY Red Bull coaches, it's weird, I drove to the game with one of them this weekend, he was at least my age most likely older, most int'l youth coaches I have met are young guys in their 20's. There is this world wide network of coaches that, a high percentage of which are from the UK, and they coach in Ghana one year, move to USA the next, are an assistant coach to a low level pro team in Wales, then become the head coach to kids in NJ, it is very weird transient lifestyle that I was not perviously aware of.
So we roll into our first league game on the road last weekend with a professional coach decked out in Red Bulls gear, and our boys are rocking Adidas kits, we arrive in a nice upper middle class town in North Jersey and they have t-shirts and dads coaching having them do jumping jacks before the game. My son's team had to stop scoring at 7-0 our else the club would have been fined for each additional goal. Not growing up with soccer it is interesting for me at least to see the vast range of how towns develop players.
The day before another team my son plays with sometimes got demolished in a scrimmage by Portuguese and Brazilian kids from Ironbound SC in Newark. So I saw the whole spectrum from kids who just kick the ball around for fun to upper middle class and rich kids with the best training money can buy to those whose families live and breath the game, you can guess which one looks the best so far.

Friday, March 25, 2011

Less Distractions On Campus

So after missing three weeks of class I has a midterm last week. I am not going to try to make up all of the reading I missed, but I have a paper and some blog entries due that I missed, plus keeping up with the current reading and and starting to research my major term paper.

Studying at home is often hard, we have had all of these house issues like possible two dead animals under our back deck that stink to high hell once the temperature sniffs 50 degrees, our heater has cut off twice and we have had to have someone come and service it to get it running again, and we had people come by to give estimates for trimming trees on our property, the guys we picked were suppose to call to give a heads up as to when they were free to come.

Well as I sit trying to figure out what the hell I am going to write my make-up paper on, and where am I going to find the research sources online, and being mad at myself for not getting any of it done earlier in the week, particularly because my kids have a half day to day and a play date at our house, so I will have less opportunity to work on the paper today than any other day this week, the tree trimmers show up. So there a bunch of Latin dudes high up in trees over my house with chainsaws and a giant truck sized wood chipper buzzing away as I type, not exactly an environment conducive to higher level conceptualizing. Also two worries have begun to creep in, one, this service was so much cheaper than the others, are they insured if one of these giant branches falls on my roof? Secondly, are we removing enough or too many branches? Too many may be safer and have less leaves to deal with in the fall, but it may look bad, and make the tree lean and force the roots to start coming up. Too few and we are still in danger of having a large branch fall on our house during a storm.
Oh and there are the squirrels who live in the tree, I am a little worried about their stress level.