February 20th, 2022

Hey there,

'Twas Super Bowl this week.  We had a handful of folks over for the 7:30am kickoff.  Decent game and commercials, and the food was good.  Not sure if I've ever had a photo taken of me in my chair.  

I had that bad boy in my room growing up so it has to be 40 years old at the least.  It has experienced a lot of hours watching football and gallons of fart juice.  And yes...that is a Fred Biletnikoff jersey I am sporting.

One thing I've become expert at is identifying knee injuries instantly.  In real time, called OBJ's ACL tear and Joe Burrow's MCL sprain.  Obviously this power is due to watching 10's of thousands of hours of sports and having all of the knee injuries myself, but a totally useless skill to have.

Today is the coldest day of the year so far...low forties last night and as cold as it's been in all our time here.  Not complaining, but the relentless gray cold this winter has been odd.  The appeal of this dump is that you get some 70 degree runs in January/March and there just hasn't been one.

That kinda sucks for baseball cause we've been rained out a bunch and we're only a couple weeks in.  Here is our team photo...first is combined Varsity/JV, and the Varsity only is below.  A decent batch of players this year...by far the best since the school started baseball 5 (6?) years ago.  

Time for the "Why baseball is great" story of the week.  After the above team photo, all of us were warming up.  I like to get in there too as playing catch is half the reason I go out.  Since it was a combined practice, the warm-up line was long and I'm down at one end.  In local baseball custom, you will hear a guy shout out "Oy", and then the rest of the team will respond in unison with "OY!".  It sounds OK and our boys have tried to adopt the practice, but it feels forced and to me we are different and should have a chant that reflects our culture and spirit.  

At this warm-up, we're chatting as we do, and one of the fellas mentions that another player has a Spotify playlist he made for his girlfriend.  The mixtape of this generation...how great they still have the same practice and even better they can make one so fast and also edit it as the relationship ebbs and flows.  Anyhoo, the kid tells me that not only does he have a playlist for his girlfriend, but she made one back for him.  The playlists are called 'I Love You Baby (ILY Baby)' and 'I Love You More'.  Such an obvious call and response and that has caught on as one for us.  Pretty perfect as it rolls off the tongue easily and sounds great, is unique to us and is funny in that baseball sort of way.  What I like the most about it is that it gets teenage boys to utter the phrase "I love you" so that hopefully makes it easier to say for them down the line.  

Brief local covid update...the local continue to fight the battle in a quest for zero cases.  They were scared lately by the high transmissibility of the current variant and the Chinese New Year holiday where people travel and congregate.  Throughout the two week CNY break and to today, cases have been in the teens and 20's with yesterday going down to 8 and 4 today.  Seems impossible, right?  Their vaccination rates are similar to most countries...pretty high but too many unwilling to get it.  They aren't claiming they have a right not to take it, but are fearful of whatever cause they hear rumors...and they love themselves some rumors here.  But they still mask religiously and contact trace with a passion.  Most all the folks I talk to, local and expat, think that they should let go of their zealousness and let this wave wash over them, and there are hints they will reduce the inbound quarantine, but the bulk of the people and government are very conservative.  No way I'm doing 14 days again, but who would be willing to predict what it'll be like in October.

Finally for today, a local public service news item to share.  A human rights group took a look at the 20 major bubble tea brands and rated them on how they "kowtow" to China.  Kowtow sounds like a word of Chinese origin, no?  See the rankings for yourself here and never get your bubble tea from the Comebuy again.  

February 13th, 2022

Hiya,

Mentioned last week we had a few different groups of people over for dinner type things.  At each one, people went into our refrigerator and had the same comment...'who drinks all the milk'.  Me of course.  I love that stuff and have guzzled it straight from the container for as long as I can remember.  Betty will put some in her coffee or cereal, but she could 'milk' a 1/2 gallon for several weeks.  I polish one off in at most 3 days.  We like to buy the stuff at Costco here cause it is imported from the States and I need me some steroids.  Plus, Betty has been to dairies here and says the conditions the cows are subjected to due to space issues lead to all kinds of horrific things that I don't even care to imagine.  With the disruptions to the global supply chain, the American milk at the Costco isn't in stock all the time, so we will horde it at home and so have 2-3 gallons of the stuff on hand most of the time.  That everyone finds this habit of consumption weird, and I've read things about how old people should stop consuming milk cause it causes all kinds of issues, have begun to question this habit.  But who's kidding who...I'm gonna drink this stuff till the cows come home  

Another habit of mine is to walk around the house at all times in bare feet.  We started baseball last week and I went pretty hard at practice.  Way too hard than I should have and in addition to aggravating all the usual aches, my back has been outta whack for days.  Our cleaning lady was over and she wanted to break down the  dining table to take out a leaf and make it smaller, but I begged off as not only did I screw up my elbow on the damn thing a couple years ago, but I didn't want to wrench my spine any further.  I told her that my back hurt and she pointed at my feet saying that the floor is cold and that is what is causing my back pain.  I know this has to be some Asian chi thing, and while I am certainly not anti that form of medicine, thought that diagnosis was voodoo.  She is Filipina and I called her a bruja.  With the echoes of Spanish colonialism still resonating in their language, she thought that was hilarious...have never seen her laugh so hard.  I have found that the word bruja always gets a laugh.  

Another local custom that intrigues me happens at the local schools.  I have reservations about the way they teach, which I am led to believe values learning by rote over critical thinking, but the aspect that I know they do right is to have the kids clean up the school.  Chinese New Year break for them ends on Monday, but last Friday the students were required to come in to give the school a nice cleaning.  I will watch them and individually their efforts are mixed, but it is the spirit of working together for the good of your school that seems like it should be done everywhere.  I advocate for this at our fancy expat kid school and get laughed out of the room as they say the parents would never stand for  that kind of thing.  Seems like a missed opportunity to show some humility and camaraderie if you ask me.

One more Taiwan thing.  I went to a talk about the legal system in the country, and there was a statistic on one of the slides that said the number of lawyers in this country of 23 million people was 8,500.  Doing the math, that is one per 2,705 people  That struck me as exceptionally low and while this wasn't the point of the slide, I raised my hand to confirm that number.  The speaker confirmed it so and could see my disbelief.  My Canadian friend sitting next to me said to never mind him as he is American.  A good line by her that drew an appropriate laugh  Half-assed internet research shows that in the US, that number is 295 people per lawyer  Wish I had know it was 421 in Canada so I could have gone back at my friend.  The speaker added that only 7% of law students pass the local bar, which is an exceptionally high/low bar.  The society seems much less litigious here and things are mediated at a much higher rate.  It definitely feels like a better system but would make for an interesting study one day.

Like I said, baseball is in full swing and I got stuff 5-6-7 days a week for a couple months.  So great...being on the field with the boys, parents and coaches brings me all the joy.  Am lucky that I get to work with two coaches that not only love and know the game as much or more than I, but they are both teachers so know how to instruct a kid in their mechanics in ways that I envy and try to incorporate.  I can look at a kid and know what is wrong, but these guys have drills and words to correct those flaws.  I know I am a much better coach now because of them.  What they can't do that I have more leeway to impart to the kids is the irreverent part of the game.  Baseball is a lot about the mind and taking yourself out of your own head or addressing a problem by making fun of yourself.  It is a a fact that the best hitters fail 7 times out of 10.  No one wants to fail or should meekly accept failure, but if you can't laugh at yourself and just get into self loathing mode, it'll destroy your soul.  Humor doesn't work with all of them, but what does.  A couple examples from this week.  We had a kid come out to tryouts that was on the end of the bench of JV last year.  Our program is getting a lot better and we have a bunch of Freshman that came up that are real baseball players.  For years, we have taken kids that were decent athletes, but not baseball players.  Who's kidding who, we've taken shitty athletes just because they liked baseball and had a glove.  There was a kid last year that was a disaster throwing the ball.  He made the team cause he had a decent swing, but when he would throw, I'd say it went straight maybe 10% of the time at best while it'd spray all over the place the rest of the time.  It was comical until you had to play catch with him.  When we said goodbye to him last year, we gave him instruction and drills to help with his accuracy to work on in the offseason.  He shows up for tryouts this year and he and another boy are doing warm-up tosses. After a minute, the kid throwing with the returnee asks me to warm up with him cause he is sucking so bad that he isn't able to get ready and is getting frustrated.  I start to play catch and it ends up me playing fetch cause his balls are going all over the field.  He hasn't improved a lick since last season and might be even worse  To show how mental these kids are, he comes up to the head coach and I after the tryout and says he should start throwing with his brother.  He is totally oblivious to the fact that there is no way he makes the team.  Before Coach can say something nice to let the kid down, I interject that he should have done that 10 months ago.  Mean, funny to me, and hopefully demonstrating to this kid just how messed up his thought process is.  

I know they don't always get my style, which is OK cause that is why we have multiple ways of teaching.  For example, there is another kid that is a Freshman...a decent player that could be quite good if he corrected a lot of mechanics.  It's gonna be tough for him cause his skull is thick and things take a long time to get through to his brain.  Whenever anyone says that something hurts, like 'dad, my knee hurts' or 'coach, my elbow hurts', I reflexively say every time...'your face is killing me.'  Every time.  So this Freshman kid complains about his elbow and I react as I always do, and he just looks at me.  I ask him, do you understand what I just said and then spent 5 minutes explaining the joke.  At the end of it, he says he gets it, but am still not sure he does.  That kid now comes up to me at every practice and gleefully tells me something hurts so I will comment on his face.  I have broken through with him and now he listens to the other stuff.  Like I said, it doesn't work with all of them, but you never know what will and you have to keep searching.

We got a bunch of new balls before the season and we have a bucket of old ones and one for the new balls.  After throwing, coach yells 'balls in the bucket' and then adds that clean balls in the clean ball bucket and dirty balls in the dirty ball bucket.  In the pile of kids putting them away I said, 'that was my nickname in high school'.  One of the kids says what was that coach, to which I say 'Dirty Balls'.  One of the kids nearby, one that I have coached for 3-4 years now and rarely ever have gotten a reaction from, nearly split a gut cause most teenage boys, and men of all ages, like a good balls joke. That kid is now talking to me like we are related.  There ain't nothing like baseball

February 6th, 2022

It was Chinese New Year week.  We have traditionally been on the road this week and so never noticed a couple of things.  Saw a a ton of families going for walks together for instance.  In almost all cases, dad looks more miserable than the kids.  And Betty did all kinds of unusual things, like doing the laundry.  We were talking about it with some people and I pointed out how unusual it was for her to voluntarily strip the bed and do the sheets as that is my thing, and she mentioned a time when The Boy was of a certain age and she said I told her not to pick up his socks in his room with the implication that he would have pleasured himself with/on them.  I said that could never have happened as she would never pick up the kids dirty clothes   A new gag I've been putting in rotation is that Betty says that when covid is over, she wants me to take her somewhere she's never been before and I reply, 'How about the kitchen?'.   Thanks Henny Youngman...

We had a few get togethers at our place this week.  A quiet hot pot with another couple on New Year's Day.  On day 3 of CNY, Betty had her local relatives over with Uncle Larry doing the heavy lifting in the kitchen.  Pretty big spread and the obligatory guzzling of all the whisky.

Yours truly makes a cameo as wine steward

Baseball tryouts begin on Monday.  Covid has so far been kept in check so we are starting as planned.  To celebrate, we hosted the baseball and softball coaching staffs (and their significant others) for a night of baseball related BS

A funny group that would likely never get together if it wasn't for the love of the game.  We were chatting about some of the prospects and got to break out one of my new sayings...there are three types of ball players.  Ones that make things happen, ones that watch things happen, and those that wonder what just happened.

Maybe it is because we haven't left town for ages, but this winter feels like it has been consistently colder for longer than any other time we've been here.  Not a complaint cause colder here is like late September in Seattle so love it, I just want to document it for scientific purposes and to also note I don't constantly complain about the weather.

Knees have been pretty good.  I notice them when I get up for a few steps, and there is some isolated pain from time to time, but they are bending great and can walk for miles and barely feel them.  What is very concerning is my ankle has been bugging me something fierce...the ankle that had been fused in 2004.  I figured there would be some weird aches from using muscles that I had been avoiding as I limped around, but this ankle thing is very worrisome.  The work that needed to be done on that ankle was pretty severe.  I jumped down a handful of steps in front of my dorm in 1984 and cracked my navicular bone.  It was different times...I don't think I took the doctors's advice seriously and was heavily self-sedating myself, and it never healed properly.  It didn't really bother me until I had ACL surgery in 2000-and something on that leg, and during that rehab it really started acting up.  In a post-ACL follow-up visit to the doctor, I was complaining about it and they took a quick X-ray, and when the doctor looked at it he said "were you in a serious car accident or something?"  

I then got with a foot doctor who said that the bone had fragmented and pieces were all over, and the way to fix it was by taking marrow out of my hip and fusing the joint.  3 days in the hospital in the worst pain I've ever had, ruthless months of rehab and staying off of it, but all good ever since...until now.  I really hope it is just an adjustment to a new way of walking and not another debilitating structural issue cause I was hoping to walk normal for a while.  Hopefully, this is the last I'll post about that.

In family matters, B-doll got into the Sorority she targeted.  Kappa Delta.  Their house sounds way cleaner than The Boy's flea/feces ridden frat house.  While that was a shithole, he did have a decent experience with frat life and has a bunch of friends that were made from that.  We hope that B-doll has a similar, but cleaner time with hers.  

Lastly for today, this movement against Joe Rogan doesn't feel right to me.  Neil Young isn't a shy guy...why not go on the podcast and tell him what you think?  Anytime you mess with the 1st Amendment, I get uneasy.  I listen to a a ton of podcasts but have never caught his.  I have heard him on stuff and seen him for years on shows and things, and he just seems like a dumb ass dude bro.  He even openly cops to that moniker.  So just because other DADB's think he has some good thoughts, we should take him down?  It isn't gonna enlighten any of them.  Don't we have more important fish to fry?