and finally ...

yeah, west virginia looked pretty good yesterday. (and not just in football.) hope this is just a taste of things to come.



(so this gives me three more posts for the month. seven. more respectable, right?)

road trip

two hours outside fort chiswell, va. the last snakebit thing on the trip.

still recovering and fading fast from about 30 hours on the road over three days. will try to hit the highlights.

trip began inauspiciously:

• major communications problem with kris kept us in the kroger store parking lot for half an hour while she completed a three-minute errand as we were supposed to leave town. (i parked instead of circling lot for a change and texted her our location; unfortunately, she did not have her phone on her.)
• discovered the memory stick i loaded with tunes from six oldies road trip cds i burned for mom and dad were saved as quicktime files instead of mp3s, making them unreadable to the audio system in dad's yukon. (amazing that i'm writing about a truck's onboard computer. we are living in the future.)
• after switching the car seats over, loading the truck, treating the windshield and getting ready to head out, find the battery has died. it also won't take a jump start. luckily, aaa had a wrecker over in less than an hour and was able to boost it.
• finally, we hit the mother of traffic snarls near fort chiswell. spent about two hours moving maybe three feet at a time for three miles. never did learn what caused the backup as the entirety dissipated like some weird car clot at what i imagined the bottleneck was on the junction headed to charlotte. (hit a lesser snarl on its outskirts that only slowed to a crawl rather than a standstill.)

interstate 77 was pretty clogged all the way down to i-26, and even then things were hairy. oddly enough, once we hit i-95, traffic was minimal. (it being sometime after 10-11 p.m. probably helped. the roads were the closest thing to clear that one could imagine from then until we arrived at 4:03 a.m.)

the most amazing part there and back was that the babies, who had nightmarish trips the past two years, were better than gold. that they kept it together even after the crawl past fort chiswell with the trip barely started and complained of nothing more than the occasional leg cramp for the next 14 hours was nothing short of miraculous. (seriously — thank you, Lord, and ss. christopher, joseph and mary and margaret-mary.)

ride 'em, cowgirl.

both of them were excited for the trip and to see their cousins. the girl has made extraordinary strides in not being so stand-offish and shy around them. (still not so much with her boy cousins, who haven't yet learned the art of subtlety.) she ducks behind daddy when she arrives, but it's not too long before she ends up like she does above.

vogue.

the boy is becoming more himself. auntie joy says she loves listening to him talk. if i could describe it, i'd say he talks in the hyper-expressiveness of a character in a children's educational cartoon series. kris and i were both happiest to find that he took our orders for a good visit to heart: listen to mommy and daddy; no acting or talking like a baby, which he seems to think is funny or endearing, which it is — for about 30 seconds, then it becomes kinda imbecilic; and no pouting. the last was most important; he took admonishments in stride and stopped bad behaviors when told. crucial stuff when a boy is amped on the excitement of the trip and seeing his cousins — and knowing santa is just around the corner.

dad and i both took naps at the hotel after dropping off mom, kris and the kids. must've slept a solid two hours before we had to head back to pj's. this was one of those rare occasions where i hadn't snacked all day before the big meal, so i was hungry enough to eat everything: turkey, ham, two kinds of stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, cranberry sauce, garlic twist rolls and butternut squash ravioli. plus pecan pie and oatmeal cake. seriously good eats.

last day — or next day — after noshing on leftovers for lunch, dropped off kids at the house, dropped off mom at the outlet mall across from the hotel and took another nap before the drive back. another solid two hours. then the long goodbye and the trip home.

special thanks to the mcdonald's restaurants of rock hill, s.c., palm bay, fla., and beckley, w.va., btw, for keeping us fed on the drives down and back. good service and fine happy meal prizes for the kids. (the boy ate almost all the meat in his burgers for both his suppers, which helped keep his belly full.)

side notes:

• watched maybe four dvds — all on the way down — the whole trip. otherwise managed to play with activities kris brought.
• super, super pleased to find that xm/sirius satellite radio continued its thanksgiving tradition of offering a free weekend of service. appreciated the christmas channel (@siriusxmholly) for providing trans-generational music that i could leave dad to listen to on his driving shifts.
• the sirius 70s station was particularly helpful to while away the miles. hit a couple of sweet spots on drive down and back where i didn't have to change the station for the better part of an hour when the played back to back chicago, earth wind and fire, dire straits, queen, firefall, player, carpenters, barry manilow, etc. it was 70s am radio at its best.

thanks to the Lord for our time together and the blessings our family shared to be together. for these and many other blessings, amen and amen.

holy crap, have i been that busy?

me and junior at the wvu-kansas state game.

just four posts for the month. thursday night ballgame, working solo the sunday after, a two-day work week, and the lightning thanksgiving visit. so i missed last sunday. and no west virginia u football recap. so, well, maybe just off by a few. plus, wrote a lot the past couple of months, so it just seems like a long time since i posted.

anyway, this is the best thing that happened that night. after a three-game losing streak with a damaged quarterback, we insert the junior college transfer. he sure lit things up, which ultimately proved too little too late, but sure showed a promise of things to come.

a pretty good day

@WVSO little guy got a real charge out of the paul bunyan and friends program. excellent cast of singers & musicians. pic.twitter.com/fbYBW33rHm
— some asian guy (@grumpnet) November 15, 2014

as i've gotten older, i've learned to appreciate days that are above average — not filled with spikes of spectacular or a steady rise building to crescendo, but a buoyant and constant sense of pleasant surprises, lucky breaks and overall contentment.

this was one of those days.

familiar territory

On this date 20 year ago, Republicans won control of both the House and the Senate in the 1994 Midterm elections. pic.twitter.com/T9ulpCLymi
— Charles Apple (@charlesapple) November 8, 2014

so my mountaineers lost today — overwhelmed by big texas beef and unable to recover in time. so not a lot of occasion to mull over recaps, boxscores and analyses.

couple that with a hard election week and all that entailed and you can see why i finally retreated to the familiar confines of my comfort medium, the romantic comedy.

watched "sleepless in seattle" for the first time maybe since we got married or at least had kids. went down real easy.

found myself examining the dynamic between the father and his young son in a way that i didn't before. must've been the boy's bright, tousle-hairedness that reminded me of my own boy.

trying to hold on to the smallness of him.

amazing it's been more than 20 years since it came out. couple that with the turnover not only in the u.s. senate but the w.va. statehouse, and i find my mind treading familiar territory indeed.

foolish behaviour

state of the children, november 2014.

just marveled this morning that we'd quietly gone without major behavioral issues like tantrums or violent outburst from the boy for a while. or at least not worth writing about.

then, tired, gluten-fed preschooler blows up at bedtime. at bedtime! luckily, things did not escalate and everyone returned to ground state.

(mama had been away all day and he was stalling from going to bed after staving off the frustration of being unable to position a ramp so as not to fall down on one of his precariously built vehicle courses. so tired he was after being such an exemplary boy all day.)

anyway, daddy was tired and mommy was tired and everyone just needed to go to sleep. or at least lie down. (amazingly, after a few minutes for everyone to cool off, he seemed to be contrite and apologetic, even go so far as to explain to his mother that he was so tired when she went in to try a goodnight do-over.)

so here we are. hope i don't have to log one of these for a long time — if ever.

(and the girl, btw, has belatedly entered her terrible twos. so far it's pouting and oversensitivity and whining and crying at the drop of a hat. otherwise, she's as sweet and loving as ever.)

facing the music

last game of the season for me and the boy.

while raising children has gone a long way to putting perspective in terms of where i place my emotional capital when following west virginia university sports, it doesn't completely take away the sting of losing, especially the heartbreaking kind, like this weekend's game against texas christian, which slipped through our fingers.

our previous defeats to alabama and oklahoma more than ever seem like "good losses," that is, while not wins, we beat expectations and could glean many positives from the experience. i was eager to see what others thought of us, seeking "affirmation, not information" as colin cowherd would say.

this game, on the other hand, i can't even bring myself to read accounts two days after the fact or even second day analysis pieces. it's taken me this long to even get to thinking about it. (and i wouldn't even be doing that if not for this lovely bout of insomnia.) so i'm finally doing it.

as in our previous setbacks this season, we had nothing to be ashamed of by way of play or preparation. and it took the best effort by the best defense in the country to force us into mistakes by harassing and rattling our quarterback and separating our backs and receivers from the ball. simply put, the horned frogs were the better team.

therein lies the heartbreak. we had this better team on the ropes — more like pinned than pummeled, frankly, less through sheer physical play as brilliant defensive schemes and heads-up execution. but a lapse, a mere moment of confusion, was opening enough for an escape and reversal, changing a slight lead into the slimmest of margins for defeat.

i suspect that being so tantalizingly close to adding another top 10 notch on our belt is what had most fans so upset. we were four seconds away from scoring the upset before it was kicked from our grasp. victory was so close we could taste it; now the whole affair leaves a bad taste in our mouths.

again, however, we can still glean positives: we have a defense. (and in the coming years, if staffing remains the same, it will be even deeper and more experienced. you think about that.) we still have a good offense. we are relatively healthy. (knock wood.) and ... we likely may not face a better opposing defense the rest of this season.

despite everything, all my hopes for the year are actually coming true. we are bouncing back from the past few years in a big, big way. we look good, even when we lose. i can only see positives for the future of the program. i'll go ahead and say it: things look bright.

so i'll close with something good: