Summer Wind-Up Winds Down

This has been a wind-down week for our summer sports.  Sisi had her final swim meet of the summer, and her best one yet.  She completed all her events without any goggle malfunctions and improved her 50 yard backstroke time by 5 seconds!  Her relay team for the 200 free style came in only 1 second too slow to qualify for the regional meet.  She was smiling "very bigly" as we left the Shirk Center last Sunday.  And on Wednesday she got 2 fifth place ribbons for her backstroke and breast stroke races.  She was very proud.

And she said the secret to keeping your goggles on in a race is to make them so tight that you feel like it's making you nearsighted.

J'dude's baseball season ended Thursday night with a difficult loss, 3-2, in game 3 of the playoffs.  He pitched a perfect 6th inning, but the damage had been done in the inning before.  It was a hard loss for him.  I think it might have been easier if it had been a big blow-out.  Seemed to make it worse that they could have beat this team on another day.

There's always next year.  And he had a great year, both with excellent pitching and his hitting really improved this year too.  In a day or two the dust will settle and he'll remember that.  

We watched a fascinating documentary last night on Netflix...The Battered Bastards of Baseball.  Bing Russell, known for his role as the sheriff on Bonanza, and also as Kurt Russell's father, started an independent minor league baseball team in Portland in the 70's.  The team was unconventional in a number of ways, and in spite of not having any major-league affiliation, came close to winning the A-level championship a few years.  It's worth a watch!