NCWVBC

I don't know if you knew this, but Jen coaches club volleyball out here in Washington. And she's really good at it. I know I might be coming off as an overproud husband, but everybody says she's a really good coach--even other really good coaches. It's amazing to see the improvement that her team has made from the beginning of the season to now. You can really see how much her team is learning and how much they're knowledge of volleyball is growing. As a teacher, I must say, I'm a little jealous. She could probably teach me a few things about teaching, from what I've seen.

In the process of being dragged to places like Kennewick and Yakima and Spokane, I've learned that there's nothing quite as shrill as a gym full of 50 excited teenage girls... and their parents... and refs with whistles. In fact, typically, I leave tournaments with a slight headache. :) And when I try to read in between matches, there's always the chance of getting pelted with a stray volleyball by teams warming up for the next match. And there are some 16-year-old girls who can hit the hell out of the ball. At least Kennewick, Yakima, and Spokane have Olive Gardens and Red Lobsters, neither of which we have here in Wenatchee. (My treat for getting dragged all across eastern Washington is usually some sort of seafood alfredo and, of course, time with Jen. And wine; we can't forget the wine.)

All that aside, it's fun to watch her team, especially when they're doing well. Today, just so happens to be one of those days. There's a tournament here in town, and her team has won its first two games so far. They're taking a break before they finish up their pool and begin bracket play this afternoon.

Between you and me, I get a little excited when the games are close and frustrated when her team loses a match they should've won. Just don't tell anyone I said that. :)

About NIU

When I flipped on CNN last week to learn more about the shooting at NIU, I found that I couldn't quite make the images on TV fit with my memories of Cole Hall. Everything was so familiar about the building and the campus. And, of course, that's no big surprise, since I grew up in and around DeKalb and went to NIU for my Bachelor's degree.

The building looked pretty much as I remembered it. A squat little building, barely one story tall, it only has two large lecture halls on the main floor, both with sloping concrete floors with two wide aisles and molded plastic chairs welded to utilitarian metal bars arranged into three sections. There are four doors, two small ones in front, one of which is a fire exit that leads outside, and two sets of double doors in back. The classrooms scream functionality, though the chairs were comfortable enough for me to sleep through Anthropology videos and Finite Math lectures. And outside, from helicoptor height, I saw the two flowerbeds that I helped to plant and maintain during the summers that I worked on NIU's grounds crew.

Everything fit, except for a parking lot full of ambulances and people, an otherwise blank slab of concrete with no buildings in the shot to serve as reference points. I couldn't make it work with my mental picture of the place. I knew that it had to be one of two parking lots. But whether it was because of renovations to the campus or because of the snow that erased the course of Williston Creek from view, I couldn't make up my mind which parking lot it was. Such a small and meaningless detail. But, for some reason, it caused me a lot of anxiety. Every time the news flashed back to that scene, I had a small panic attack because I couldn't pinpoint where those people were standing or where the ambulances were parked in a place that I had known my whole life.

Surely, it had to be the closer of the two parking lots, the one between Cole Hall and Founder's Library, the one right near Neptune and the Holmes Student Center. But the details didn't quite fit...

Well, it's over now, and it's good to know that my friends and family who live and work on or around the campus are all okay. But for closure's sake, I think I'll find myself, someday, standing in a parking lot reconciling my memories of the place with those TV images.

Favorite Promotional Deal Ever!

It's that time of year, again folks -- the time of year when Les Schwab Tires holds their "Free Beef" promotional deal. That's right. Buy a set of tires and get some steaks to bring home with you. Nothing says new tires like a nice juicy steak. Oh yeah. :) You have to admit, it's a pretty nifty promotion. Why would I buy tires anywhere else this time of year?

Caucusing for Obama

Having grown up in Illinois, a primary state, I'd never attended a caucus before. Since I moved to Washington and learned that my primary vote wouldn't count for anything, I decided to go check out the caucus process. And I wasn't alone. It seemed that there were people who had lived here for years, who had never been to a caucus and who also decided that this was the year to come check it out.

It was kind of interesting. And I was actually surprised to see just how many democrats there were in this part of the state and just how many chose to take their Saturday afternoons off to cast a vote and say "Aye" a couple of times. It will be interesting to hear what the actual turnout of voters was. Run smoothly the whole thing could've taken 20-30 minutes. Instead, it took our precinct about 2 hours.

So we gathered, all of these Democrats, in the high school cafeteria. We said the "Pledge of Allegiance" to a tiny flag held out in one hand by a man standing on a bench. We stood around lunch room tables, struggling to hear each other over the din of other precincts discussing their choices, repeating things over and over to an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid in the back. "No, you don't need to choose a candidate." "Yes, you can mark that you are undecided." "If you signed in on a sheet for a different precinct when you arrived, you need to find that sheet and cross yourself off." (I did that one... :P ) And then we cast our votes. Our precinct had 6 delegates to allocate between the 35 people who showed up. Four went to Obama; two went to Clinton. "Is it bad," I thought as I cast my vote, "that I needed to look at the sticker I'm wearing to know how to spell 'Barak'?"

There were a couple of highlights that had nothing to do with who chose who but with who showed up. In my precinct, there was a high school student, who must have just turned 18 or would turn 18 by the election date. She was voted as a delegate to the county caucus, and she was really excited about it. The other story is that I saw a woman there who recently became a citizen, and so she was voting in her first American election.

And while it did get a little boring, like when our windbag precinct chair read aloud to all 35 of us what the precinct should do if only one person showed up to caucus as tables around us cleared to go, I must admit that it was an interesting and a gratifying experience. It was much more gratifying, say, than the isolation of a voting booth, where you fill in a little box and wait for the results to be counted later that night.