Labor Day weekend recap

I hope everyone had a great three day weekend. I'll keep this post (relatively) short because I've got some catching up to do as a result of the extra day off. But on Saturday morning, DAUGHTER had her soccer practice and from there we hit the pool for a while. Then around 3pm we went over to our block party/pig picking. The three families that host this annual event already had the tents and the chairs out, and the pig had been on the grill since 6am. There was also an inflatable bounce house on one of the front lawns for the kids, and a horseshoe pit in the back for the annual block party bragging rights. Finally there were some poker tables inside for late night gaming for those who stayed sober.





This year, a few other notherners on my block and I volunteered to take a two hour shift on the grill with the pig. And this year will be the only year they let us "Damn Yankees" near the pig. We managed to char the head of the pig almost completely off. Thankfully the rest of the pig was fine and turned out to be the best pulled pork I have ever tasted. Still, apparantly we ruined the presentation. Judge for yourself:




After we were done eating, they had a couple of pinatas for the kids, and then the horseshoe tournament broke out. I partnered up with a guy that lived two doors down from me, and it was the first year that either of us participated. As such, neither of us realized just how serious an event this was. There were 15 teams entered and since it takes 16 to make a complete bracket, there was a major discussion about which team got the first round bye. One contingent said the "defending champs" should get it. That contingent just so happened to be the defending champs and they got quickly put down. I suggested that the team of young girls be given the free pass, but surprisingly that was equally unpopular: "Why should they get any special treatment?" (Wow.) Finally it was decided to draw the name from a hat. And so off we went. Literally. Neither my partner or I had ever played horseshoes competitively before. ("Damn Yankees") and we got eliminated by quite a large margin in the first round. Anyway, the rest of the party was a blast and went well into the night.




On Sunday, not much happened. We all slept in quite a bit. It was the first time in about three years that I remember waking up with a bit of a hangover. Since I didn't drink much, this was a bit of a surprise. I have got to stop drinking shitty party beer and start bringing my own. Anyway, once we got up and moving, DAUGHTER had a friend come over and they had a sleepover.

Then yesterday we spent a good part of the afternoon at the pool and tested out my new camera underwater. Not too bad. These are low rez pictures I shrunk down for this site. There were many more pictures of much higher quality that I decided not to share since the girls hated how the camera caught the boogers floating out of their noses. Anyway here's DAUGHTER and her friend:






Then after her friend went home, DAUGHTER had another soccer practice and we ended up scrimmaging against another U10 girls team. We lost 2-0 but I saw a lot of good things from our girls. Our mistakes were all correctable, and the girls seemed to realize that. They realized that the other team wasn't made up of "better players", but instead they just played better. As soon as it was over my girls were asking when we could play them again. It was good to see that "get back to it" attitude instead of a lot of hung heads because we lost. I told them that we get a chance for a rematch on Saturday, our first real game of the season. We'll see how that goes...

And that was our weekend. Hope you all had fun too.