0 Event Review - Speech Meet

I once competed in a speech meet, way back when I was in seventh grade. My only category was poetry - I recited 'Casey at the Bat' and won first place, which was, up to that point, my biggest accomplishment yet. I wish I had done something cooler, like Hamlet or maybe Letters to Penthouse, but whatever. Hindsight's 20-20, I guess.

So when my daughter told me she was in a speech meet, I was thrilled. She is an incredible student - far better than I ever was - and she's sharp as a tack, too. She was in two events, storytelling and debate. Neither of us could be bothered to care a lot about storytelling - her speech coach made her sign up, and she couldn't have cared less. But we were both kind of stoked about debate. She wants to be a wealthy lawyer, and I think she's got the chops. She sure as hell knows how to argue with me.

Sadly, speech meets for junior high kids don't seem to be a very big deal in my city. The meet was at a local high school, and was primarily run by the high school debate team. If these debaters are the upcoming politicians and attorneys for our great nation, then God help us all, because these were some stupid, stupid kids. For one thing, they were all wearing the debate team shirts, which were seriously retarded garments. They had a top five list on the back, for crying out loud. I have an idea that's way more original - you could make a shirt that says, 'Got Debate?' on the front, and on the back it could say, 'Debating: Priceless'. Freaking ignorant nerds. Someone ought to beat them with a rubber mallet just for wearing those stupid shirts.

For the first debate challenge, my daughter faced off against a girl who was not only half an hour late, but was also thoroughly unprepared. The entire thing took five minutes, because the other girl (who told the judge she memorized her case) forgot her case. Total deer-in-the-headlights blank. So my daughter, who spent three weeks writing cases, walks away with almost no points. Apparently, debate is unlike sports, where a win is a win - if you clobber the other team 95-0, you still get to put it in the win column. In debate, however, if the other person gives up and walks away, you get only a little bit of win. This came back to make me more angry later in the day.

The second challenge was between my daughter and one of her classmates. In this particular debate, the judge ended the entire session one round early, and then proceeded to tell both contestants that they left off their closing remarks. Well, no kidding, Whiz Kid, you cut them off before they were done. My daughter, however, kicked ass (metaphorically - it's debate, not kickboxing), closing remarks notwithstanding.

The third challenge was even more of a debacle. In this case, the other kid's main argument against my daughter's intensely persuasive contentions was to say, 'yeah, like what?' Sadly, it was at the end of this particular debate that my intestinal difficulty reared its ugly head, and I was forced to make haste to a public restroom at a public high school and was not able to watch my daughter complete the humiliation of the uninspired mama's boy. I was there long enough to note that the judge for this round cut it even shorter than the last one, just not long enough to see the dorky loser boy start crying.

As if to make a bad situation even worse, my daughter (who completely destroyed her opposition in three out of three matches) did not make the semifinals. Why? Because she did not get enough points against the first opponent. Both of her other opponents, on the other hand, did make the semifinals, because my daughter ran them so hard that they were given points for continuing to attempt to counter her brilliant, unrelenting logic (despite failing completely). So to sum up, my daughter prepared for three weeks, executed her debate skills with the brilliance of a military tactician, and two of the three people with whom she mopped classroom floors went on, and she did not.

I can only hope that the debate team process improves as my daughter gets older. As it stands now, I could not be any less impressed. I know that my daughter could rock your face off in a debate - as I said, she does it to me all the time. I'm not just saying this because she's my kid (though that is a completely sufficient reason). If she was a bonehead, I would tell you, because it would be funny. No, she's a damned brilliant kid, and it makes me sick that she wasted her efforts on such a complete circus sideshow.

In fact, that gives me an idea for the next speech meet. Instead of wearing those dumb-ass t-shirts, the high school debate team could wear round red noses and huge shoes, and when they arrive at the school, they could all pile out of a VW Bug. Instead of crappy nachos and dry pizza, the cafeteria could sell peanuts and cotton candy. Because while watching my daughter destroy her competition in a contest of genius was one of the proudest moments I've had in a long time, the debate team at that high school was a circus.

If you get the chance to attend a debate contest when your kid is in high school or college, I'm betting it would be very cool. But if your kid is in junior high, just drop her off and then go spend the day at the batting cages. They serve hot dogs there, too.

Summary

Pros:
Massive pride in watching your kid kick ass
Bonding with your spawn

Cons:
High school debate teams should be competing, not judging

Oh, yeah, one more note - my daughter took third in storytelling.

0 Event Review - Model Train Show

If you want something done right, hire a nerd.

I know that's not the way the saying really goes, but let's face it, for most things, you couldn't do them yourself anyway. If you want your computer fixed properly, you should almost certainly not do it yourself. If you want someone to tell you exactly how much equity you have in your home based on current appraisal value and time value of money, you should probably not try to figure that out on the calculator that came with your cell phone.

And if you want to set up a toy train display that will bring in crowds and impress everyone, you should not leave that to the local craft club that meets at the rotary club on Tuesday nights after the crochet class leaves. Unfortunately, if you go see the trains at the mall, that's what you're likely to see.

Christmas, that most despised and odious time of year, brings out many horrible things, like rude shoppers, crappy parking, and repeated airings of 'Feliz Navidad.' But it does have a great benefit - people break out model train dioramas left and right. These run the gamut from 'holy crap, that crane is actually unloading the cars!' to 'why is that guy's head bigger than the front window of the store next to him?' And of course, Christmas brings out the uninspired, unoriginal, profiteering bastards who put less time into actually creating the spectacle than they put into marketing it for ten-year-olds and hiring moody teenagers to sell tickets.

The mall shows that get all the publicity are frequently publicized by local news stations, who are giddy to tell people about the pathetic train shows because the marketing people are giving a sliver of the money to some nationally known charity that buys hats for bald kids while they're on chemo. If you're trying to decide if the train show is worthwhile, avoid any affiliation with Marines at Ronald MacDonald's Toy Box Christmas Tree. If you see those big-name charities, it's a sure bet the trains will suck.

If you are interested in seeing some great train displays (and I am - I once saw a scale model of the French Quarter that filled a large display hall, and I spent two hours looking in the windows and checking out the inch-tall street walkers), then you need to find nerds. Look for local model train clubs. Especially around this time of the year, these enthusiasts shake off their mantle of secrecy and open their doors to allow the unwashed masses to walk slowly past their thousands of hours of hard work, allowing their preschool children to lean on the plastic retaining walls and pull parts off the scenery. This, of course, causes incredible consternation among the train modelers, but if you're naive enough to think that you can invite seven hundred people to look at your painstaking effort and carefully constructed dioramas and none of them would be rude enough to just break your crap, then you're high. Any place you put more than ten people, someone is a douche bag.

Still and all, if you want to see some examples of careful, cautious, devoted model-train nerdery, you simply cannot beat an enthusiast's club for dedication and attention to detail. Avoid the mall trains entirely - they seem to think that they've built a whole scene if they have a ceramic old man with his dog next to a model car that would bruise his kneecaps if it hit him in a high-speed chase, and put them both next to a caboose built completely from cheap Chinese plastic, decorated with the names of whichever loser family decided to give ten bucks to Angels of Christmas so that every loser stupid enough to get duped into a six-dollar ticket could see that they were an upright and holy family. The mall train sets have no sense of scale. They lack the obsession over detail that marks the true nerd, and thus are less than merely adequate.

On the other hand, if you can handle having very uptight hobbyists staring down their noses at you and slapping the hands of every street urchin who wants to drop his gum into the tiny model creek, you should treat yourself to a real train show. And now is the perfect time of year to do it - especially if you can go while everyone else is at the mall.

0 Event Review - Paintball

I am in so much pain.

My son is a teenager, and like any other healthy, red-blooded American adolescent boy, he has an unhealthy fascination with firearms (and matches, but that's a different article completely). He grew up shooting tin cans with his grandfather, and graduated to AirSoft when he hit early puberty. Now that he's taller than most adults, he has decided to upgrade once again. So he wore me down, weekend after weekend, until I agreed to take him to play paintball.

For those of you who don't know about paintball, this is a game where you pretend you are the least bit athletic, and so you run halfway down a field covered with obstacles until a boy who has not yet developed hair on his testicles shoots you with a gun that leaves a huge purple welt on the fleshy part of your belly (and in my case, that leaves a fair amount of targetable area). Then you go to the sideline and watch for five minutes, then you do it again. After a few hours, you will be covered in bruises and welts, your legs will be so wobbly that you will be unable to stand, and you will smell like a wild coyote covered in rancid vegetable oil.

It might seem like I didn't enjoy myself, but I did have a very good time, and now I have to figure out how to do it again (it was expensive, and I don't own any equipment, and I really hate those damned pubescent acne-magnets who show up with their own guns and armored jackets that make it look like they've been sponsored like NASCAR drivers). My kid was crazy about it, which is no surprise, because as I may have mentioned, he likes guns. He got to shoot a lot of people. He is much faster than I am.

I think I would have had much more fun if the park had been organized a little better. For instance, the fields we played were kind of small. In one or two cases, you could actually shoot from one side to the other. For another thing, the only game we played was straight-up deathmatch, where you all go out there and shoot each other until one team is all gone. I wanted to play Capture the Flag, or King of the Hill, or some other game mode invented by kids in the 1950s and stolen by Halo.

Also, beware of parks that don't speed check their guns. The guns we had were so underpowered that you couldn't hit the same place twice, but some hot-shot kids showed up with ammo belts and guns that cost more than a used motorcycle, and their weapons were so over-pressurized that the little plastic bullets could almost send the paint right through a wood plank. Forget about the amount of pain you receive if one of those bullets actually hits you - you may be in a coma for a while. The park should have clocked their weapons to make sure they weren't causing lasting harm to fifth-graders, but since the park was staffed mostly with high-school dropouts and college stoners, they weren't exactly operating on a 'safety first' platform.

Ultimately, I think it would be best to go with a group. It would be fun to plan your attacks, set up screens and flanks and hand signals, and get to gloat furiously when you shoot your buddy in the neck. It's so much more fun to talk trash after a game if you're friends with the guy who scored that hit on your crotch that made you glad you wore a cup. Plus, this should really be approached in a manner similar to playing a board game. You should plan your moves, position your key players, and practice careful and flexible strategy. Paintball should be played as if it were live-action HeroScape, and you just can't do that when you don't even know the names of the burnouts who showed up with guns that are only slightly less painful than actual bullets.

But even if you go to a place like the one we visited, where you check out your gear from a shack that looks like it might have been stolen from the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and where there are huge piles of discarded gun barrels in drifts behind the buildings, you can still have a really good time. It's obviously fun to shoot people - that goes without saying. I shot a little kid at a distance great enough that I'm surprised the paint pellet broke, and I shot a really cute girl right in the eye of her facemask, so that she was half blind as she stumbled off the course. That was fun. But even more fun was circling around, dodging behind stuff, calling for help and organizing flanking maneuvers that allowed a couple of scrappy kids and one slightly tubby old man to take out a couple of those wannabe-pro punks. Those gun nerds might have talked crap up until then, but once two of them got sniped by a little dude shorter than an Ewok hiding behind a spare tire, they shut up for a while. It's no fun having to tell your elite paintball buddies wearing armored jumpsuits that you got completely outmatched by a winded, middle-aged man and his cohort in the SpongeBob sweatshirt.

I am seriously in pain. Not just sore - I have some welts and bruises that aren't going to heal in the next few days. Every muscle in my entire body is aching, and reminding me that the most strenuous activity for which I am actually fit is an afternoon nap, and spending three hours crouching, diving, climbing and sprinting is way outside my comfort zone. Yet I would love to put together a small local league, made up of friends who have as little experience and physical conditioning as I do, and play a good, fun game about one Saturday a month.

And next time, it will be someone else who is in so much pain. And, probably, me too.

0 Event Review - Swimming Pool

Buying a swimming pool is like getting a part-time job, except that you have to pay to be there.

My wife and daughter have been pestering me to buy an above-ground pool for our back yard since the beginning of summer. Admittedly, it was a hot summer (though last summer was WAY worse), but I resisted. I know having a pool is a lot of work. I know it's hard to keep it from getting murky. I know it drains money like having a hole in your pocket. So all summer, I avoided buying a pool.

And then, the weekend before Labor Day, we found a huge pool at an insane discount on closeout at Target. And even though I was opposed to owning a pool on general principle, I broke down and bought it, because I have absolutely no will of any kind.

The first awesome part of buying an above-ground pool is having to drive it around until you can unload it. Getting the damned thing out of the car is an incredible amount of work, when you get one that is as big as the one we got. It weighed more than most people, and was ludicrously bulky, so I did what any sane parent does and made my kid get it out of the car. But it was so damned heavy that I had to help, and so managed to drop it on my foot. This was about as much fun as dropping a washing machine on my foot, except that washing machines are not as heavy.

Then we had to put it together. The pool came with an instructional video in which two beautiful people with a beautiful lawn that is perfectly level assemble the pool in three minutes flat and have absolutely no problems of any kind. These people were either magical creatures from a novel written for young adults, or they were lying. It is incredibly hard to assemble an above-ground pool. I recommend you hire someone to do it for you, so that you can drink lemonade on the porch and give life-affirming tips.

I did not do that. Instead, I spent my entire Labor Day weekend digging the yard flat, laying out the tarp, catching the tarp when the wind blew it away, cleaning the dirt out of my underpants where the flying tarp threw it, then placing bricks on the tarp to hold it down. Oh, and I put together the pool. Then I put water in it.

The pool promptly sank into the ground. It turns out, 15,000 gallons of water is heavy enough to dig straight down into Texas soil, even with the drought we've been enjoying turning the ground into concrete. And since some parts sank more than others, the pool was so far out of balance that I couldn't swim in it. So I drained it and started over.

After placing bricks under the legs of the pool and filling it again, I was finally able to swim. I love swimming. I grew up in California, and used to spend my entire summer at the beach. I'm having so much fun that I almost don't mind all the money I spent buying my pool, filling my pool, draining my pool, then filling my pool again. Almost, but not quite. Because I had to swim alone.

See, the pool ladder is so rickety that my wife cannot get into the pool. She tore all the ligaments in her leg a few years ago, and can't turn her knee. And since the ladder is so flimsy and narrow, she can't do the acrobatics necessary to flip around at the apex. Sure, she could have just allowed herself to fall into the pool once she was at the top, but that solution would not have worked in the case of exiting the pool, and so once she was in there, I would have had to bring her meals out to her.

So I got to spend more money. This time on lumber, which I used to build a proper wooden staircase level with the top of the pool, complete with broad steps and hand rails. Now my wife and I are enjoying swimming together, and having a lovely time.

Except that now the water is getting a little cloudy. I think I need to add more chlorine, or balance the bromide, or possibly I need a stronger pump. I don't know for sure. If you'll excuse me, I need to go spend more money and time solving yet another problem with my pool.

I'm sure I'll get this right, sooner or later. Of course, by the time I do, it will be winter. Anyone know how you winterize an above-ground pool?

0 Event Review - Bed & Breakfast

I've been married a while now. It's eighteen years this coming Saturday, and we wanted to spend the night at a bed & breakfast nearby. The problem was that there was a huge wedding party at the place we wanted to go, so we went a week early. Which was last night.

In case you're completely unaware of, well, anything, a bed & breakfast is like a hotel, except usually they're just somebody's house and they let you sleep upstairs. Breakfast is generally assumed to be included (thus the name), and it's better than when you stay at the Motel 6 and they have gross donuts in the lobby. The rooms are more luxuriously appointed, and the idea is that your stay feels more personalized.

Other than that, though, you're pretty much just in a hotel.

We've actually been staying at bed & breakfast places for a while. We've checked out a few, from the place way out in the middle of No Place, Texas to the gated compound in the middle of the big city. We have started to figure out the things about a B&B that make it really appealing, and the things that make you just kind of wish you had stayed at the Hilton.
There are lots of features you might want out of a good B&B. The bed is important - it needs to be big and comfy, because let's face it, that's in the name. If the bed sucks, you're just showing up for breakfast. You're there because you need some time away from the kids, the pets, the bill collectors, the probation officers, and the in-laws (you may not have all those things. I'm just covering the bases) and your escape should include a really good night's sleep.

Another important reason you go to a B&B is for the surroundings. The place we went last night is in the middle of the city, which we chose because we wanted to be close to our home, and because we wanted to be able to just run out real quick and grab dinner so that we could bring it back and watch a movie while we ate. The whole area is gated and fenced, so you've got some real privacy, and it was ridiculously quiet, especially considering we were in the middle of the city.

Usually, though, we prefer to make the two-hour drive to the place out in the boonies, where we can go hiking before dinner, hit the outdoor hot tub after dinner, and watch the sun come up from the spacious front porch before breakfast. This particularly awesome B&B has a llama that will follow you around when you go for a walk on the trails. It's incredibly cool to be trailed by a 7-foot-tall herbivore while you're on a nature walk.

You also want to consider the space you get. At last night's spot, we had a whole cottage, including a spacious dining room table which we used to play Glory to Rome and Mice & Mystics (yes, we're nerds - we went on our anniversary vacation and played games). At our preferred, country spot, the room doesn't have a table - just a bed and a bathtub - but there's a lovely common room where you can go downstairs and chat with the other people staying there.

Another neat feature of many B&B's is the communal breakfast. This is where they go, 'breakfast is at eight,' and everyone shows up, and you eat whatever they bring out and talk with the other guests before you all leave and never see each other again. There's a down-homey sense of community and, I don't know, humanity that feels like a lost art. This is another thing about staying in a B&B that makes it better than a hotel - in a hotel, if anyone talks to you in the lobby, you duck your head and put your hand on your pocket to make sure they don't steal your wallet.

Probably the thing that sets a B&B apart from a regular hotel more than anything else is the personal touch. There's no concierge or guest services attendant. There's just the lady that owns the house, and she'll see if she's got any aspirin, but would Tylenol be OK? If you forget your razor at a hotel, they can probably give you a cheap disposable. At a B&B, they'll tell you where to find the convenience store, and say hi to Jerome while you're in there, he's a friend of the family. Get sick at a hotel, they'll send room service with some Imodium. Get sick at a B&B, the guy who runs the place will whip you up some chicken soup and see if you need extra pillows, and here's a quilt my grandmother made, and should I call the family doctor?

I really like taking my wife to B&B's. We always have fun, and usually come back very relaxed and happy. Then we walk through the door and find out the cat pooped on the landing, the kids spilled orange soda on the kitchen floor and there's a roach stuck in the puddle, and they ate all the Pop-Tarts while we were gone.

So happy anniversary to me!