• Bite of the bug

    In the beginning there were local sports, and they were occasionally good. Home teams present and past; Bucs, Pats, Bruins, and Bosox held occasional sway with my attention. Home teams past were particularly prominent as there was but one home team present; as were the high scoring affairs: namely football, owing to my impatient nature.

    Ah, but things change: home team became home teams, and youthful impatience gave way to a mature appreciation of the sweet science of sport. Rays and Lightning, despite their losing ways, supplanted Bruins and Bosox… just as the lower scoring affairs gained more equal footing with almighty Football.

    Now I find myself tracking the progress of prospects, reading box scores, and sitting through whole games. Not every game mind you – they play almost every night for heaven’s sake! But watching some is more than none, and reading up on box scores and prospects is more than the occasional article in the paper.

    Look at me: mature sports fan.

    As the home teams have taken their rightful place among my allegiances, I have found other changes: tenuous ties of place becoming roots of home… my sense of self shifting from northern transplant to… something else. Florida may be a place without a “sense of there,” but it isn’t exactly the south either; too many people from elsewhere, bringing their “there” here for geography alone to define my home. The home team is here, not there, and it can’t be the home team unless this is home; so whether or not outsiders or fellow transplants find a sense of “there” here, in my own way I have found “here” here, and I can finally say *I* am home.

    Go Rays!

  • Good news

    There is little I find relaxing about a summer vacation in Florida. What about Central Florida theme parks? Here’s a theme for you: dehydration, heat exhaustion, and sun stroke.

    So here are my first three responses to the proposed weekend trip to Orlando that just passed:
    1. “No.”
    2. “Please don’t make me go.”
    3. “Ah… um… (Sigh)… fine.”

    Now here’s where the whole thing gets a little weird. Despite years of experience suggesting the contrary, I had a decent time. This was due largely to much of the Kennedy Space Center being enclosed and air conditioned. Although we spent A LOT more money than we anticipated, I felt good knowing that the folks at NASA seem to be putting that money to use keeping up and expanding the visitor facilities. Perhaps the biggest surprise was finding the old Saturn V rocket still on display… but indoors… in a newly built facility showcasing the Apollo missions. Where else can a space buff eat pizza underneath the third stage of a moon rocket? I’m telling you right now, that all by itself was worth it. Everything else: the walk-thru of the International Space Station assembly building (seeing the next pieces to go up being worked on), the tour of the launch facilities, touching a moon rock, seeing the newly recovered Liberty Bell 7, watching an AWESOME 3-D IMAX movie about the Apollo missions – that was gravy. I’ve been to Kennedy several times, and before this weekend I never would have said there was too much to see in one day. No more. We barely had enough time to go on one tour, eat lunch and see one of the IMAX movies. Left unseen was three quarters of the original visitor’s center and all of the Astronaut Hall of Fame (which was included in our admission fee).

    It was one of the few times as an adult that I left a Central Florida attraction not feeling satiated. You don’t catch me being overly enthusiastic very often, so when I say: “I was blown away,” you know it must have been good.

  • PDA with a rep

    I called a meeting today and whipped out my trusty Palm OS device. In response someone said, “uh oh, this must be serious, John’s got his PDA out.”

    I had no idea my PDA inspired so much fear.