Matching Tracksuits

the girl

Home Game

Thursday 5 September 2024

It was a tough loss: the girls were up 15-7 in the first set only to lose 22-25. It’s tough to lose after having such a lead, and it’s tough to go back out for a second set. But they did. And the struggles continued, and the frustrated girls took another one on the chin: 21-25.

Then came the third set. They jumped out to a quick lead just like the first set, but this time, instead of losing it, they increased it, taking the third set 25-14. “See? That’s what we’re capable of,” they seemed to be saying.

Then came the fourth set, which the lost 16-25. It’s these ups and downs, these moments of brilliance followed by moments of — what? — that are so frustrating for this year’s team. They know what they’re capable of: they’re just not managing to maintain it consistently.

Yet through it all, there’s our L, always the upbeat cheerleader of the team, always celebrating even the smallest victory, always cheering up the team when they’re down, always believing in her team.

Soup

Wednesday 28 August 2024

Polish cuisine, in my experience, is centered around soups. I’m not a culinary expert or anything of the kind, so this is undoubtedly my personal preference coming to the fore: what has always caught my eye (and my tastebuds) in Polish cooking has been the soups.

Barszcz z uszkami is a treat beyond treats: we only have it once a year because the uszki are so time-consuming. It’s one of E’s favorites.

Żurek is such an odd-ball dish for Americans: soup made from a base of fermented rye flour? How weird. And how utterly delicious. It’s one of L’s favorites.

Ogorkowa? Pickle soup? “Get out!” was my first reaction. Who the hell makes soup out of pickles?! It’s absolutely perfect.

K likes most Polish soups, but she probably agrees with L and E that a simple rosół is the best. Babcia always makes it for us as our first dish in Poland, and a gentle, easy broth like that is the perfect thing after traveling.

And then there are the other: koperkowa, chłodnik, kapuśniak — the classics. But there are a couple of soups that stand above them all for me: flaczki (not because I love it so much — I do, but it’s not a favorite — but because I only get it in Poland: K absolutely is not a fan) and my hands-down favorite, kwaśnica. Not so much a Polish soup as a regional highlander soup.

We usually stick to soups in the winter and give them a break in the summer: having the stove on that long really warms up the house, and we want lighter meals in the summer. Except for rosół and koperkowa (none of us is really a chłodnik fan), the soups disappear.

Until the Girl asks K to fix that one soup — you know, with the potatoes and bacon bits.

And so we had for dinner a soup I have always thought of as a winter soup.

“We should do kwaśnica,” I will say some time in October or November.

“No, it’s not cold enough yet,” comes the reply.

But all our Girl has to do is ask for kwaśnica, and it can be 90 degrees outside, and K will not hesitate.

Volleyball

Tuesday 27 August 2024

The volleyball season hasn’t officially started yet: we still haven’t had any regional games, but we’ve been in a few tournaments. Tonight was our first home game. Our girls had a tough time of it the first two sets, losing by quite a margin due to silly errors. They pulled it together for the third set, but ended up losing it 23-25.

What impressed me about the Girl — other than a couple of monster hits she had — was how little she’s changed regarding volleyball. She’s always been the most enthusiastic cheerleader on her team. No matter how the game is going, she’s always up, always positive, always cheering and encouraging her teammates.

Everyone notices it; many have commented on it. More than her playing ability, I so admire that positivity.

Start of the Final Season

Thursday 15 August 2024

We’re not the powerhouse we were a couple of years ago when the girls took the state title. But the girls love the game nonetheless.

Saturday

Saturday 10 August 2024

I spent much of the morning working on school-related issues. My honors kids have turned in their first assignment (the famed/infamous 500-word introductory letter I assign the first day of school — “I didn’t know we’d have homework our first day,” some write), but it’s not for a grade (they don’t know that yet — I will apply it to extra credit later), so I read it as I would anything else: for information.

After lunch, which included (for me) a finely-sliced fresh habanero from a colleague at work, I started working to fix the pressure reduction valve that I had to take out a few weeks ago due to its leaking. I thought, “This should be a quick job. Just some Teflon tape to prevent leaks from the joint between the Shark Bite fitting and the valve itself…” but I knew it wouldn’t be that simple. It never is. Because the valve has 3/4 inch openings and our plumbing is 1/2 inch, I had to add a couple of couplings as well. And two of the four of the connections leaked when I put it all back together and turned on the water again. I turned off the water, pulled everything apart, and did it again, with more Teflon tape. The same thing. I tried a third time, putting an ungodly amount of tape. Finally, I got both of the leaks stopped and a third one started.

In the evening, when K and E went to mass to fulfill their Sunday obligation, I threw the bike on the rack and headed out for a quick loop at our favorite spot. It rained last night, but I didn’t quite realize how much.

Part of the boardwalk — K’s favorite part of the ride — washed out.

While I was gone, though, the Girl decided to bake. And my goodness, did she ever bake. Cupcakes topped with raspberry choclate ganache.

First Day 2024

Thursday 8 August 2024

Last year’s first day — exactly one year ago — was a little strange. In here, I wrote it was a good day, but that was not entirely true. My two on-level classes were, in a word, hyper. Several students were immediately chatty, immediately disruptive, and there were several more students who fed into that. There was a bit of attitude at times, and while I tamped it all down quicky, it didn’t seem to bode well for the rest of the year.

I was right.

Last year’s eighth grade was tough. We’d heard they’d be tough from sixth-grade teachers; we’d heard they’d drive us to insanity from seventh-grade teachers; and we saw the difference immediately.

Most eighth-grade classes are pretty calm at first. Most eighth-grade students are reasonably relaxed those first days, trying not to push boundaries, trying to make a decent first impression. Those kids (rather, many of them) did not do this. And it was a harbinger of things to come.

“This year’s kids are better,” everyone said. We met them all today, and I would have to agree: a night-and-day difference.

One less stress.

Our kids started school with the usual excitement: the Girl is starting her senior year (how in the world is that possible?) while the Boy is starting seventh grade (how in the world is that possible?).

“Enjoy your last first day of school,” I said to her, though that’s not quite accurate. She’s planning on going into bio-engineering, and she’s already accepting/planning on getting a doctorate, so she has plenty more first days of school.

As for the Boy? A snippet of a conversation from a couple of weeks ago says it all: “You have to pay for college?! You have to pay to sit in school?!”

Nationals

Thursday 1 August 2024

Today, the Girl competed in AAU Nationals in high jump for the first time in her life, but it’s the fourth or fifth time she’s competed in AAU Nationals in general. It’s just that before today, it had always been in volleyball.

Unlike volleyball, though, these nationals did not take place a day’s drive away. Instead, they were a mere three hours away.

It was also by far the biggest track meet she’s ever participated in: three high jump mats with over 50 girls participating.

Talking to her coach

How did she do? She’d say “Meh” if you asked her that question.

But she placed twelfth out of fifty-one girls.

And of course, no matter how it ended, we’re all proud of her and her accomplishments this year.

Dinner

Wednesday 31 July 2024

The Girl has decided she needs to be cooking more, to learn how to cook more than mac and cheese and quesadillas. She’s done chicken alfredo a couple of times, but when K asked L to cook dinner tonight and suggested she just make the tried-and-true chicken alfredo, the Girl demurred. She wanted to try something new. Something different.

Something Asian.

Long, long ago, when K and I were dating, she wanted to do the same thing — try something new, something different. She decided on something decidedly non-Polish, something from southern Europe. She chose lasagna.

Mother and daughter both chose pasta. They both had similar issues with the pasta. And in both cases, those they cooked for ate the dish with enthusiasm.

Saturday

Saturday 27 July 2024

K spoils us — she really does. We all get up to freshly made racuchy topped with homemade blueberry preserves. Why? Because we asked for it? No — because K just wanted to do something nice for us.

In return, L trimmed some of the hedges at the side of the house. To be honest, it wasn’t really in return: K asked her, and L obliged. I’m not even sure she had any of the racuchy because got up late and ended up going out for lunch with her friend.

“But I’ll gobble them up later,” she assured me.

They’re still in the fridge.

Still, the Girl did the trimming, and even put aside her teenager I-know-everything-why-in-the-world-are-you-explaining-this-ness and let K walk her through what she wanted.

In the afteroon, Ciocia M came for a visit (her girls — L’s and E’s cousins for all intents and purposes — are still in Polska) and we went for a walk in our favorite park.

A lovely day, in other words.

In the evening, we watch some replays of Olympic events — beach volleyball, swimming, gymnastics, the individual time trial, and some tennis.

Friday Insanity

Friday 26 July 2024

I’ve had the matchingtracksuits.com domain registered through the same company for as long as the website has existed, which is around 19 years or so. I’ve had the actual website hosted at a few different providers, but for the last few years, I’ve used Host Gator because their cloud VPS hosting is a good value for all I do online. I also have my school site hosted here (ourenglishclass.net) as well as a Moodle installation for class content (no URL provided because only students have access). I decided it’s about time to move the domains to the same company that provides the hosting (it made sense to keep everything consolidated), so a week ago, I began the process of changing domain registrars for two of the three domains we have (kingary.net being the third). It finally went through today, and much to my surprise, it broke the two websites. Completely. And totally.

So I spent most of the day going through using phpMyAdmin to move all the necessary records from one MySQL database to another. One of the tables has 519,000 rows. Another table has a more modest 49,736. But the catch is this: I had to do massive search-and-replace operations on every table to make sure it would continue working when moved everything to the new database that now runs this site.

The upshot is this: while the site might not look all that different than it did 24 hours ago, what’s going on under the hood is completely different. It still uses WordPress, to be sure, but it’s a totally different installation in a totally different directory with a totally different database.

That was the day portion of Friday.

The evening was so much better. We took K out for her birthday dinner: she chose pho, which we all love. When we came back home, we played a family game, something we’ve never played before: a Polish game called Pytaki.It’s likely made with younger children in mind, but the premise is as simple as can be: there’s a bag of questions from which you choose a random question and then talk about it. They’re questions that show you how well you know the other people (one for K was, “What is the best way to make the person on your right happy?” she answered immediately: “Cigar and whiskey.”) or give you a chance to share a little about yourself (“What’s your favorite movie.”) Some where about family history, like “How did your parents meet?” A lovely game that we played for an hour and led to a lot of much-needed laughs.

Semi-Lost and Found

Wednesday 17 July 2024

It was like finding cash in a coat pocket, but better: old pictures I’d never posted here. These are from 2014 when we spent the week at Deep Creek.

E is now twice the age L was during this vacation.

Our Children

Monday 15 July 2024

Where did these kids go? How could the relationships between us grow so relatively complicated?

It’s my common theme, though I don’t always express here why I’m thinking about it…

Jacksonville Meet, Day 1

Tuesday 9 July 2024

Today, we were back in Florida, less than a week after we left it last. It was a quick trip, though: the Girl and I drove down yesterday afternoon (hence the nearly-non-post of yesterday), arriving at close to ten in the evening and going to bed shortly afterward. We were up at six to make it to the meet by a touch after seven for L’s first event: javelin.

Her total was simple: finish in the top eight to qualify for nationals at the beginning of next month. Sadly, she missed the mark, finishing ninth.

It was disappointing, but in some ways, not completely unexpected: she hasn’t thrown in three weeks, and she used her shoulder a lot on a daily basis a couple of weeks ago at volleyball nationals, so it was a bit sensitive today. By the time she was heading up for her second throw, she was already massaging that shoulder.

We head back to Jacksonville Thursday afternoon for her second event on Friday morning, the high jump. We’ll see how that goes, but she already went started preparing, heading out for jumping practice right after we got back from Jacksonville this afternoon.

St. Augustine 2024 Day 1

Wednesday 3 July 2024

Morning

The shells on the beach just at the edge of the surf were visible for only a few moments before the white bubbles and turbulence hid them again.

In the brief time I could clearly see them in the shallow water, it was obvious most of the shells were only fragments, often smaller than the smallest coins, slivers well on their way to becoming grains of sand. Every now and then, a shard would catch my eye, and I would think, “I might try to grab that one” just before incoming wave hid them once again.

By then it was too late: once the water cleared up, the tide would have tkane the shard so far away from its original position that finding it was all but impossible. Another might catch my eye, but then the process would simply repeat itself.

To get a shell required calm and patience followed by a paradoxical ability to move quickly when needed. Hesitation meant the loss of the moment. In some ways, that’s a metaphor for live in general for many people. Everything is about getting the right moment, and when that fails, increased stress is the outcome.

Yet the older I get, the more I realize the error in living like that and the unnecessary stress it causes. Yes, I might not get that exact shell that I wanted, but there were plenty of other shells that were just as lovely, often more so.

Evening

In the evening, after we’d spent a few hours back at the Airbnb, after we’d spent some time downtown and had dinner, we headed back to the beach.

I took a few pictures:

and the Boy took a few pictures:

A short walk to end a lovely day.

And we got home, and I saw the fantastic news from the Tour de France: Mark Cavendish got his record-breaking 35th stage win, assuring him the historic title “The Greatest Sprinter of All Time!”

Almost as enjoyable as watching the win itself was seeing the other riders’ reaction to the amazing win.

Previous First Day

St. Augustine, Day 1

Tampa to St. Augustine via Gainesville

Tuesday 2 July 2024

We left our lovely hotel room with an incredible view to head to St. Augustine for the second half of our Florida vacation. It’s the second time we’ve been to St. Augustine as a family, the third time for the kids and me. That is to say, we really like St. Augustine.

Along the way, we made perhaps the most important stop of the whole week: a few hours in Gainesville. What’s so special about Gainesville? Well, it has a fantastic Korean restaurant, as we discovered for lunch. And rocker Tom Petty is a Gainesville native. But neither of those was the real reason we went to Gainesville. Our primary motivation has to do with our daughter, who is going to college in about a year. Going to college in about a year. Her number one choice of colleges: University of Florida, which is located in — guess — Gainesville. She wants to study bio-engineering, and Florida University has one of the best programs in the nation for that.

So we stopped by for a tour of the university. I tried not to talk too much or take too many pictures. The Girl remained relatively quiet during the tour. But we came away with a positive impression: the parents are happy with some of the safety programs the university implements; the Girl is happy with the college as a whole, especially one of the enormous chemistry labs we got to take a peek at.

Afterward, we headed to St. Augustine and our lovely Airbnb spot: a bungalow in an absolutely beautiful part of town. Walk to the end of the street, and this is the street we see:

Yes, that’s a peacock taking a stroll down a Live-Oak-lined street. It’s positively bajkowy.

Lovely houses as well. And the peacock? They’re from Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, an ethnographic museum literally at the end of our street.

We weren’t planning on visiting any real attractions while in St. Augustine, but since it’s just down the road, we’re thinking we might. We’ll definitely visit the Cuban coffee cafe down the street.

A games night rounded out our evening: our Airbnb has several entertainment options, including a ping pong table. Poor K gets knocked around in board games, card games, and our front-yard badminton games, but she really knows how to play ping pong.

“Don’t worry,” she assured us, “I’ll take it easy on you.” And proceeded to trounce us all one after another, beer in hand.