A Fourth With Friends

It is the first day of America's two-hundred and fifty-first year, and I am abed whilst the Kitten sleeps quietly nearby. We have guests upstairs in the rooms set aside for transients, now that Dash-1 and Dash-2 are making their way in the big world. As I walk past the staircase on the way to coffee up, a cool wind blows down like I was in some Swiss mountain pass, and it is obvious our guests have been at the thermostat, an annual game of cat and mouse that will elicit a counter from me shortly.

It has been a delightful few days, days in which the blessings of owning a pool were manifest in the face of triple digit heat. There is talk that our visitors will be leaving this morning to try and get ahead of the traffic, but there is always a chance they'll stay another night beat the traffic tomorrow.

Like my birthday weekend last week, I have defiled myself with sugars and carbohydrates, and I dare not venture near the scale until I've had three days of proper eating under my (lengthened) belt. We (the Kitten, me, and our three guests) went over to another friend's house Friday evening for a delightful cookout, after which we all proceeded to still another friend's house for a delightful event on the Tred Avon River with ringside seats to the Oxford fireworks, an open bar and a ridiculous assortment of desserts. I had been good, very good, all day until I saw that table, and then I was no longer good. There were little pecan pie squares, and I must have had a dozen of them, and there were shortbread cookies in the shapes of stars with red, white, and blue icing that simply begged for my patriotic consumption.

We hosted last night's event, and as the grill-Meister and second in command, I was responsible for attempting to time things around what were purported by our various meteorological services to be nasty summer storms approaching. The buttsweat heat drove an early decision that we would eat inside, but my menu choices (ribs, Italian sausage, grilled portobello mushrooms) drove the use of my grill and the kitchen oven, and so I needed to be as sure as I could that the grilling part was done before the lightning part started. As luck and good fortune would have it, the rain held out until well after dinner, and my inamorata was even able to lead a little party of guests into one of the corners of our yard to exercise some good old Native American/Colonial American hatchet throwing skill, something that is always sure to energize her (and cause me some hesitation at her skill therewith).

We capped off the evening watching the televised fireworks from New York, which can only be described as epic. Between the local display and the New York televised display—and my reading of the Declaration after dinner last night—my great love of country was right in my throat, and I was warmed to be a citizen of this great land.

At one point, Catherine turned on (gads!) Fox and there was live coverage of some room in which the President and his wife were standing, apparently readying himself for a speech I would not note at a time of day when proper Americans were already abed. I am somewhat unhappy with myself for my churlish reaction to the President's role in these festivities, but I feel quite confident that if I were to review his performance later on today, it will have validated my decision to skip.

Soccer/Football

I am enjoying the World Cup, and watching a good bit more soccer than normal. Since normal is virtually nothing, this is not hard to do. But like most of America, I am not only now an expert on the game, I have come to a number of conclusions about the game. Here they are:

1. The game is not as popular here as it is in the rest of the world, and it is not as popular here as the basketball and football. It seems to have edged out hockey and baseball, and that seems fine. I think there is no chance the sport will ever displace either football or basketball in my remaining lifetime. Of American sports, its closest kin is baseball, which is boring and has largely become a niche sport that interests people only during the playoffs. Though the game is inestimably improved by making games shorter.

2. Euros like to make fun of American football because of all the stoppages of play. Ok. Watch a World Cup game…not only are there a TON of stoppages for over the top faking of injuries, even when the game is in play there are MANY slowdowns that approach the status of stoppages. I get that it takes a lot of athleticism to play men’s professional soccer. But there is also an AWFUL lot of standing around.

3. What there isn’t—is rigid timing. For heaven sake, just stop the clock when Rodrigo is rolling around on the ground seeking his first BAFTA. This “extra time” stuff is falderal.

4. Overtime in US football is kinda wacked, and so it is in big time soccer. You tie after 90 minutes—and then you play 30 more? And if there still is a tie THEN you go to penalty kicks? I am told they used to have a sudden death ending during the two 15 minute extra periods, and I think Americans would vastly prefer that.

I’ve listened to the soccer is going to be our biggest sport crowd for fifty years, and at no point in that time have I believed it.

A Big Decision

I am mulling a big decision, one I haven't discussed with The Kitten yet, but since she won't read this--likely at all--but if so, until tomorrow, I will share with you here now as I'll bring it up with her later today. I am trying to decide whether to join a country club. Or as the case may be, another country club. I’m still a member at a club I joined in my 20’s, but an “absent” member so my obligations are quite modest. This would be a local club, with the obligatory offering up of a lung as an initiation fee followed by monthly minimums for the rest of time.

There is simply no good economic case for this. I think for the past 39 years, I’ve averaged one or two golf rounds a year, and if I joined the public course close by, I could play over 600 rounds just for the up front money at the private club.

But the next twenty years of my life—as far as golfing is concerned—are likely to look more like the FIRST twenty than any other period in my life. And I played a LOT of golf before I entered the Navy. I STILL will never be able to justify the expense based on a per round basis, so I won’t even try. I DO know that if I joined a club, I would play a LOT more than I do now, and that is very consistent with how I want to roll.

There are all sorts of other emoluments that come along with joining a proper country club, including pools (I got one of them), pickleball (I may never play again), and tennis courts. Besides the golf, the dining room is pretty much the other big draw for me, as I’d really like to have a place where, when Cat and I don’t want to cook, we know we can go and get a table and eat a good meal.

I also cannot help but think that if Jimmy Wires were around (my Dad), he’d say “this is a no-brainer. If you can afford it, do it.” Hell, he belonged to two country clubs in his seventies (and maybe his eighties)!

I realize this is a first world problem. And every time I look at even a modest projection of where I’ll be financially some day, I think to myself that I wish there were a way to shift some of that money/living to the left. Any of you that track your investments probably have access to a graph that looks something like this:

That one all the way on the right is a conservative view of my stash when I’m 91. Ninety-one. And while I obviously cannot make the leftward shift I dream about—financially—I can shift the living part.

I’ll keep you posted on this.