I guess it’s a simple fact of life - if you and your wife have older children, sooner or later you’re going to have grandchildren. With Malinda being 25 and Steven being 22, the odds were definitely stacked in that direction (given the fact that Beth had Malinda as a teenager and we had Alex when I was 24).

So on your left, you see one of the cooler little guys on this planet - that’s Kai David Nelson, Steven and Brianne’s son and my grandson (think for a minute how painful that is to admit at the age of 33). Baby Kai - the name he is currently going by - was born on September 1st 2005. I manage to see him about once a month or so, and Beth and Malinda have been able to see him a bit more often.

About the funniest aspect of this whole experience is the fact that Alex is an Uncle - a fact which he is more than willing to share with everyone he meets. In fact, he often begins conversations with “hey, I’m an Uncle…”

The other funny note - when I used to travel out to San Diego every few weeks for work, one of the Thai restaurants that I frequented had a great curry dish with chicken and vegetables. The name of this entree? Why, Kai Chicken Curry of course.

Did you just get the music from The Jeffersons stuck in your head after reading that title? My mom told me about this a few weeks back, but I have not had time to post anything on it until now (I know - I’m a slacker). The old looking guy on the left there is my cousin Michael, who, in addition to being much, much older than I am was recently named the Special Teams coach of the Kansas City Chiefs. I first mentioned Michael in a post back here talking about Alex’s football team - his father is currently (at least as far as I know - with all the coaching changes this year one can never be sure) the Special Teams coach of the Detroit Lions.

This move does come as somewhat of a relief to me, as now I can finally stop feeling guilty when I cheer against the New York Giants (Michael’s old team) on Sundays.

Michael has always been one of my favorite cousins (as are his lovely sisters), but unfortunately I seldom get a chance to talk to him. Every time that he is in town I tend to be away on a trip somewhere, or off on vacation, or something of that nature. As you can see in his bio, he’s done quite a bit of moving around in the last decade or so - I’m sure it’s been rough, especially on his family, but they’ve stuck with it and things are looking good!

Sending all our best along to Coach Mike from all of us in the Portage Lakes in Ohio - congratulations and good luck! We’ll try and come to see you at work this fall.

Well, I got sucked in to women’s hockey again this year. Four years ago in Salt Lake, I watched them falter in the final to slip to a Silver. Eight years ago in Nagano I watched them capture the Gold. This year they beat Finland after a tough loss to Sweden on Friday to secure the Bronze.

But no matter what color the medal, these various incarnations of Team USA (and especially this year) have won me over with their poise, dedication, perseverance, heart, and sportsmanship. The last, at least to me, is key. This is the age of overpaid, whiney, prima-donna players who call news conferences to complain about their coaches, lack of playing time, or to offer excuses for their poor performance. Players who play with all the passion of someone punching the clock for a job that they really could care less about.

Today, Team USA beat Finland and will - in an hour or so - mount the podium to receive their medal. A great accomplishment. However, to me the defining moment of this team came not today in their victory, but rather last week when they lost to the Swedes in an overtime shootout. It would have been easy to cast blame following the defeat - after all, Team USA were the favorites. The old “they didn’t beat us, we beat ourselves or the officials beat us” angle. This is something that many fans can relate to - here in Northeast Ohio we dealt with this a few years ago when OSU beat Miami in the Fiesta Bowl for the National Championship.

However, that wasn’t the case here - the girls stood up and were gracious in defeat. They praised the Swedish keeper, they talked about how well their opponents played, they talked about how good this was for women’s hockey.

I’ve been reading Angela Ruggiero’s blog throughout the game - as I told my wife, it’s a great insight into the world of the Olympic athlete. I’ve posted a few comments to the site, and I’ve read parts of the posts to Alex here in my office (the pictures in this post are from that site as well). In part, Angela had this to say about the loss:

On another note, if I can find any positive at all from this loss, I will have to say that this will give more credibility to the sport. It is sad that this lesson has to be taught at our expense, but in the long term, this will give our sport the viability it needs to sustain over the long run. I talked about this in my book for a bit…I said that one day I hope Sweden or Finland can capture a gold or bronze (I guess you get what you wish for sometimes).

The sportsmanship, the candor, and the love of the sport are all things that hit me about this quote.

I live in Northeast Ohio - with the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers I’m quite use to losing. Losing is one thing - going into the sour-grapes routine after a loss is even worse. We’ve watched a number of interviews this last week or so - the NBC commentators seem to be bent on eliciting some level of controversy. They want Apolo Anton Ohno to rip the Koreans for team skating. They give way too much coverage to the Davis/Hendricks affair in speed skating. They want to rip Lindsey Jacobellis on not getting a gold due to “showboating”. The controversy, to me at least, takes away from the spirit of the Olympics. The Olympics is about competition - winning, yes - but also the joy of competing against the best in the world. When a commentator goes on at length about the gaffe committed by Jacobellis, one has to wonder what they were doing at the age of 20? I know I did a number of stupid things or things that I later regretted - she made a mistake, but did take home a Silver medal. She did get to represent her country.

Angela posted one other thought on her blog following the loss to Sweden - she said:

We still have a chance to win a medal and make our country proud.

The simple fact of the matter is that by merely representing our country they way they have they’ve made me and my family (I can’t really speak for the whole country, but they should feel this way) proud. My son plays sports, I’m guessing my nieces and nephews will as well, as will my grandchildren someday. Whether they are an Olympic class athlete or more like me (pretty much the polar opposite of an Olympic Athlete, as you all likely know) I want them to display a measure of class.

Congratulations, Team USA.

Alex took the final shot for his basketball team a week ago, in a game that saw them eliminated from their tournament. At this level, the teams that have a good shooter and a few tall kids seem to roll over the competition. Unfortunately for Alex and the rest of the Manchester Zips, the Magic was one of these teams.

That night, with a little over a half-minute remaining, down by four or five baskets Van called in the play “Jet Alex” - Alex broke to the center of the key, was passed the ball, and setup for the shot but was stripped of the ball which the other team drove down the court for a score. Alex, visibly upset with tears in his eyes trailed down the court. Coach Van saw this, and called a quick timeout. As the players huddled around the coach, two of the forth graders on the team comforted him by putting their arms on him, patting his back, and telling him it would be OK.

With the ball back in play, the Zips moved down the court and “Jet Alex” was called again - this time, Alex caught the pass, dribbled once, and setup and put the ball up. It was a miss, but the smile on his face at taking the shot was priceless.

This was Alex’s first year of playing basketball, and it was very much a year of learning. It was a year to learn how to dribble, how to pass, and how to shoot. In our garage we have a Little Tykes plastic basketball hoop, courtesy of his friend Lucas’ family, which he started to learn how to use the backboard on. Coach Van Eidom played a big part in Alex’s growth as a basketball player - he can be credited with teaching Alex how to shoot, how to rebound, how to pass, and how to play.

For me, it was a year to rermember all the rules of them game that I had forgotten, and to learn the rule changes that are in effect for the younger children (no full-court press, no double-team except for in the key, 5 seconds instead of 3 seconds on key violations, etc). To help out Alex, I started taking him to the High School Boys games on Tuesday and Friday nights. The Panthers field a good squad, but they are not as dominant in the PAC-7 as the football team is. Which, in a way, I feel is good for Alex as he needs to learn to cope with losing in a graceful way.

I had a bad experience the one year I played basketball, back in eighth grade. Our team was horrible - to make a slight sports shift for analogy purposes here, we made the Bad News Bears look like a bunch of ringers. Our average margin of loss was by something along the lines of 60 points, and the season ended in a giant brawl at Hoban High School that found most of us kicked out of CYO.

I blame that problem on both the fact that we really had no idea what we were doing (similar to the Jamican Bobsled team a decade or so ago), and that the coaches and staff of St. Hillary’s made the decision to have a “good” team (which went on to win most of their games), and a “bad” team which lost every game - ours.

I was going to talk about how lucky we have been with athletics since we moved to this community - but, on further thought it seems less a matter of luck and more a matter of the hard work and dedication of the men and women who give up their time to work with the kids to teach them a bit about a sport, a bit about being a team player, and quite a lot about sportsmanship.

After the game, I stopped by to thank the coaches. Van and I talked briefly about the season - despite our losses, he was upbeat about the team. He told me that Alex made great strides and that I would be amazed at how much better he would be next year. Then he reminded me that it was all about having fun, and that for him it was a great feeling to see a player with Alex’s enthusiasm.

Great team. Great coach. Great season.

I ran across this while researching the previous post on Challenger - the scientists and engineers involved in the NASA Haughton-Mars Project up in Canada’s artic have assembled memorials to the crew of Columbia. The memorials take the form of Inuksuit, which are stone figures that have the likeness of a person. Fans of the Canadian band Rush will recognize these as being similar to the figure pictured on the cover of their 1997 release “Test for Echo”.

These figures, which can be any size and are built by stacking a rock or rocks, are created for many reasons - as a memorial (as these were), to provide direction for travelers, to warn of danger, or to help in hunting. According to The Canadian Encyclopedia (where I have pulled most of this information) the creation of these figures was not limited to the arctic. Other cultures were known to create these figures as well, however the Arctic is one of the few places where they still stand.

This memorial, and the others on the Space Shuttle Columbia Inukshuk Memorials | NASA Haughton-Mars Project page have a strange sense of serenity as well as a stark beauty about them. I may be in the minority, but I prefer this type of memorial over bronze and marble plaques. The only disadvantage is that since these are located thousands of miles away in some of the most inhospitiabal terrain known to man I can probably safely say with certainty that I will never see them in person.

The picture at the top of this post is of the “McCool Crossing” Inukshuk Memorial, and was created in honor of astronaut William McCool. To build your own Inukshuk in a flash animation, visit this link. It’s not as much fun as doing it with rocks, but it certainly is easier on your back.