Prodigal Daughter

   High Above Courtside has been very good to me. It provides an outlet for my creativity that I've lacked since I gave up teaching full-time. It won me a trip to Houston, and got me seated close enough to Barry Bonds that I was able to throw popcorn at his roided up ass. It has made me many new friends. If I wasn't spoken for, I could even get laid with it.....and I'm not as cute as I was back when I was in playing shape.

   I like to think that there are people out there who enjoy it as much as I do. Make no mistake, I appreciate every single person who takes time out of their day to check out my column. That Cuban guy who chewed me a new one...I even appraciate him. He could have looked at a lot of other stuff when he opened HAC, and I'm glad he took the time to read what I put down....even if he ended up TOSing me over it. For everyone who stopped in since I started this- even if they are only killing time while the kiddie porn or hydroponics page loads- you have my thanks.

   This is no retirement/going away speech. I'm just letting you know the Dilly. I have been neglectful of my good friend HAC, and it is time to crack open an Add Entry and get busy.

   I may as well explain why HAC hasn't been updated since 1/7/05. I can chalk it up to these reasons:

- I had the flu from the week before Christmas through, well, just about now. I kind of bank on being funny- or at least perky- and neither works when you feel bad, look worse, and sound like you are trying to growl out everything you say.

- My phone went dead for a week, and Verizon takes some time finding out where Monponsett is. Monponsett is very rural, and when I mail stuff from here, they still hand it to a guy who takes off at a gallop on a horse. When I fax, a Wampanoag goes out behind the Post Office, builds a campfire, and sends out smoke signals to a Wampanoag at the Staples in Plymouth.

- When Verizon got my phone working, we got hit with the Blizzard of 2005. 50 inches of snow in a week, some nice hurricane-force winds, iced up lines, and a hum instead of a dial tone whenever your faithful author picked up a phone. When they fixed this, the original phone troubles returned.

Had I injured myself in the week after the blizzard, I'd get an ambulance faster by going out into the street and screaming than by going inside and trying to get a dial tone. I'm also a creative hairdo above 5 feet tall, and if I end up in a snowdrift, they might not find me till the spring thaw...so I just try to be careful.

- Pats.

- What I mean above....The Patriots have been in the playoffs, and what little writing time I get goes to The Belly Check. TBC is my other journal, devoted entirely to the New England Patriots. There's a link to it on this page somewhere...off to the right, I think. If you've noticed a lack of football in High Above Courtside and suspected a vacuum here means a surplus elsewhere...you were correct.

- Licensed teachers with degrees in psychology are in demand. When you are able to do that job in French, you can actually hammer out some fat bargains from desperate school districts who are compelled by law to meet every need mentioned in a student's Individual Education Plan. If I felt like going to New Hampshire once a week, I could make cute stripper money just to give a couple of math tests to a kid named Henri....and I hold no licensure in New Hampshire. I don't even know how they got my number, but the offer is on the table. Either way, I've been hopping around a lot.

   I may be the clumsiest woman alive, and it is not that unusual for me to put myself in the hospital. Once, when I was coaching, I decided to jump into a practice and earn some credibility from some of the newer players who didn't know that I played in college. My skills fade more and more every year, but I can still dribble and shoot. What I can't do is cut really well.

   I waited until a veteran student had the ball...I lollygagged at the top of the circle, lulling the kid defending me into thinking I wasn't in on the play. Then I made my move to the hoop for the pass. My first step broke my leg. I react poorly to pain (as my students do...my starting center, a fearsome student/thug from Trinidad, held the EMT to a wall and said "You'd better fix my MFing teacher."), and I ended up in the hospital for an extra day.

   This was the day I normally shop for food. When I came home, I was amazed at how quickly my husband had descended into Bachelordom. There was a mess in the sink that I could only look at and think that the man had tried adding Hershey's Chocolate Syrup to rigatoni. There also seemed to be signs that- despite an entire dishwasher full of clean plates- the gentleman I have pledged myself to before God himself had been eating off a Frisbee.

   He defended the Frisbee plate when I questioned him about it. "Real plates should have this lip on them....a man needs to eat lying on the couch sometime...geez, you French people are funny about food " Had I asked him about the chocoalte pasta, he would have been sleeping on that very couch until I got old enough to forget how he answered.

   A little bit of neglect- even if it is no fault of your own- can lead to a mountain of trouble. My older sister had taken my daughter, and she got the younger sister/nanny in the process. I knew that Gabrielle was being tended to well. She was about 18 months old when I snapped the gam, but I doubt that- had she been left to her own devices- she could have fared much worse than the Captain did. She has my blood in her veins...I sort of won Stephen on the Open Market, and can't share any blame in his shortcomings.

   He is a wonderful man, who intended to simply pick me up and carry me everywhere I had to go until I started hitting him with my crutch, but he was lost without me. For those of you faithful who I have similarly neglected when I took my little unannounced sabbatical here, I will do my best to insure that none of you will have to eat chocoalte rigatoni off a Black Master frisbee again.