Patience.org

Like many other lads, he’ll be very happy to hear the news tonight.
Those pictures were from his first ever Mets game, Tusday July 4, 2006, against Pittsburgh Pirates.

We left after 7 innnings, when they were losing 6-4 but thankfully the Mets came back to win 7-6.

On to the playoffs…..

I’ll be trawling back through our lives over the last few months over the next few days, updating pictures that I should have done, well a few months ago. So here’s a load from May from London (including his first football match at Fulham), Paris & Boston. It was a busy month.

And below is a couple of my favorites of his first attempts at cricket in the back garden in London. An ‘A’ for enthusiasm is warranted, I think. Usual username/pwd combo required.

This astromical dispute about Pluto is coming at an awkward time for us. The lad has just got interested in space but isn’t old enough to start sniggering at Uranus, though I’m sure that will come soon enough.

We bought a mobile of the planets a couple of months ago, though with our usual procrastination, we are yet to hang it. But I looked and we’ve lost one – I think it’s Pluto, so that’s a relief.

If you lend a boy a camera, what will he do? Well, this boy will take a picture of his players all in a line.

Should I read something into the fact that the English player has no ball? Oh well, at least the floor looks reasonably clean for once.

So I got a bit of help upgrading the software and now the pictures are back at patience.org. Links to the albums are here and on the right.

I will update the albums in the next few days, but by way of a taster, here’s a couple from yesterday at Chelsea Piers, where each Saturday he plays football and she does gymnastics. He’s improving each week and he always scores, usually about half the team’s goals. Yesteday in a short game he got a couple and here’s the celebration after one of them.

Meanwhile, with her gym finishing half an hour before football does, she comes to cheer him on. In a lull in proceedings yesterday, she invited herself to a game of catch with two older boys, as she is wont to do. This is her asking for the ball. Any comments regarding her hair-do should be directed towards her mother.

This was in a local playground, resting between practising her pitching. Her action isn’t quite as good as her brothers’, it has to be said.

But then she hasn’t spent as much time as he has studying the technique of Pedro and the other Mets.

Update: I should probably add that this was taken on my phone, hence the ‘quality’.

Blimey hold the middle page! Street fairs, that concentration of deep fried food, mix tapes and poor quality underwear that clog up New York’s streets every summer are apparently not the rich cultural institution the name may conjur up in people’s minds.

I could have told you that without commissioning a report just by looking out the window!  I like this comment on the Gothamist story:

“Hey, if it weren’t for street fairs, I would never have gotten to try things like deep-fried Oreos, which I had only read about in articles about how Middle America is getting fat.”

So you may or may not noticed two things about patience.org recently :

1. I like fiddling with things related to this site.
2. I am not very good at/don’t have time to – complete these fiddlings to a satisfactory level.

So I am currently waiting for community help in upgrading the Gallery photo management software that handles al the photo albums we have here. I have still not been able to complete the upgrade to the next verson of Gallery and until I am able to do so, the albums linked to on the right, will not work. Sorry.

But apropos number 1 – I have chanegd the theme of the site to this one, which I think is a little simpler and more elegant.

Back to fiddling….

There’s not many decent football blogs out there (although the Guardian’s been fairly good during the World Cup). And the websites of most professional footballers are usually a wasteland of cliches whereby ‘you’re only as good as your next game,’ and you easily become ‘gutted for the lads,’ at the slightest mishap.

Into this vacuum steps Moritz Volz. Who he, you ask? He’s a German U21 international right back (even though he’s 23) and best of all, he’s one of our own. Fulham, bought ‘220’ as he’s known (think voltage in Europe) from Arsenal a couple of years back and he’s been great for us – a whole-hearted player if ever I saw one (and I saw him launch into the crowd at Pompey a couple of seasons ago to try and avoid giving up a throw-in). But the diary on his website is an absolute classic.

He’s German and he knows it, i.e. he knows all the stereotypes people have about Germans and he has the ability to poke fun at himself, while truly assimilatuing into English life – he’s just passed his maths A-level (sounds as if he’s doing four in all) for instance. He has a phrase book on his site where he translates phrases such as, “Wo ist der pool? Ich will meine handtuecher hinlegen/Which way to the pool? I would like to put my towel down,” and “Kannst du meine aermel abschneiden/Please can you cut the sleeves off my denim jacket.”

It’s hard to know when he’s being ironic and when he’s not, but this is the man that went into a Niketown in Londona and bought a pair of custom-made football boots with “Volzy.com” on one and “The Hoff” on the other, in honour of German’s obession with David Hassehoff, which he says “should be fun in close-ups in the Premiership next season.” He even has part of his site devoted to the Hoff.

When meeting Roger Milla (famous Cameroonian footballer from years gone by) at Cologne airport, he gets him to sign his Panini sticker album and has his pictute taken with him, captioning it “Me with Rog the Ledge.”

So much other funny stuff as he makes his way around Germany following the World Cup. You can read the lot here. Can’t link to individual entries, you’ll just have to page through, but it’s worth it. A fan’s diary written by a very professional footballer.

No, not the teams and the tournament, but its use as an educational tool.

With our wallchart almost complete, I wanted to share some of the things the boy has learned over the last month:

• He’s learned to fall over, holding his leg, waiting for the ‘doctor’ to come on and spray his leg, befofre immediately getting up and continue playing. Where on earth could he have learned that from?
• Flags – well where do we start? Within a week of the start of the tournament, he was waiting for a bus outside a pub displaying small flags of all the competing nations, he asked if that was Portugal’s flag he spotted next to that of Trinidad & Tobago? Why yes it was.
• Walking down Park Avenue last Monday, once the semi-final teams were known, there’s a French restuarant that for some reason was hanging large flags of Brazil, France, Germany, Portugal and Italy. He spotted them and asked if they had deliberately hung the flags of the four semi-finalists and if so, what was Brazil doing there too?
• Tears were shed when Sweden scored against England and when England went to penalties against Portugal in the quarter final.

As the torunament went on, we switched our attention to the second kits of countries, mostly the ones that had been knocked out. Just this morning I had this conversation:

Him: what’s Brazil’s second kit?

Me: Blue.

Him: What’s Switzerland’s second kit?

Me: White, I think.

Him: Oh just like South Korea! And speaking of South Korea, what’s their second kit?

Me: Erm, perhaps blue, I’m not sure.

Him: OK

Swap out those teams with any others in the World Cup and you have the basis of many conversations over the past few days.

Overall grade for the World Cup as an educational tool? A+, I reckon.