Holiday Reflections

As the year comes to a close & I reflect on the moments I experienced, I can't help but think about the main theme of my year: friendship.
I have made some friends & unfortunately lost some friends this year but in all, I was lucky enough to have all of these people in my life at some point.
If we've shared dinner, drinks, tweets, confidences, FB messages, Astros games, texts at 2 am, hotel rooms downtown, cried in bars, whispered about men, commiserated about women, road tripped to Kissimmee, written actual letters, taken pictures we can't allow out in public, molested bears or just shared our lives, I am grateful to you this Holiday season!
Happy Happy Holidays



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Reading Emma

Often said to be Jane Austen's most perfect novel, Emma" is also the perfect read - with a very imperfect - but loveable - heroine...Beautiful, clever and rich, Emma Woodhouse thinks she knows best. She only wants to help others arrange things as she thinks they should be done, and, convinced she's just not destined to find true love herself, she believes she must instead devote herself to playing Cupid for others. But absolutely nothing goes to plan - and in the process, Emma has a lot of learning to do: about others, but most of all about herself...

Discussion question 1:  Jane Austen famously said that Emma was a heroine whom no one but her will much like.  What do you think of Emma?  Do you like her?

You can post comments here or on twitter.  Use #Emma!

Saying Goodbye Is Never An Easy Thing...

This is hard to write because like most people, I start believing that things will always stay the same and the thought of some kind of change seems scary.

However, I’m an adult and I do know that change happens and in order for us to grow, we have to evolve and move on.

As an Astros fan, I’ve had to learn this the hard way.  We grow to love our players and yet, sometimes…a lot of the time…we have to say goodbye to them.  Yes, it can hurt, but we trust in the people running the show that this is for the best.  Didn’t our parents tell us that time and time again as we grew up?

Over the years, we’ve bid farewell to many of our favorites and have wished most of them well (I’m looking at you, Carlos Beltran).

Yesterday, we found out that we’re losing another member of our Astros family.  No, not a player, but someone who changed the way many of us experience baseball.

Alyson Footer is leaving the Astros organization for a pretty sweet national gig with MLB and we do wish her well.  I’m sad that we will have to share her with all the teams but you can’t let someone who literally changed our lives just stay in one place her whole career.

Through Alyson, her Social Media Nights and her Twitter involvement I met a large group of really great people who have enhanced my life in so many ways.

I’m also honored to be able to call Alyson my friend & hope we can continue to share adult beverages together (off the clock of course) even after she moves on.

Because of Alyson & her Social Media phenomenon, I have met baseball players, met Astros GM Jeff Luhnow, road-tripped to Kissimmee for Spring Training with my AstrosTweeps, met my BFF Dave Raymond, attended countless Astroline broadcasts during the off season and have been to more games than I have in my entire life.  You see, before Alyson merged Social Media and Astros baseball, I was just a casual fan; I watched the games, I attended maybe once a month and I read a few baseball articles here and there. 

Now, the AstrosTweeps and I are immersed in it.  We live and breathe Astros baseball and we couldn’t be happier!

Astros fan were so lucky to have her as long as we did.  Now, our fairy godmother has to move on to change the lives of other baseball fans but her work here will never be forgotten.

Alyson Footer brought baseball closer to us all, and in doing so she brought us all closer together.

The Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

I finished this book around 10pm last night and as I put it down, I thought to myself, "I need to stop reading Murakami because I don't know what the hell just happened in this book." The thing is, that's what happens in all the books I read by Murakami; I never know what the hell is going on but for some reason, that's ok. Haruki Murakami has this bizarre way of writing that is so captivating and so lyrical that you can't stop, even if you realize you're reading about a talking sheep. I mean, what the hell? I wrote something similar about Kafka On the Shore but I guess sometimes, even in books, it's not about the destination but the journey. All at once, this book is a hard-boiled detective novel, a fantasy adventure, a shining example of postmodern literature and a commentary on modern Japanese culture. To describe Murakami's writing as "quirky" would be an understatement. It's bizarre but at the same time, it's charming and engaging. I surprise myself by hungering to read another one of his novels but this is a journey I'm not quite ready to give up.