First, just let me say that I'm rather excited that Bowen's classes are cancelled today, not because we'll be missing out on content and have to make up time for it, but because I've been working so much on his research paper for US Foreign Policy and for Modern China's research paper that I haven't read for class and I was dreading having to take a quiz on the readings . . . so yeah, sigh of relief there!

Now for baseball . . . after today, there will be 3 weeks, or 21 days, until the first pitch of the Braves MLB season for 2005 . . . *YAY!*   I made a mention of this in last night's brief post and sandyquill commented that she knew another Braves fan and I replied back to her, and since some people do not read replies, I'm posting what I wrote to her here:

Well, growing up in my house, by the time you're 5 years old, the learning begins . . . for baseball, there's the Braves, and Baltimore, but only because they're in a separate league; for college football, it's always VA Tech, and UVA; and professional football, it's the Carolina Panthers, or just about anybody except the Cowboys. It's strange though because I know about the rules of baseball and football than my boyfriend . . . and get this, my mom is a bigger sports' freak than my dad, except at high school and college football, then he's the biggest.

The thing with my family is that we're verbal when we watch games, meaning that we yell at officials on tv as if they can actually hear us.  My roommate is not as excited as I am about baseball season starting . . . as she said last night, "so, the yelling begins . . . ?" *lol*

In my house growing up, you learned sports, or you learned how to keep yourself occupied in some other way that wouldn't get you in trouble. And being the family-oriented family we were, my sisters and I learned sports, and all three of us played some form of softball, even if only for one or two seasons. I played on the church slow-pitch league when I was 12-13, then all the younger adult women in our church got married and started families, so the team is no more. There's still a men's team, but no ladies . . . the children are still rather young for that and college students like me are away, but hopefully one day we'll get a ladies' team going again. My sisters both played Parks & Rec. softball and were on the same team for two years, but when Kayla had to move up and Donna couldn't yet because she was old enough for the next group, Kayla quit.

Donna has kept with it and is a pretty awesome player, and I'm not just saying that because she's my sister. She's even improved drastically from playing in a Dixie league all summer and especially since she got contacts last month and can now really see the ball, *lol*. Donna even plays volleyball to keep in shape during the off season; and when softball conditioning and tryouts were supposed to have started this season at the high school and didn't, she ran with the soccer team and advocated the right for all girls' teams to be able to use the weight room as much as the boys' teams. (So yeah, she's also developed a bit of an attitude, but it's not really a bad one, just one that lets people, team members and coaches/teachers, that she's not into the beating around bushes or anything bs-ish. For example, when she went to hunt down the JV softball coach for this year and asked him to do something about the weight room issues because all she had been told was that boys' sports were more important than girls', the coach started, "Well, boys' sports are" and at that point Donna interrupted and said "Don't you say it, boys are no more important than girls," well, something like that, I don't know the exact wording.)

So if I had to rank my sisters and I from sporty-est to not as sporty, then based on involvement in sports, fan or athleticly, it would be Donna, Me, Kayla. Wow, this has gotten to be a rather long post, and I guess I should end it soon and go take advantage of this extra time with no Bowen classes to work some more on my research papers. So I guess my points are as follows:

1. Females can be just as much of a sports' freak, if not even more so, as males.

2. Male sports are NOT more important than Female sports.

3. My family pretty much revolves around sports. If we're not watching a game on tv or in person, or listening to a game on the radio (yes we do that), then we go to one of my sister's games, or even to one of her boyfriend's games (he plays baseball and basketball), and there's also the high school football games where my sister is in marching band (and yes, marching band is very much a sport, check out a DCI-Drum Corps International- competition sometime).

4. The Atlanta Braves are the BEST! . . . Ok, not a point of this post, and it really is a matter of personal opinion I suppose . . .

Oh and one last thing before I sign off, there's a girl here on campus who is doing her senior project on females and sports . . . I took her survey and did the interview (I was the first one she interviewed) during which she told me that I had the highest round-about sports knowledge based on the questions from her survey . . . *yeah baby!* And after the official interviewing had ended, we spent another 30 mintues just talking about baseball and football and how we both disliked the Patriots and how we grew up with sports in our lives almost daily. It was rather cool, but I'm terrible with names and since I have and have not had any classes with her, I just can't remember the name unless I look it up, but anyways, it was awesome and she's really cool as far as I'm concerned.

All right, I'm going now . . . going to go grab some lunch to bring back to the room and get started on organizing all this stuff for my papers . . . later all . . . just remember my points, at least numbers 1-3, and that Braves baseball starts in 21.5 days . . .