We paid good money for this?

We thought we were cool. We weren't going to settle for Jimmy John's for the early lunch, we were going to a cool barbecue place in West Chicago. And we actually found the place a good 20 minutes before it opened. Fine, we will have our meal and get back in time to watch more baseball. The boys had a football and tossed it around.

The cool barbecue place had electrical problems on a sunny day and the owner came out and apologized. It wasn't opening. Heck, what about us?

The nice guy at the closed cue place told us about a nearby pizza place (not as fun) but when we drove by it was closed. Screw this. We settled for Subway. Actually we could have taken a ride on the New York Subway and got better service than we got. If we weren't so famished, we would have dashed out of this place screaming.

This is what you do when your boy signs on with a traveling baseball team. We got up at 5:30 a.m. for this 1 hour trip. Our team took some lumps. You root for everyone on the team but you live and die with your boy's ups and downs. Please don't have my kid be the goat.

There were games at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. In somewhat better news, we went out for ice cream at a Mexican ice cream joint. Rice water anyone? Actually the boxes said Ashby's so they didn't make it but truthfully the sugar in the pralines ice cream woke me up enough to drive home. Oh, well, let's have a better game next time.

On Eighth Grade Graduation

It's a big deal out here. The kids get dressed up and march in alphabetical order. The speeches were great and we all had a fine time at Brady's graduation ceremony held at Lake Zurich High School.

How did I handle the pomp and circumstance at my 8th grade graduation? No such thing of course. Have no memory of it in fact since the schools in my day could care less about eighth grade graduation.

I don't recall anything significant at all about eighth grade. That's enough about this. We are glad Brady got a hair cut and behaved himself at the event.

Grandparents showed up and we all ate afterwards at the Wild Onion Pub in South Barrington. It was half-priced craft beer night so I ordered the Hopfest beer. The waitress said that wasn't half priced because it was too high in alcohol. Yes, that's called bait and switch. I said nothing and drank the one high alcohol brew.

Congrats, Brady. This means in another four years, he'll be a high school grad and another four years, a college grad. Why, he was just a baby not that long ago.

70 cents a ticket for pro baseball

Was that a misprint? How in the heck was Stub Hub listing baseball tickets at the Milwaukee Brewers game for 70 cents a ticket? Of course there was a catch. There were plenty of service charges. So for four nice tickets on the third base side cost me 13 bucks. So even with that, it's less than 4 bucks a pop.

Now I recall back in Baltimore, you could get an upper reserved ticket or maybe a bleacher seat for 85 cents. But I'm guessing that was back in the late 1970s.


So Mr. Coffman came from near Wrigley Field and we met Captain Bob and his son Will and drove up for an afternoon game. It was a few quick beers in the parking lot and then we walked into the stadium.

I was a little concerned that they weren't going to take our nearly free tickets but that didn't come up. Again the seats were nice and the roof was closed so we didn't freeze inside. We took in a pitcher's dual. We even saw a Cincinnati relief pitcher throw the ball 101 miles per hour. Naturally that ball wasn't hit.

We got our money's worth in the first inning and left the game after eight innings with no score on the board. When we got the parking lot, the Reds finally scored.

And then we headed to Leon's for great frozen custard. That's a tradition. Of course.

Heck, I could get used to ticket prices like that.

Worst City in America?

But what about the clock tower? And the cool minor league baseball stadium if you can ever find it.

I was living in Chicago when Mobil Magazine (is that magazine still cooking?) gave Rockford, Illinois the title, ''worst city in the United States" tag. Wow! How about Newark New Jersey or Apopka, Florida? There has to be worse places, I thought. My friends and I drove through a neighborhood in Apopka a good 30 years ago and we never uttered a word. It was so poverty stricken we thought we had detoured off onto another planet.

Anyway, Brady's team had a tourney in Rockford this weekend and heck it wasn't so bad. It had some top 40 restaurants but I guess that's anywhere USA. What really bugged me was finding the home of the minor league team where Brady's team would be lucky enough to play.

My directions said turn left off of 90 and find it. And then at the exit, we saw a sign saying turn right. So, I followed the sign. And drove and drove and drove. I think we must have driven five miles. How in the heck do you hide a professional baseball field anyway? Well, these folks did.

Evidently, it was all of walking distance off the highway. I know they were pinching pennies in the Rockford government but all I asked was to see one more sign. Like, TURN LEFT HERE TO BASEBALL PARK. I would have gladly checked in with 10 bucks for that sign since I used $15 dollars of gas money driving through town looking for the place. I did hear folks saying I missed the run down section of Rockford but I guess that's a good thing.

Finding Sarasota by accident

As the story goes, my parents decided to make a break for it from the cold winters of Northern Virgina. I was finding out about girls and the Orioles were great and we moved away from it all and made a dash to Cape Coral, Florida. My first day of school presented me with a race riot. I was robbed of my lunch money. Did my parents check out the schools before sending me off to hell?
Mom understood and one day after work, she made a plan to drive to Orlando to find a school where her child wouldn't be killed.
But she pooped out. She drove as far as Sarasota and found a nice town. She got my Dad to move there and life returned to normal. At least the kids were friendly.
So that's my lead-in to the family trek to Sarasota this week. What a great place. We had a condo crawling distance to Turtle Beach. We saw the Orioles and Red Sox play spring training games. We ate at wonderful Sharkeys and the kids even survived a two-hour wait for dinner. We played catch for most of that time in a nearby field. We had one beach day on Siesta Key which has been picked as the top beach in the United States. See, if my Mom wasn't so tired that one day back when, the family wouldn't have ever found this gorgeous spot in America.

Another cool 80s band

The amazing thing here is the lead singer (Dan Zanes) of the great Boston band, "The Del Fuegos" actually sang children's songs at Nolan's day care back when he was quite young. Sure, I recalled this band with their great songs, "The Longest Day, Don't Run Wild and I Still Want You."

But they broke up way back when. I purchased their so-called big hits on CD and played them for the boys when they were young.

And on Sunday, Eileen and I drove down to Evanston to see the Del Fuegos. They had reformed. We actually had the GPS but still couldn't find Space until the band had already come out. No matter they played a good two hours. And I was singing in the background all night long. At my seat, of course.

I have that Longest Day album at home and see that I paid a whopping 25 cents for it back in the 80s. I think Eileen liked it, too, but it was a late night for her. And get this, neither of us had anything to drink.

As I write this, I have the Del Fuegos blasting in the shrine. Thanks to I-Tunes. Maybe if I was younger, I would have followed the tour that hits Milwaukee, St. Louis and Minnepolis. No, I have better things to do.

Be careful or you will break your neck

Those are real comforting signs at X-treme Trampoline in Buffalo Grove. If you jump this way, you will break your neck. If you land that way, your back will be broken. A broken back? That has to be a serious pain. And this is all in the name of fun?

On Saturday, Brady took three of his friends along with Riley, Nolan and I to Buffalo Grove for two hours of tumbling and leaping on trampolines. Of course, I just read the news on my phone as the boys got their exercise. This is the place where you have to sign a waiver before jumping on the mats. Now its true there is a lawyer in this house but I don't think that waiver is worth much if someone actually gets killed over there. They are still going to get sued.

Enough of that legal stuff. No one got banged up. They all had a good time. I watched Nolan play dodge ball on the trampoline. He told me later how he had made a nice play against two older kids.

I wonder if they had such a place like this when I was young. I probably wouldn't go as I'm not the jumping type.