sour numbers

Slugger Frank Thomas retired yesterday and the White Sox announced plans to retire his number this summer. This happened the same week that the White Sox announced they were unretiring #11, which belonged to shortstop Luis Aparicio. Seems that new acquistion Omar Vizquel has only ever worn 11 or 13 in his long career. Manager Ozzie Guillen wears 13 and declined to give it up for Vizquel, who instead asked Aparicio if he could 'honor' him by wearing his retired number. What could Aparicio say but yes?

It's shocking to me that the White Sox would even consider unretiring a number. It's unimaginable for it to happen with, say, the Phillies, Yankees, or Red Sox. Fans would go nuts. As for Vizquel, he seems to be full of himself.

let's hear it for the goalie

My second cousin Charlie V. has been playing hockey since he was a 'mite'. He's been a goalie for almost as long and, now a high school freshman, is a goalie on his school team. That team was on local cable last night, playing another area team. Charlie's team is not very good this year. In fact, they came into last night with just one win on the season. Still, I was looking forward to seeing the game, which started off with a flurry of goals by both teams and Charlie on the bench.

When Charlie took in for the sophomore in goal midway through the second period, his team was down 4-3. He was tested right away---and responded by making a sweet save. Pretty soon the guys doing the game were tossing around words like "stellar", "tremendous", and "wonderful" to describe Charlie's play. It's not as if they knew who he was; he is after all a freshman goalie on a bad team. They were simply responding to what they saw. Sure he's a relative, but the kid was definitely impressive. From the moment he stepped in, he looked like a goalie and moved like a goalie. You couldn't help but notice that this kid was serious.

The game ended in a 4-4 tie. The same kid scored all four goals for Charlie's team. Fresh off an injury, he scored all four goals last week in the only game the team has won all season. It's been that kind of year, but the second half of last night's game had some spunky defensive plays and sparkling goaltending.

Charlie is already looking into hockey schools in New England. Maybe his love for hockey is in his blood. His dad is, after all, from Slovakia.

bottling wine

The big jugs hold grape and dandelion wine, respectively, while the gallon jugs hold, variously, elderberry, mulberry, pomegranate, blueberry/kiwi/mulberry and ginger wine. The last was, to me, the best.

Robin siphons off dandelion wine for tasting. It was very sweet.

In between tasting and bottling we nibbled on buttermilk biscuits, flax/millet cracker/cheddar cheese, pears, and Dagoba chocolate with chili pepper. Next time I will start with the nibbling. Tasting wine at noon on an empty stomach quickly made me loopy, though it did bring back memories of travels in Central Europe.

Neighbor Robin S. has started making her own wines and needed help bottling. At noon one day last week I went to Robin's to taste and bottle. We started out tasting down in the basement where she has had the wine stored for many months, then moved up to the kitchen, where bottles and corks were already being sterilized. Corking the bottles takes a lot more strength than uncorking does, but once we got into a rhythm it went pretty well. Still there were corks that just wouldn't go in flush and had to be discarded. Some bottles we recorked, others we tabbed for early consumption.

We ended up with 36 bottles. It took all afternoon to do them, including writing out the labels and affixing them. We finished just as Robin's husband came home from work. (Good timing on his part!) I left soon after with a bottle of each wine we put up. The ginger is already gone.