the joys of being a referee

every Saturday morning in the spring and the fall i ref for a local soccer league called kicking for the cross or K4C. Its run by my highschool soccer coach and his wife. i ref the 8 9 and 10 games of second and third graders. i usually end up with boys but occasionally i get a girls game. the boys and girl are very different even at this age. its pretty obvious most of the girls dont care much for the game and i think they enjoy chanting their teams name from the sidelines more than actually playing. the girls who are on the field, for the most part, shuffle around in a huge group consisting of everyone on the field except the goalies moving together around the field at about the speed glaciers move. not only is it excruciatingly boring to watch but if you looked at most of the teams jerseys alone you would say that it is pink, so in most cases i will have the light pink team playing the hot pink team or the dark pink team playing the pink team with a hint of purple. this creates a problem because on the rare occasion that the ball escapes the bundle of pink in the middle of the field and goes out of bounds i will have to say which team gets to throw the ball in, this would be a simple task if they choose normal colors such as blue or green for jersey but since they didnt i usually end up awkwardly fumbling out a few words that make some sense to me but never to the coaches.

the pets of my family

we have had many pets come in and out of my house. the first one was appy, a dog whos still around after 17 years. we had another dog named lady, he was a collie. she died several years ago. she was the nicest dog you could ever meet, and the reason i think collies are the greatest breed of dog. the lassie movies also make me think that. we have had three cats. the first one was the devil. it had orange stripes and it was ugly and i hated it. it handled me and my brothers abuse by being mean back, we would throw it and mess with it all the time. it was fun. our second cat was named maggie, she had grey and black stripes and wasnt awful like tiger so i liked it. we are now on our third cat, her name is ellie but only my mother calls her by that name. everyone else calls it cow because it looks like a cow...shes the best cat yet because she doesnt care about anyting, we can pick her up by the paws and shell just hang there or we can bury her with random things we take from the table and again she just lays there. my sister had a fish named tyrone. he had big eyes and one fell off. hes dead now and then there were the hermit crabs we had that we left at the house when we were on vacation and when we got back they were gone. never to be found again. the last ones that i can remember were the hamsters that i fed peppermint to and it killed them

my last two days

i woke up like i do every morning early enough to be in creative writing class by 7AM after that i went to my classes like any other day and in english class i was reminded of the essay that was due the next day and when i got home at 6 after soccer practice and started the essay around 7. this essay had to have at least twenty quotes that made sense with what we were writing about and i had just discovered the day before that i had the book. after i decided what to do and found all the necessary quotes i finished writing the paper around 1:30 AM in bed by 1:45, neglecting the homework i had in other subjects. the next morning i wanted to meet my beautiful girlfriend of 11 months, megan, for breakfast before school as well as feed my neighbors cats so i woke up and hour earlier than usual at 5 AM. needless to say i was a little bit tired. when i got to school i discovered our essay wasnt due until after the weekend, i was not very happy. i got a 55 on my math due and a zero in another subject. my day was not going very well, i was in a bad mood and managed to get megan mad at me right before i had to get on a bus and ride two hours to play a soccer game. we made up early into the trip by phone, i meant to sleep on the way to the game but we were having to much fun, luckily i had bought a extra strength five hour energy that morning so i had plenty of energy come game time. we tied 1-1 and on the bus back we sat in traffic for almost two hours. everyone was tired out by the time we were out of the traffic. i tried to sleep for a while but the bumpy road we were driving on made that impossible. we had been on the bus for almost 4 hours and i was feeling the lack of sleep and i felt sick to my stomach from the road and i managed, for the second time, to make the girl i love not want to talk to me again. i fell asleep a little after one and woke up at 7 to go to work. i came home after and thats where i am now, swamped with homework, papers and projects due monday.