Fillies All-State Softball

Two of our Fillies were recently recognized by the Texas Sports Writers Association All-State softball team.

Charlsi Brawley is the 1st team all-state catcher, and Lizzie Elston is 3rd team all-state outfield.

Way to go!

New Monterey Baseball Coach

My money’s on Kent Meador, but I could be wrong.  KLBK says it’s a Lubbock native, Coronado grad, Tech grad and currently highly successful coach in the Houston area.  Meador fits that bill, and I think his 5A team went to the state playoffs regularly.  They were state bound in 2007 and this past year dropped out in the regional quarterfinals.  He’s won awards for coaching in the Houston area and coached several Houston area all-star teams.  I think he’s been a finalist for several coaching jobs on the South Plains recently such as Frenship.  Sounds like a Lubbock native trying to get back home.

Anyway – might be wrong but that’s what I think tonight.  We’ll all find out tomorrow.

If I’m right — a Coronado grad in charge of Plainsmen baseball….how they gonna take that? 

A Little Landscaping

With the free time we’ve had lately with the earliest end to baseball I can recall, I’ve had opportunity to get a few little things done around the house to make things look a little better.

In front I redid the flower beds around the red oaks which we’d let fall into major disrepair over the last few years.  I wanted shasta daisies to go with the yellow flowers between them, but coudn’t find them so went with black eye daisies.  These are not as big and I’m not sure I’m going to like them, but the yellow flowers between look good.

Lisa found some ground cover she liked, so she planted those in the bed we’d killed off last year.  Hopefully this ground cover (Astenia) will fill in solidly and set of the lantana we’ve had there for the last few years.  That lantana is beautiful stuff and very hardy.

On the side I have added more boxwood so that will fill in quicker and I’m going to keep it trimmed shorter than originally planned.  I dug up all the roses we had along the walk.  They were 15 years old, very woody and just didn’t look healthy any more.  In their place I put a mixture of red yucca and mexican heather.  The heather took a while to settle in but I think it’s to make.  I completely rebuilt that bed, edging it with red scalloped edgers, filling it with red cypress mulch and putting in solar accent lighting.  I really like the way this looks.

The red scalloped edging looked so good on the bed that I bought the same kind of curved edging to make a new tree ring for the red oak there.  I also redid the half whiskey barrel there and set in four english ivy which I want to cover and spill out over the edges of the barrel.  I put some perriwinkle in the window box outside the laundry room window.  They are a little oversized for that box so I hope they survive.

The tree ring with the red scalloped edging looks so good I’m going to redo the tree rings in the front where the golden rain trees are soon.  The golden rain trees are blossoming better than ever before this year, which is surprising given that they put out leaves twice and had them killed off by late frost each time.  Third time’s a charm I guess.  I’m also letting the buffalo grass grow up to 4″ this year.  That’s supposed to be heathier for the buffalo grass and will help it thrive with the once every two weeks watering plan I started last year.  It’s looking good this year, and was before we got any rain, so I think that’s going to work – but I have a significant amount of undesirable grass and crabgrass I need to get killed off.

That’s it for the landscaping update!  I was just so happy with how some of it looked when I finished Saturday that I thought I’d snap a few shots of it.  Plus I had not taken any pictures of the house since it was built.  This place has changed a lot!

Pearson & Odom Named Academic All-State

Justin Pearson and Westin Odom of the Shallowater Mustangs were named to the 2009 THSBCA 2A Academic All-State baseball team! Kudos JP and Odie! Way to GO guys!

Future Fillies Take Titles

Sorry I am so late to the party but my wife clued me in a day or two ago that both the Major and Junior Shallowater Little Dribblers girls teams won the championship tournaments recently.

The Majors won straight out, while the Juniors took the hard road and won the championship coming back from the loser’s bracket!

How about that!  Roundball is just the thing in Shallowater.

KCBD Digital After BIG SWITCH

I have talked before about how the local NBC affiliate, KCBD, has had troubles getting this whole digital TV transition right.

They were the only local station to delay the big switch to June.  They advertised their rears off trying to convince everyone to scan for channels after 6/12 because you see they were not only shutting of their analog signal they were switching frequencies on their digital signal.  Read below to understand why this means you HAVE to scan for their channel again.  I don’t know the ins and outs of that decision, but I’m betting the powers that be at KCBD are regretting that.  They tried to pitch it that you should regularly scan for channels or you wouldn’t know about new channels you might get.  Yeah, that COULD happen once in a blue moon but how often are new channels going to pop up in the Lubbock market?  Even sub-channels with the new digital capability are not coming up that often and the broadcasters that would do so would let you know to scan for it when it happens.  Get real, KCBD, you made a bad decision with your frequency choices and you’re trying to pawn it off as a “complication” of this digital transition.

How are y’all doing getting the KCBD signal since the 6/12 switch? 

Not so good here.  In fact less than not so good; it downright sucks pond water.  They are transmitting now on DTV channel 11, which they were not before.  The local paper said they recently changed from DTV channel 9 to DTV channel 11 which I believe because for a long time one of my tuners kept trying to call their channel “9-1″.  A search for signals in Lubbock states KCBD was registered to broadcast on DTV channel 44, but perhaps that is old information.  Or perhaps that explains why KCBD was originally the strongest signal of all when DTV was first broadcast, then their digital tower equipment burned and things changed.

Now their signal is coming in so weak on all antennas I have that the picture cannot be displayed.    Every other local station comes in fine.  KCBD went from acceptable on Thursday 6/11 to bad on Friday 6/12 to fair over the weekend of 6/13-6/14, to very bad after that.  Very bad being described as cannot receive it well enough to display a picture.

Remember, the channel designation you see on the TV guide or channel display is just a label, this whole 13-1 thing for example actually comes in on DTV channel 40.  The conversion boxes I bought for the two old TVs we still have are actually the only tuners that will let me see this, but it’s very handy to understanding how this works.  So KLBK-13 broadcasts on DTV channel 40 but they send out a label with this signal that calls it “13-1″.  This disconnect between the “label” and the actual “digital channel or frequency” is basically why you have to scan for channels and cannot tune them directly.  If you tried to tune KLBK in Lubbock with DTV frequency 13, you’d get nothing-it’s on DTV frequency 40.  Very confusing I admit.  And in fact most receivers I’ve seen don’t allow you to tune to DTV channels directly anyway – just labels.  That’s why you basically have to scan to find things..

I have used the converter tuners to manually tune to DTV channel 11 and indeed the signal is there, but well into the “bad” signal strength territory on the meter.

Fool me once, shame on me.  Fool me twice, shame on you.  Fool me THRICE?  Are you kidding?  I get the feeling someone at KCBD has made a series of VERY BAD decisions.

Danbury Defeats Holliday in Title Game

Danbury beat Holliday 6-5 in the 2A championship game Friday.  This was Holliday’s 12th trip to the state tournament, but they have yet to win a championship.

Also at the state tournament, Miles won the state championship in A with a win over Windthorst.  Miles is the team that knocked Lockney out of the playoffs and, interestingly enough, were the THIRD seeded team from their district!

Holliday Advances

Holliday defeated White Oak 6-5 in 8 innings in the state semifinal, so they advance to Friday’s championship game.  They won with a walkoff hit into right field that scored a runner from second with two outs in the bottom of the 8th.

Looks like our Mustangs were knocked out by a pretty darn good baseball team…

It Ends With a Double

Justin played in the GWTBCA all-star game Sunday on a blistering hot afternoon with winds whipping around all day.  It was brutal in those aluminum stands at Moegle Field.

We got to see him be recognized before the game for being the 2A recipient of a scholarship from GWTBCA.  This was nice as there were only four scholarships granted from 5A-1A and Justin was awarded one of them.

Then later he reached base on an error at 2nd, but was promptly picked off first by the left handed pitcher.  When Justin went into the dugout, he sat down and said, “Daaaaannnggg!”  After which a teammate replied, “Yeah, I forgot to tell you he has a SICK pickoff move.”  Justin would not be the last this pitcher would get.  Another north runner was picked off by the same pitcher and a third should have been had not the 1st baseman misplayed the ball.  That must be SOME move.

Justin pitched the 3rd and 4th innings.  Didn’t stretch well before the appearance and didn’t have his best stuff, but still did pretty well.  The north defense let him down a little in the 3rd inning when a misplayed ball at 3rd base would have ended the inning with no runs scored.  For once he got Jace Chancellor to ground a simple hopper instead of drilling it back at the pitcher, and we still didn’t get him out! 

Instead, two runs scored before we got the third out.  He pitched the 4th inning and had another tough outing.  Three runs scored in the inning and it was mixture of leaving pitches up in the zone, a couple of walks, a hit batsman and more less than stellar defense.  Hey, to be honest, some of these boys are asked to play out of position in these games and it ends up showing eventually.  Justin didn’t do bad, but not what he’d hoped for.

He was the first batter up in the top of the 9th (9 inning games in this showcase) with his team down three, and drilled a line drive into left center than rolled to the wall for a standup double.  It’s just what his team needed.  Shallowater teammate Dusty Leach came in to run for him, which was a good move and one Justin supported.  The north eventually got two runs in to close it to 9-8 but lost the game by that one run.

So the kids last at bat in high school was a stand up double ripped to left center.  Not a bad way to end.

Last High School At Bat

Slow Recovery

Mercy, it is taking me a long time to get over last weekend.  Two days in a row of staying up past 2:30am with the emotion and stress of graduating the oldest boy and then having the baseball team end their season in a one game playoff were almost more than I could take.  Monday I had the last game of the youngest boy’s JR league season which was delayed due to lightning, but did finish after 10pm.  I have come home the last two days, had supper and collapsed in a chair.  Of couse, I awake in time to be alert about 11 or midnight…which is just continuing this vicious cycle when I have to get up for work the next morning.

I have GOT to get this resolved.  About a month off would do it.

What?  No, no, no.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with getting older.  Silly question.