It is the evening of November 2nd, and most of my friends are watching baseball.
Most of my friends don't even like baseball.
Actually, most of my friends are lamenting the rain delay that is preventing them from watching baseball. They want to watch History Being Made. Hey, the Cubs might win. If they do, it will indeed be historical. Not, you know, Felix Baumgartner jumping from the stratosphere historical, but yeah, historical. I get it.
Growing up, I loved baseball. A deep part of me still loves baseball. I played baseball. I collected baseball cards. Even chewed the crappy gum. I rooted for the Tigers, even though they have never, within the span of my personal memory, not sucked. (Actually, that's not true. In 1987, they were pretty darned good. The one game I ever saw from inside Tiger Stadium, they beat the Angels.)
A big part of me wishes I had as much passion for the game as I did back then. That I wanted nothing more than to sit through this rain delay until the game resumed at 12:15 tomorrow morning and maybe watch the Cubs win the series for the first time in over a century. That I was on the phone with my Dad, both of us watching the field dry, talking about how, either way, this was one hell of a game.
Me? I wrote. I encouraged my kids to write. While the world focuses on the final game of the World Series (it IS the final game, right?), November 2 is, in my household, Day Two of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and we've been focusing instead on our word count goals.
And while it's not a World Series Pennant, I'm pretty happy with our progress. Both my older children are participating this year, and so far our days one and two have actually been pretty similar. All three of us got off to a slow start on Day One -- something under 1% or so... and all three of us hauled today and landed very close to our daily word count average that will help us to hit our overall goals for the month. For me, doing the full NaNo experience, I'm shooting for 50,000 words by the end of November. My children, who haven't ever really written anything over 1,000 words, I talked them into putting themselves out there and shooting for 20,000.
And I'm pretty darned proud of 'em, because tomorrow, if things work out half as well as they did today, they'll be ahead of schedule.
And I'm happy to be here for them, encouraging them and coaxing them to victory. It may not make history, but it'll make a difference to them, and, really, that's all the history I need.
NaNoWriMo Day TWO WordCount
ME: 3348/50,000
Son: 1332/20,000
Daughter: 1133/20,000
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