A Brief Hiatus

Despite my best efforts to sit down and write, I'm afraid other responsibilities are eating away my time for blogging at the moment. This spring is markedly different from last year: I'm an assistant coach for two baseball teams, my son's rec league team and his travel team, plus running a extra workout each week for three All-Star candidates and scouting all the teams we don't play until late in the season so we can draft out league's All-Star team by the end of April.

On top of that, I'm handling the process for incorporating my son's travel team as a 501(c)3, which includes paperwork for the Secretary of State, the Franchise Tax Board, and the IRS, drafting bylaws and a budget, creating a website, and lining up potential donors. With tournament fees, insurance, uniforms and other equipment, and promotions, it's costing the parents collectively over $10,000.00 a year for the boys to play, and our goal is to defray a significant portion of that through sponsorship.

I certainly haven't run out of things to blog about - in fact, my queue of half-written posts hovers right around fifty at the moment, including two new event tables, non-player character-specific Advantages and Secrets, and a 'village of Hommlet' for swashbucklers drawn from a Kids of Carcasonne game board. I'm really excited to put all of this out to y'all, but right now my personal free time is consumed by America's Pastime.

There may be a few sporadic posts here and there: I still want to get a couple of posts up for The Queen's Cavaliers, and if I finish something in a quiet moment, I won't hold off on posting it, but I also don't want to race to turn out crap just to keep a schedule. It's better to step back for a bit.

So, RBE is going deep and quiet probably until the end of April - hopefully the incorporation paperwork will be complete by then, All-Star selections will be made, and my extra workout each week will be replaced by someone else's actual practice.

Thanks for being patient, and I hope you'll continue to stick around.

I'll conclude with a quick (and true) anecdote from last week.

My son and I were on our way to the batting cages at his field to warm-up for his game that day, and he asked me, "Daddy, what's 'play ball'?"

"The two most beautiful words in the English language, son," I replied.

Thanks again.