Today was day 2 of my son's soccer tournament. As expected, they got their butts kicked by the Under 14 teams. We were missing one of our bigger players and another good mid, too. Some of those U14 boys were, no fooling, six feet tall, at least one was at least a foot taller than my son, who's coming up on 5'3" They made a much better showing against the U13 boys. They have some offensive issues, but they dominated most of the time (they just couldn't get it in the goal). Against the U14 boys, my son made two absolutely stellar defensive plays, one came with the goalie too far out of the box. The giant boys blew past the goalie but my son blocked the shot in the goal (no hands since he's a fullback). Awesome play. He made another similar play in the next game. He played a little offense but not for long, since they soon needed him on defense. Interesting, though, to see him on offense. Still, there's signs of the team coming together. They should win some league games.

Today's games were deadly hot. 100+ degrees. Yuck yuck yuck. I'm wiped out completely, and that was just from watching. My brain is fried. I managed to get through 2-3 books this weekend so far. More on that later.

The tomatoes are starting to come in and it's heaven. Tonight I parboiled a couple of tomatoes with the pasta, then skinned them, mushed up the innards with garlic and butter and mixed in the pasta. Yummy! I like cooking that doesn't require a recipe. And garden tomatoes. Oh, to have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. Heaven, indeed.

So, I read books during the tournament in-between times (they had games at 9am and 2pm both days) one book I won't mention by title or author because I didn't much like it. It was Romantic Suspense by a NYT author and included everything I consider cheap parlor tricks. I intensely disliked the heroine, too. She was a whiner. But mostly I despised the deliberate inclusion of tricks, just plain authorial tricks, to make it look like one of the characters was the villain. There's a difference between a red herring and an authorial lie. Like, suppose you have two characters whose names are, say, Fredericka and Felicia and everyone calls Fredericka "Freddie". So, when the psycho has a conversation with "Freddie" who could it be but Fredericka, right? No. Turns out Felicia has a secret nickname of "Freddie" which isn't revealed until the last few pages. This book went straight into the garbage.

I also read Lori Foster's Simon Says which I enjoyed a lot. It was well written, internally consistent, mostly worked against stereotype and cliche, and was fun. I've started Tess Gerritsen's Mephisto Club. Pretty good so far. I read a page or two of Cormack McCarthy's The Road, realized it was going to be depressing as heck and set it aside for a time when my brain isn't fried from heat.

I'm going to bed now. I'm going to sleep late tomorrow morning and then get myself caught up on Scandal.

Labels: reading, Scandal