You Know Your Daughter Plays Fastpitch if . . .

[BobInMadison]

when you are on vacation and pass a field you look to see if a game is going on, maybe you can pull over and watch a few of the local teams playing to see how they look in the Boise area....then realizing that it is the beginning of August you resign yourself to the fact that you will have to wait another THREE weeks to watch your DDs play in a game....then you drift to thinking about guys like Bob in Madison or 29s dad and what they must go through from November to May and you thank God that you are only visiting an area with winter weather. Then you think that maybe Boise would be a good place to live, and the girls would probably kill it there after playing against the SoCal teams all their lives, but what would you do for money? then a kid fight breaks out in the backseat and you are drawn back into the fact that you have been driving for 8 hours and really need to see a man about a horse...so you pull the family truckster over for a break.

Strange as it seems, Madison does NOT have the longest winters of any place I have lived, but it is the coldest. I spent a year in La Grande, Oregon. Rather, I spent 9 months. I had a 9 month contract for a tenure track teaching position, and I was there 9 months to the day. I stopped teaching after that, just to leave the town.

Late September, Indian Summer, was really weird. Mornings in the high 20s, afternoons in the high 70s. Every day. I was glad to have an office where I could store all the layers. I would see co-eds walking to school in parkas and mini-skirts.

By October, winter was there.

Winter ended early that year. The last measurable snow was in mid-May. One year it snowed on July 4th. I took my kids sledding in the mountains in early June. So, I was there 9 months, and only a few weeks of that was not winter. Boise is a little milder, but not much.