The boy’s roller hockey games have an announcer who lets the crowd know who scored. Two weeks ago: “Goal by #1 Dylan W on an assist from #2 Gavin W!” I wasn’t there, but apparently their momma melted into a small puddle, right on the spot.

Last night they played the Penguins. They had a week off because of rained out games and practice, so everyone looked RUSTY the first half. The other team went up 3-0. Our guys got fired up for the second half and scored 4 unanswered goals to go up 4-3. After that there were several lead changes and our “Hotwheels” ended up winning 9-7. Dylan played with more passion than I had ever seen in him before. He plays offense and is usually loathe to go help out on defense. Last night, to protect the lead, he charged down to help out. He scored 3 goals. One of them was made while stretched out on his knees, diving for the puck! Gavin also had a solid game. He made a sweet between the legs pass to a team mate who drove down for a score.

Grace had her first soccer practice of spring season and maintained her reputation as a dangerous dribbler.

Last week I worked in Portland. It poured rain here, so I escaped all the rain in So. Cal by going north to sunny Portland. How does that happen? I made the most of it by biking 50 miles and running 3 miles. Local hookups got me into the Nike and Columbia employee stores!! I also got to ride in this Maserati:

This week a massive American-British study of some two million souls throughout 80 countries confirms, empirically, that middle age immiserates us all without regard to income, culture, gender, marital status or previous experience. The study offers a new visual to illustrate the overarching mood swing of life: the U-Curve, in which mental stability and happiness bottoms out in our 40s and into our 50s.

We then get more cheerful as we round the curve and head into the final stretch. In the U.S., women hit bottom at 40 and men at 50, according to the study.

They also speculate that “we learn to count our blessings when we get older. We see friends and family die and we see bad things happen and are just happy to be alive.”

One suspects that, with women and men both, midlife is a time when the mirage of life’s perfectibility and symmetry, as envisioned in one’s youth, comes back to trouble you like a conscience. In plain language, one might call it a last chance at happiness, or of “getting it right.”

Midlife is perhaps the last opportunity to shape your fate before you have to accept it; a phase when you are suddenly taunted by the lives unlived because you can still, though only just, try to live them; a time when you can still become what you might have been. Midlife is a last chance to keep your word with the 10-year-old you once were, who looked forward at life and made a pact with the future. You wake up in middle age to feel you have drifted. Amid a solid family, wife and job, you might feel a kind of awakening, though possibly a delusional one fueled by chemistry. The feeling might haunt you into one last eruptive attempt at realignment.

From Melik Kaylan in 2/2/08 wsj

To top it all off, Mrs. Clinton has, for 30 years, held deep respect for her husband’s political acumen, for his natural, instinctive sense of how to campaign. And he’s never let her down. Now he’s flat-footed, an oaf lurching from local radio interview to finger-pointing lecture. Where did the golden gut go? How did his gifts abandon him? Abandon her? Her campaign blew through $120 million. How did this happen?

And it all happened in public and within her party. The dread Republicans she is used to hating, whom she seems to pay no psychic price for hating, and who hate her right back, are not doing this to her. Her party is doing this.

Her whole life right now is a reverse Sally Field. She’s looking out at an audience of colleagues and saying, “You don’t like me, you really don’t like me!”

From Saturday’s wsj by Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speech writer.

Then there is Obama: supports legislation to prosecute the phone companies that cooperated with the government immediately after 9/11 to track down terrorists. How likely is it that those same companies would cooperate with him in charge when the next crisis strikes?

For Valentine’s Day Shannon and I went to Santa Barbara to watch my nephew Jake’s BYU Lacrosse team play UCSB. They are the defending champions of the MCLA and ranked #1 for 2008. It was a pretty drive: all the rain has really greened things up and we were right on the coast from Ventura to SB. We were expecting it to take 3 hours to get there, so when we made it in 2, it was a pleasant surprise. That gave us time for Valentine’s Day dinner at a local favorite restuarant: Brophy Brothers. Not enough time to visit Oprah’s $85 million estate. The game was great. There were lots of lead changes, Jake had a goal and an assist and it was close until the 4th quarter. The crowd was incredibly rude and vulgar. The cops came after they started throwing cans and balls at the players. BYU ended up winning 15-9. We spent the night Hotel Oceana, which was right across the street from the beach and walking distance from the harbor.

Friday I had a work dinner meeting in Newport Beach, so we took the boys rollerblading around Balboa Island. It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny beautiful scenery. While I was at the meeting Shannon took the kids to see The Spiderwick Chronicles. They liked it.

Some friends from Portland were planning on coming down to stay with us and watch the 3 game So. Cal road trip, but their daughter had to have an emergency appendectomy. Brian and Matthew flew down Saturday in time for the game against Chapman University. Margo and Jim drove down from Utah. The crowd at Chapman was much more civil. Another great game, but BYU lost 15-16 in the last seconds. My nephew felt bad because he got a 3 minute, non-releaseable penalty for an illegal stick. After anyone makes a goal they measure the stick head to make sure everything measures within specific guidelines. His was just outside the limits, so they took away his goal and he had to sit out three minutes while Chapman scored 3 man-up goals. His backup stick didn’t meet the specs either, so for the rest of the game he played with an unfamiliar stick, which made for a frustrating game.

By Saturday night Ashlie was feeling well enough to make the trip, so she flew down with Helen Sunday morning to catch the game on Monday. On Monday they played the Whittier College Poets (nice mascot!!). They are in a higher division. Another great game. BYU came back from being down by 4. Whittier won in OT. Jake had 1 goal. Pretty cool to start as a freshman and score in 2 of the first 3 games of the season!!

Monday I worked early and the kids didn’t have school, so I took Dylan skiing at the little resort up on the mountain from our house. Shannon, Gavin and Grace went to a park with friends. I had very low expectations for the snow conditions since it was 80 degrees in the valley. We made the 20 minute trek up the hill to 8,000 ft (did I mention it’s only 10 miles from our house!!) and found the snow was in great shape. It was soft, but not slushy. There was hardly anyone there, so we never had a lift line. No avalanches this time, just lots of sun. You take a chair up to the main ski area. Usually you have to ride the chair back down to the parking lot. There was still enough snow (barely) to take the cat track down to the parking lot. We scraped up our boards a bit on some rocks on the way down. The view from the top is amazing: Mojave Desert, Edwards Air Force Base, Victor Valley, etc. Favorite apres ski treat: chili cheese fries from The Hat.

The cold spell is over and it feels like SUMMERTIME!! Did a little work in the yard, the kids even braved the pool for a few seconds. At 8:30 AM on Saturday the neighborhood coyote walked right down the middle of the street. From about 30 yards away he stopped, looked at me, then kept on walking. A couple hours later a hawk swooped down and grabbed some kind of rodent/ squirrel, then flew away. When we got home from church on Sunday there were ~20 crows on our parking strip munching on acorns.

Dylan and Gavin started rollerhockey on Saturday. They are on TEAM HOTWHEELS. The coaches wife got permission from Mattel to use a variation of their logo for our team. Gavin played well for his first time. Dylan was a bit rusty, but had 2 goals, one came on an assist from Gavin. They were suffering in the oppressive heat of the first game. It cooled off for the second game as the sun went down. Mild-mannered Gavin loved his first game, especially after he got away with a big retaliatory shove. He SEEMS like such a nice kid, but put some pads on him and he morphs into the “Gavinator”.

For his 4th grade California mission project Gavin chose to do a mission with a family connection: Mission Dolores in San Fran. Gavin’s great, great, great, great grandpa stayed in it for a year and a half in the late 1840s after it had been abandoned. He had just sailed from NYC around South America.

Our town has it’s own school district: CUSD. There are 8 elementary schools, one middle school (7-8th grades) and a top ranked high school. Famous alums from CUSD: Jessica Alba, Ben Harper and Frank Zappa. Dylan and I went to a meeting for a robotics competition the school district is putting on for 5th to 12th graders. The judges will be graduate students from Claremont Graduate University. There will be eight teams that each get their own Legos Mindstorm robot, $100 for additional accessories AND a mentor from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasedena. How cool is that?!? The engineers that built the friggin’ Mars Rover are going to help my 5th grader build a robot. Dylan LOVES LEGOS, so he is excited. The competition has a speed course and a “follow the line” course.

Yesterday I did a quick trip to Portland for work and a pharmacy school job fair event. It was set up like speed dating: 35 pharmacist from different practices and 35 students. For 5 minutes the students would find out about different options in pharmacy practice, then rotate to another pharmacist. It went well. Things I like about my job: flexible hours (3.5 day weekends every 3rd week, off work at 10 AM every third week), working with my hands and the challenge of matching resources to the orders we get. I’ve been able to travel quite a bit with work, also: Toronto twice, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, St Louis too many times, Chicago, Boston twice, Vegas many times, Ft Lauderdale, Marco Island, Austin, San Fran and So. Cal many times. It’s been a good gig!