Unfinished Boy Business

This is a post I meant to get up in June, but just never got around to posting....or even writing, come to think on it....

June was a busy month for me.  Remember the waterless well?  What a lark that was.  Incidently, sometime in July--about a month after we left, as happy chance would have it--the fish we kept in the well, and tasked with eating all the worms and moldy bug-a-boos that might muck up the water, died, rotted, and essentially poisoned the whole system.  It was apparently no small task to get it all cleaned up and rebooted, so to speak.  Shame I missed that.  On a happy note, there was plenty of water on hand to flush through the system once it was clean again....

Anyhoo--back to the unpleasantness of June.  In between hauling all those buckets of water up from the lake, I found myself frantically driving Boy to and from soccer practices and (finally) a handful of real games. 

How psyched was Boy to show up at that first game and be handed a real uniform?  Blue!  With sponsors and everything!  The awesome was palpable.

To be honest, Boy's athletic performance is haphazard and, shall we say, uneven at best.  I believe he has the raw material of a potentially superb athlete.  But at the moment, like many of his kind, he suffers from the short attention span and volatile grace of a Golden Retriever puppy.  The strongest, most solid kick I saw him make during the entire season clocked his own team's best player squarely in the face.  Boy was about to feel really bad about this until he got distracted by the goalie's sister turning cart-wheels on the sidelines.  He's never scored a goal.  He rarely manages more than to merely get in the way of the other team's attempt to hussle the ball.  He'd never dream of attempting to steal the thing from them.  He'd be uncertain what to do if they just handed it to him.  None of this bothers Boy in the least.  He has the time of his life everytime he goes out to play.  I hope some of that comes across in the pictures.

I love the orange shoes.  What flare!  No one else on the pitch has them.  No one else could carry them off.

I believe he believes his team scored a goal.  This may or may not have been true.  He often got confused and cheered for the other team's goals as well.

Huddle up!

 The kid on his right, the one whose face we can see, that's Ole-- Boy's bestest friend in the whole wide world.

The last weekend before we left, his team participated in a cup/tournament thingy (different, apparently, and separate from the other series of matches he'd been playing....fucking soccer....baffles me) at the end of which, all the players got a medal and a goofy headband.  He lost the medal, but that headband he wore to bed for three nights running.