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Friday, May 27, 2011

Summer Cricket Fever Dream

Summer has arrived in the northern hemisphere.  Well, it's close enough anyway.  After spending it's winter down in Australia it has finally returned to the top and has brought with it so many interesting things.  For one, cricket!

The weather up here is warming which means the cricket is back.  Sure the Cricket World Cup (#cwc11) was only a few months ago, and the IPL has been on for the last month.  It's back to the international stuff, though, and Test cricket!  Today I caught small bits of Sri Lanka vs England in Cardiff.  It was the second day of the test and Sri Lanka went all out for 400.  That's a pretty good score for an innings... I think.  Still learning y'see.  I love watching those white uniformed bastards battle for superiority, I really do. 

Also going on in the world of cricket is the IPL final.  This is harder for me to really sink my teeth into.  It's a more familiar form of sports for my American brain, city teams in a league.  So many years of soccer has, however, conditioned my brain for national teams so I don't mind that.  The IPL has been notoriously hard to find online.  Sure I can find match summaries and live updates, but unless I'm watching the game I have trouble following the league.  I managed to watch only two games, Kings XI vs Deccan and Mumbai vs Kerala.  I'm also not as informed about India as I am about, say, England or Japan.  That is another barrier to following the IPL.  All of the big name players compete in the league so there is a lot of excitement, certainly, but it didn't capture my interest this year.  I was too busy and the schedule is extremely tight, understandably, so I mostly passed on it this year.  Maybe next year I'll give it a chance, though that depends on so many different factors in my life. 

I'll try to catch the IPL final Madras... oops Chennai vs Bangalore.  There are some players that I'm familiar with on those teams.  MS Dhoni, Michael Hussey, Chris Gayle, Doug Bollinger, AB de Villiers, and Daniel Vettori. 

Ashes recieved a package from Cricket Australia in the mail the other day containing childrens cricket sets.  We had been expecting the delivery for a while but I guess the whole thing got stuck overseas for quite a while, to our frustration.  Luckily I arrived home from work last week to find a huge package sitting on the porch addressed to Ashes.  I had to resist the urge to open it until she finished work and then we busted it open.


Inside was a large duffel bag with the Milo in2cricket logo on the outside and stuffed full of cricket gear inside.  Six cricket bats, a dozen cricket balls, six sets of stumps and field markers were the contents.  We immediately took a bat a piece and went out into the yard for a quick hit around.  We didn't play long as the yard at the place we rent isn't meant for activity, but it was a lot of fun to finally have our own stuff.  Yes, it's meant for kids.  That won't stop me from enjoying the hell out of this stuff as much as any of the kids that will use it.  On a day that isn't raining (of which there have been few lately) she's going to bring the set into her preschool and play the game with the kids.  I'm sure there will be videos or photos to accompany the experience, so look forward to that as well.  For the moment I've rarely been without a cricket bat by my side over the last week.  It just feels good to have one around, like I'm not so out of touch with the cricketing world.

We haven't got any major travel plans this summer, unless some kind cricket organization wants to invite us to a game... which of course is highly unlikely.  So we'll just resort to the standard day trips this year.  We have got a cartload of new trip possibilities in our immediate area.  Since we moved down to Massachusetts last fall we haven't had a chance to explore much since winter was so extreme this year.  This means we have dozens of destinations in western Mass to visit.  There are also hundreds of places in a 2-3 hour radius to occupy us all summer.  Adventures await, and hopefully the accompanying articles!

I have a few more half completed posts about Sydney to finish, and after that I can move on to other stuff.  So look forward to even more gushing about Australia's finest city, as if you aren't already sick of hearing it.

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