Last night, we took the whole family to a Washington Wizards basketball game. It was a lot of fun–Selma enjoyed every second. She loved the game, the “dancers,” Jay liked the mascot and all the clapping and chanting. We’re paying for it today, all tired and out of sorts from a change in our schedule.

I had some crocheting with me, but It didn’t make its way out of the bag in the arena (it did on the metro) because Jay was too bouncy going from lap to lap.

During the game, A Wizard player had the ball, but he realized he was falling out of bounds. Just in time, he threw the ball so it bounced off his opponent’s foot, and then out of bounds. Because it touched a player on the other team, the rules say the ball stayed in possession of the Wizards. I thought this was completely unfair. Unsportsmanlike. The opposing player never reached for the ball or touched the ball–it was thrown at him (something an opponent would never do under other circumstances). But no one sitting near me agreed with me. “Those are the rules,” they said. I was trying to think of any such “rule” in everyday life, but I couldn’t. Imagine, you’re about to have some kind of problem, and instead, you push a problem onto someone else, on purpose, to save yourself the trouble. To me, that seems to break what my mom calls “the golden rule.”

Aside from that–I loved seeing how the two teams interacted. I’ve been mostly to baseball games in the past few years, and there’s often shouting, and sometimes even brawls between teams. But during last night’s game, I saw Wizards helping up Pistons when they fell down, and vice versa, and after the game (The Wizards won), I saw high-fives and even hugs between players of opposing teams–they’re clearly friends off the court which was cool to see.

I went to a new yarn shop yesterday. It’s called A Tangled Skein (no web site yet), and it’s in Hyattsville, MD. right on Rt 1. The shop is big and the people there are very friendly and fun. I’m going back tonight to their “sit and stitch.” The shop is in a great location with no competing stores in the entire county from what I can think of–and it’s a downtown area that’s having a very artsy renaissance, so a yarn shop fits right in.

Of Yarn and Wizards