When summer time hits and the high school ball fields are empty, the sports pages need to be filled. We receive news of little league baseball teams, soccer teams, roller hockey teams, swimmers, golfers, drivers of all ages and track athletes. In addition to all of these stories, my colleague Kevin Wandra and I have started a summer tradition of challenging each other to sporting activities around the county and seeing how we stack up. Last year, we went miniature golfing at DixieLand Fun Park. I won the first course and Kevin won the second, also eking out a one-stroke overall win.

That headline, while clever, is a little misleading. I am the one trying to get fit with the new Wii Fit. My wife is already in great shape. Just two months after the birth of our daughter, she is already back to her weight before we even had kids. And yes, I am more than a little jealous. I enjoyed all the sympathy weight gain while she was pregnant with our son, Colin (another brownie sundae, dear?), but didn’t get to enjoy any of the calorie draining breast-feeding after he was born.

The Citizen has certainly done its share of picking on The Frederick Brown Jr. Amphitheater in the past and not without reason (semi-annual REO Speedwagon/Foreigner shows anyone?), but the kick-off to the 2008 Summer Concert Series was fantastic.

The hot topic of the 1984 McKay Elementary School Science Fair, at least in the mind of a charming, fourth grade boy with the initials M.B., was acid rain. He had read about this in an issue of National Geographic, which came to his home faithfully thanks to a gift from his Grampy.

I forgot how small babies are when they are first born.

Our son, Colin, will be three years old at the end of April and he looks like a giant compared to his baby sister, Nora. When he holds her and tries to pat her head I am reminded of the giant in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, expecting him to start hugging and squeezing and calling his sister George at any minute.

From time to time, I get called a Yankee. It’s done mostly in a joking manner and the person calling me that isn’t thinking about my deep hatred for the baseball team with the same name. The word typically comes up when something truly southern comes up in conversation.

7th grade dance

We had been going out for a week, although we hadn’t actually gone anywhere.

We had agreed to meet at the school dance, which was to be held in the gym, that Friday. I don’t remember what I wore that night, other than a liberal amount of English Leather, and I can’t remember what she wore either.

I sat in the living room of my cousin Lisa’s apartment last year watching the AFC Championship game between the Patriots and Colts with family members I hadn’t seen in years. We ate this great chicken pot pie and had a few beers, celebrating and hooting and hollering as the Patriots ran up an 18 point lead over Peyton Manning and his boys.

Is everybody O.K.? Did you have enough bread and milk to last you the night on Saturday?

Whew, that was some batch of flurries.

Close your eyes and try to imagine what the news room of The Citizen looks like. Don’t get scared. We won’t let Ben bite.

First off, this is not in response to not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus for Christmas. I understand that there is really no room in Santa’s sleigh for a vending machine full of Hostess’ Suzy-Qs and Drake’s Devil Dogs. Besides, it is important to be careful what you wish for. You wish for a mega-supply of delicious baked goods and you get something else, like a huge gut. Or worse.

“Merrit, Tre Merritt
King of Dewitt, Arkansas”

To the tune of “Davy Crockett”

The story of five-year-old Tre Merritt, a descendant of Davy Crockett, killing a 445-pound black bear lit up the internet on Tuesday. There were stories about the tiny hunter on both ESPN.com and Drudge Report, as well as video clips of little Merritt holding a rifle and driving an ATV.

Ahhh, the slow news days of December. A time to read about Hannah Montana’s march across the country, raunchy mannequins in a shopping mall, teddy bears named Muhammad and the return of Don Imus to the airwaves.

I have been racking my brain lately - and yes, this does require stretching it out on a medieval instrument of torture (it actually feels good for the first few turns) - not for column ideas but for Christmas gifts. How could I not be after Black Friday, Gray Saturday and Off-White Sunday? What they say is true, if you don’t have your gifts chosen by Taupe Thursday then you must not really love your loved ones.

They say one of the joys of parenting is being able to re-live your childhood by playing with your children. You get to re-read classic tales like “Hop on Pop,” a book which my 2-and-a-half year old son, Colin, has just recently decided to take quite literally, play games like Hide and Seek, color and use some of the eight million toys, many of which are battery operated, annoying and/or noisy, that people have bestowed upon your child in the hopes of driving you as completely bonkers as their children drove them.

Halloween was a over week ago, but the candy that little Colin amassed will be with us for a long time to come. If you love candy (and who doesn’t?), slap a monkey costume on a toddler and watch the goodies come rolling in.

Football is a sport with a proud tradition and with the rising popularity of websites dedicated to football at all levels, football video games and radio and television networks dedicated to yearround football coverage, the football fan has a wealth of information at their fingertips at all times.

On Sunday, July 1, I decided to get in my car and travel up I-85 to Greenville, SC. I wanted to see the ball park that some had called a “mini Fenway” and the Greenville Drive, a single A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox (my favorite team). If I went on this particular day I would also get to see Sandy Creek graduate Brent Brewer play. Brewer is the starting shortstop for the West Virginia Power, a single A affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Frederick Brown Jr. Amphitheater hosted Southside Slugfest II Saturday night and the place was packed with people watching grown men battle each other in hand-to-hand combat inside a locked cage.

There is a song called “Life Is A Highway.” It was originally recorded by Tom Cochrane of Red Rider and then remade by Rascal Flatts and put on the soundtrack for the movie “Cars,” which I have watched umpteen times since giving it to my son for Christmas, but that is another story.

Scene: The White House, with a white picket fence around it and a tire swing in the front yard. Daddy is sitting at the table enjoying a lemonade while he listens to the ball game on the radio.

I grew up in a suburb of Boston and one of my earliest memories is of listening to Johnny Most call Celtics games on my transistor radio while I drifted off to sleep. This may seem unusual for anyone who had ever heard Most’s trademark, rusty nails on a chalkboard squawk, but his calling of names like Bird, McHale, Parrish, Ainge and Johnson, as in Dennis, better known in Most-speak as DJ, was like a soothing mantra for a little boy with hoop dreams.

If you have ever read my movie reviews, you know I am a fan of horror movies. I even put one of them, “Slither,” on my list of top 10 films of 2006. I started 2007 the way I ended 2006, by watching a movie, and I can honestly say that the most recent film I watched was one of the scariest I had seen in awhile.

As a parent, I have left many of my old haunts behind and picked up a new set of stomping grounds. Gone are the days when I could pop in to a bookstore for a long, leisurely browse and maybe enjoy one of those phenomenal gingerbread lattes at Starbucks.

I like horror movies as much as the next guy. O.K., I probably like them a lot more than the next guy and that is why movies like “The Grudge 2” tick me off. It shouldn’t exist, but it does and it laughs at you, while not giving you one iota of a reason for its existence while you are watching it. It has no compelling story to complete, no fun character to follow, nothing left in its arsenal after the first one and yet here it is.

It hit the papers last week that a school in Massachusetts banned the game tag from recess.

As I read the story, I thought, why couldn’t this have happened somewhere like Delaware. It embarrasses me that this happened in my native state. I couldn’t believe what I was reading at first and then, upon further review, I could definitely believe it. This is just the latest in a war on childhood, a war that featured a salvo against dodgeball several years ago.

Temperatures soar in Iraq and U.S. soldiers suit up and admirably do their duty, trying to quell the seemingly unending insurgence and periods of civil unrest and merely survive until their tour of duty is up.

I got back from my first trip south of the border on Sunday night and I am no worse for the wear.

No Montezuma’s revenge and no really bad security stories (although taking the sippy cup that was filled with bottled water from the airplane after we got back to Atlanta is a bit much).

I was recently released from what amounted to a monumental waste of time.

No, I’m not talking about a viewing of Rob Schneider’s latest film, nor am I talking about the umpteenth discussion of Mel Gibson’s apology to people of the Jewish faith on the Fox News Channel.