Heirs of the Magi News Flash!

***Heirs of the Magi News Flash!*** Winter has, for the most part, been mild so far - or awesome for the month that Cassie and Michael spent in summertime-Australia! They are home now and will be working from home for most of the time until Easter. The hometown work will include getting ready for their next trip, but there will be a lot of fun to get in on and share with their favorite people - including their March Break trip to Florida adventure. All of your favorite Magi Masters will continue to work and play while their future plans unfold; so... ...Visit Witch Falls often to keep up with all of their latest stories; and Happy Reading!

Monday, August 24, 2015

Cassie's Journal - August 24, 2015



What a day!

I’ll start with the cheerleading news, since tryouts were a big part of my day; and continue on to the football report after that.

The first bit of news is that Rowen and I don’t have any competition for the Grade Ten spots on the squad.  We hadn’t heard that any of our classmates were going to give that a shot; so that wasn’t a complete surprise.  It is nice to know that we won’t be in a fight for the jobs this year, though.  Jenny and Tammy can’t say the same because they do have two Grade Eleven competitors.  I’ll be blunt about that; and just suggest that their classmates are delusional if they think they can out-cheer Jenny or Tammy.  It isn’t going to happen.  As always, it’ll be the Grade Nine competition that’ll be the most intense; and I haven’t decided which girls are my personal favorites to join the squad from that group of hopefuls quite yet.  I’ll let you know when I do get there; and then we’ll see if that works out and our captain, Anna-Marie Palmer, agrees.

As for the actual tryouts, our workouts were a bit less intense than last summer; and we instead spent a bit more time on the creativity side of cheerleading.  Anna-Marie and Erica Bassett, our two senior cheerleaders this year, want to do more with both our half-time routine and sideline cheers; so being able to help out with that is going to definitely be part of the equation when they pick their squad.  Rowen and I already had a dozen new ideas for routines that we worked on last week; so we’re way ahead of the curve on that – and we impressed Anna-Marie and Erica.

The warm-ups, exercises, and cheerleading drills kept us busy even if we didn’t physically work quite as hard as last year; and all of the girls loved every minute of it – even when it was tough for the younger girls that aren’t used to the physical effort that goes into being a cheerleader.  No, it isn’t all fashion and beauty secrets, boys; so don’t go there.  From what I saw today, there were some hopefuls for the football team that would have had a problem with our workout.  That sounds strange considering the fact that almost every guy in and around Witch Falls work on farms or doing other physically demanding jobs; but there is a difference between those kinds of work and training for either football or cheerleading.  For the cheerleading side of that; I’ll just sum it up in one word – flexibility.

I’m sorry if that comment left you with a scary mental picture of big football linemen trying to do the impossible – for them; but instead of thinking about that too much; let’s move on to the football report next.

It was and wasn’t a tough day for Michael, Tim, and the rest of the football hopefuls.  The physical effort that Michael and Tim put into their first day of tryouts was more intense than last year; but that wasn’t the case for everyone.  The good news for them is that they stood out as the top two players on the field; and the bad is that they are not happy with how the training went for most of the other guys with just a handful of exceptions.  Lucas was one of those exceptions; along with a few of the guys that have been training with them for the past few weeks.

Tim had a lot to say about everything that happened with them today after our practices when Michael and I hung out with Tim and Rowen until dinnertime.  It’d take quite a while to cover all of that; so let’s just include a few highlights instead of writing an essay.  Jason Johnson has pretty much anointed himself team captain this year, and since the other seniors support him; Tim’s sure it’s a done deal – even though he doesn’t think it’s a good idea.  Jason is a big part of the problems Tim’s seeing with the team this year – an over-confidence combined with lack of effort from the seniors that have now been on two championship teams and somehow think they’re unbeatable.  Since most of them only made the team for the first time in their Grade Ten year; winning is all they know.  What Tim thinks that they don’t know is how much effort the past two senior football players and captains put into making those teams worthy of being champions.

For the football skills part of the tryouts, Michael, Tim, and Lucas are all even better than last season.  Being taller is part of that for Michael and Tim, and along with all of the extra training and weightlifting workouts; they’re stronger and faster.  That’s great for the team, but they have a problem this year at quarterback.  While Coach Robinson pretty much leaves every position open for competition during tryouts; our team lost a very capable quarterback to graduation; and our top prospect this year isn’t nearly as good.  Ray Parker has wanted his shot at the job pretty much since Grade Nine, and will likely be our quarterback this year if Tim’s right about the complete lack of competition; but he really isn’t nearly as good as Jeff Morris was for the past two seasons.

I can pick one word to describe Ray’s quarterbacking issue – accuracy.  Jeff wasn’t flashy, and couldn’t throw the huge passes; but he didn’t mess up many throws either; and that gave his receivers a chance to do something with the play after the catch.  Michael and Tim didn’t have to worry about getting killed out on the field today, but one of Tim’s biggest worries right now is over how to keep from getting clobbered thanks to bad passes from Ray – or defend even worse passes from being intercepted.  He assured Rowen and me that there’d have been more interceptions at the practice today if he and Michael had been defending against Ray instead of working as his receivers.

Finally, for this update, Tim needed to vent a bit with us about their new, as-yet-unofficial team captain.  While he doesn’t have the specific data to back up his opinion; I could confirm that Jason did not kick as well today as he was kicking last season – though I couldn’t tell Tim that.  He’s a bit off on the actual numbers, and I didn’t see everything Jason did today while working on that; but his range is down more than ten yards for field goals; and his accuracy is down even more – maybe as much as twenty yards; but fifteen for sure.  While that’s a big problem, Tim’s more upset about Jason’s methods of motivating his fellow players.  I’ll be blunt again and just say that Jason likes to use back-handed compliments; insults; and sarcasm as his primary ‘motivational’ tools.  That style of leadership might even work on some of the guys; but Tim is sure that it won’t make them a better team – regardless of which guys end up making the team this year.  I agree with him; but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.

On the brighter side, some of our classmates are doing much better so far with their tryouts; and Tim and Michael think that they’ll have at least three of the Grade Ten guys joining them on the team this year.  I won’t name names now in case they’re wrong about that; but keep you posted for how that works out by Thursday when the final team picks will be announced.  Whatever happens, my two favorite football players are going to be glad to have some classmate company on the team this season!

Rowen and I were finished our cheerleading tryouts for the day more than a half-hour before the guys were done; so we waited for them and watched the tail-end of their workout before heading back to Michael’s house to go for a swim and cool off once they were set free for the day.  That was fun, and so was the chat time; but we didn’t really have that long to spend together before Rowen and Tim left to have dinner with his parents and Michael and I went inside to help out with getting dinner ready at his house.  That wasn’t a lot of work, since we were having an easy-dinner night so that Michael could be ready to move on to his baseball practice on time; but the dinnertime fun was all about spending that couple of hours with his parents and Rebecca.  That would have been more fun if Lucas could have been there too, but he had needed to hurry back out to his farm and get to work right after football; and he’ll likely be working until dark every day this week.

I feel sorry for him over that; since he’s going to be very sore after the football workouts and then hours of farm work on both sides of the sports training; and he doesn’t have the advantage of a Magi Master girlfriend.  That’s skipping ahead of the story; but I’ll admit that I was happy to help Michael out with some Magi-powered healing before I came home tonight when he was starting to get very sore and cramped up from a long day of football and baseball.

For the record, Michael – no, I do not plan on ever healing anyone else while also sharing long hugs and kisses; so quit joking about it with me. ;^)

I stayed and helped with the dinner clean-up when Michael headed for the school ball diamond to meet up with Tim.  Rebecca decided to come along with me after that; we picked up Ethan and Ehlana along the way; and went to the school for some playground time while the boys were playing baseball.  Rowen met up with us there, and we had other kids and teens to play with; so that was another hour or so of fun before we all went back to Michael and Rebecca’s house to go for another cool-down swim.

Mom and Dad came over to hang out with Jacob and Miranda after seeing us out at the river; they took the twins home with them; and Michael and I had some alone time in his room after Rowen and Tim left that was partly about playing music, having a little make-out session, and healing Michael of all of his aches and pains.  That all added up to a lot of busy, but we still managed to fit all of that into just a couple of hours; and I came home at ten-thirty.

That had me here in time to do the bedtime routine with Ethan and Ehlana; I had them tucked into bed by eleven; and then I got ready for bed too and moved right into my bedtime computing and family business work.  I need to be ready for another busy day tomorrow, so I time-phased the entire work session so that I could get everything done without staying up until three or four; which is why I’m exhausted by will be sleeping before midnight.  Trading off the extra sleep time with the power drain is basically an even trade, but I still feel better with the extra rest even if that is just an inaccurate perception.

I won’t be perceiving any benefit at all if I don’t wrap this up and get to the napping part of my night, though; so, until next time...

...May the Magi Force be with you!