Never Underestimate Radical Vision

“You’re not Santa. You smell like beef and cheese! You don’t smell like Santa.”

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I had a great Christmas. Isaac, now three, loved every minute of it. He was so excited about opening presents and singing songs. It was great to be able to experience Christmas as a kid again. It truly believe Christmas is a child’s holiday. My wife had him put out milk and cookies for Santa on Christmas Eve and he was delighted to see them gone in the morning. We spent Christmas day at my in-laws and Santa came to visit in full Santa garb (a special thanks to the next door neighbor for brightening a kid’s day).

The question of the day is: Would you tell your child Santa is real?

My current position is that I will tell him the truth if he asks me, otherwise I will let him believe that Santa is real. I grew up thinking Santa was real as a child and when I found out that he wasn’t it was no big deal. I don’t ever remember my parents telling me he was real, they just let me believe what I wanted about Santa. When I grew old enough to figure it out I understood why they did it that way. I have to admit that Christmas lost a bit of the magic after I found out the truth. I personally find no problem in that, yet I know others do. What do you think? I would love to know.

Am I lying to my son by letting him believe in Santa? I could see it as a lie if I told him that he was real. Is a lie an untruth only, a manner in which you deceive someone or a combination of the two?

One thing is for certain, he knows the true meaning of Christmas, well as much as a 3 year old can understand. If you have children what have you done? If you do not have children how are you going to handle that situation? How were you personally raised and how did that effect you? Have at it.

“Crisco, Bardol, Vagisil. Any one of them will give you another two to three inches drop on your curve ball. Of course if the umps are watching me real close I’ll rub a little jalape”o up my nose, get it runnin’, and if I need to load the ball up just wipe my nose.”

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Well the major league winter meetings are under way and now the fun begins. I am very interested in what moves the St. Louis Cardinals make. I also want to see what the player’s union and the owners do about steriods.

I see that we just re-signed Matt Morris for 2.5 million with 4.5 million in performance bonuses .I am really glad that we got to keep Morris. He was making 12+ million and was just not worth that price tag anymore. It would be great to see him return to form and earn that 4.5 million. He is a great Cardinal and I love watching him pitch. Let’s just hope he can find the Matt Morris of a few years ago. I think he can, I mean he is only 30.

I also see that Tony Womak signed with the Yankees for 4 million. Good for him! I am glad to see him get a good contract. He was great for us last year but we have some young players waiting to fill that second base position. Hopefully Hector Luna can prove he can get on base enough to land the position.

I really hope we can re-sign Edgar Renteria. The Cubs were looking at him pretty hard but they just signed Nomar for another year. I believe that is a good sign for us. If we don’t land Edgar, I hope we go after Orlando Cabrera. He has a good bat and can play defense. It is just hard to picture Edgar in another uniform.

I hear that we might try to sign Randy Johnson. I think this move would be a big mistake. For the same money we could pick up Matt Clement and Russ Ortiz. You give these guys the run support we can produce and both will have productive years, just ask Jeff Suppan. They only way I could see justifing his salary was to bring him in to teach the young pitchers we would be bringing up. I am interested in seeing what the front office does with our pitching staff.

I think if we could add a few good pitchers and run with a few young ones we will be right back in the World Series. Pitching is not what killed us in the big game, it was hitting. That being said though, there are a few young pitchers. I would like to have becuase I think they could be even better with our lineup to protect their mistakes. We shall see.

Now, what do you think your team needs to do to get to the big dance? I will help you out. Here are a few players that were not offered arbitration:

Troy Glaus
Jeff Kent
Jermaine Dye
Carlos Delgado
J.D. Drew
Russ Ortiz
Moises Alou
Steve Finley
Eric Milton
Kevin Millwood
Jeromy Burnitz
Magglio Ordonez

Update: this is my 100th post! Yeah!

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.”

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I know, I know, I have not blogged in a while. I have been extremely busy but none of it is really worth talking about. I will work hard next week to come up with something interesting to talk about, I promise, no really, seriously, ok, shut up, I admit it – I never talked about anything that was interesting, are you happy now?

Here are just a few tidbits about my life over the last few weeks:

• Started coding my first real project with Java 5.0 and I am absolutely loving it
• Earthworks Systems purchased a new laptop for me to code on, click here to check out the specs
• Started having Pastor Search Committee meetings
• Changed my blog url
• Watched almost all of the first three seasons on Seinfeld

So there you go. I will try to be better next week.