Hop Fest

Visted the family and tasted a bunch of IPAs at the Yakima Hop Festival over the weekend. Great beer and people watching. Notable was the sense one got that various people in the crowd had chosen a given decade of their life in which they would stop changing their look and then really stuck with it, somehow managing to find places to still acquire clothes that Jaime and I would have otherwise assumed had disappeared in great cargo containers addressed to aid groups overseas many years ago. As always (and maybe more so than ever), it was great to see our Yakima family members and learn about all of my nephews' latest interests (a game called "rat catchers" for the younger and playing catch for the older). I played catch for a while with my older nephew; there was a moment when he handed me the glove when I wondered "do I still know how to do this?" It turns out I (sort of) do. Yes, I did hit him with the baseball, but we both agreed that, given the lob-type throw and the pronounced downward angle at which it struck his leg, the impact was the result of his missing the catch rather than me doing anything wanton, negligent, etc. This is not to say I wasn't doing some quick mental culpability analysis when he dropped to the ground clutching his stricken limb (no tears, tough kid).