Lopez Family blog

I went to watch an MLS game tonight between the New England Revolution and DC United. I’m not a big fan of MLS since I don’t like the pace or the style of play but having said that, they are making an effort to try and make it a good league. DC United signed Marcelo Gallardo who became one of my favorite players when he was playing for River Plate in the 90s. In that sense it was nice to get to see him play, even if he’s not at the top of his game anymore.

The game ended in a 2-2 draw which isn’t bad considering DC United was up 2 nil before the Revolution came back to tie it late in the game. Gallardo showed some flashes of the great player he once was, he still has the vision for the game but lacks the finesse and accuracy that made him so great.

I can see the effort on the part of the MLS to bring good players to improve the overall quality of the game but I think it’s turning out to be like the North American Soccer League of the 70s where super stars came to retire much like they do now in the Asian and Middle Eastern leagues.

Overall, it’s still a pretty fun family outing.

I haven’t had to traveled for a while which has been nice. I’ve been able to enjoy coming home in the evenings to play with Natalia and when we’re lucky (i.e. Natalia sleeps more than half an hour in her crib), have some quality time with Lisa.

This time I’m in Dallas, TX doing a new type of gig in which we not only do a performance assessment of the customer’s website but we also do a data analysis workshop so the customer can see how we went about doing the assessment and can in theory do it for themselves in the future. There are other firsts that will/are happening during this trip. My colleague Jean and I are presenting together for the first time, this will be the first customer we do the workshop for and this is also the first time that I will be part of a performance assessment without Stephen. Exciting times.

This, however, is not my first time in Texas. Texas and I go way back, I basically grew up in Texas and have many, mostly distant, memories of my time here.  Ever since I found out I was coming to Dallas a couple of weeks ago, the line ‘All my ex’s live in Texas’ from the song ‘All my ex’s live in Texas’ by George Strait has been in my head.  I’d thought nothing of it until I realized that in fact, all my ex’s DO live in Texas. Granted I never had a huge dating history but the girls/women that were a big part of my life still live here. Wife and daughter excluded.

I’ve never been one to look people up and try to find out what they’re doing and how they’re getting on with life. I’m busy enough with my own life to really give much thought to anyone I don’t talk to or see on a regular basis. This however has stirred my curiosity and I can’t for the life of me get it out of my head. So I’ve set off to find out what my ex’s are up to.

I will, perhaps wrongly so, categorize the ex’s into three types. Ex number one was the high school sweetheart. A bit of a stretch but I’ll roll with it. I do have fond memories of our time together, we both played soccer and I believe that’s how we met. We hit it off and were dating not long after we met. We lasted a good while together and it wasn’t until she started hanging around with a new set of friends that we began to grow apart. Out of the three she’s the only one that I’ve actually had contact with. I believe she found me on one of those websites designed to help you find old high school friends. She’s currently married with two kids and seems to be happy with life. Good for her?

Ex number two was a girl I always wanted to date but she was way too cool for me. This is the movie type story where the geeky guy gets the girl. It wasn’t until long after high school that I ran into her at a party and we hit it off. She actually remembered me and said she’d thought I was alright back then. One thing led to another and we did long distance dating for a while. Unfortunately unlike in the movies it doesn’t all end in happiness (or maybe it does if you consider that I would not have met my wife, had this relationship not ended). She turned out to be nothing like I expected and I became disillusioned with her and where things were going. This I must admit broke my heart. As far as I know she’s nowhere to be found now days but I must admit I didn’t try very hard.

Ex number three was not really an ex at all. She was more like a mega crush who of course like all proper crushes never amounted to more than a really good friendship. This was another stereotypical situation where girl is too cool for geek. So there’s really not much to say about her. I think she’s married and that’s pretty much the extent of what I know of her.

The real treat of this trip isn’t the fact that we walked to and from Chicago O’hare terminal C to terminal B several times but rather getting to know my coworker Jean. You never really know someone until you’ve traveled with them and it turns out that she’s kind of cool and even thou there’s an age difference we’re pretty similar people.

So there you go, I went to Texas thinking about ex’s and came back with a friend.