Community Park Field Day

Despite the torrential downpour at around 8:30 when I went to read to Graham's class at Riverside, Field Day was on at Community Park, so I threw on shorts and headed over. Natalie's class was at the soccer station when I got there, and Pers was leading the show mightily, though he had to shout over some awful din coming from over behind the giant hedges by the Princeton public tennis courts and paddle tennis courts (yes, readers, you read that correctly). Sounded like power washing or jack hammering, one.

So, since I didn't want to direct kids doing this soccer thing anyhow, I sidled around the monumental hedge around the courts to see what was up. Some dude in a hazmat suit was sandblasting the tennis practice wall. Brilliant.

So I made my way over to the Rec Department offices to see what was up. Didn't seem like a good idea to sand blast with hundreds of kids and adults trying to have fun 50 yards away. After working past a couple of clock-punching admin types, I found myself in the presence of a generously girthed apparatchik in jeans. He explained to me that there was a tennis tournament scheduled for Thursday, and this was the only day they could get the sandblasting contractors and they needed to get the job done because (gasp!), there was some graffiti on the tennis wall!

In the end, he agreed to have the guy in the space suit work on the other side of the wall so that the sound would bounce the other direction while the kids were on the field. In any case, it is certainly comforting to know that, in times of dire fiscal crisis, our tax dollars are hard at work attending to crucial matters like sandblasting offending gang tags.