Immediately after opening the closet to put away my coat this morning I realized I had made a terrible oversight.

A week ago I did a post about the newest bat in my life and took the opportunity to recount tales of the other bats I’ve owned.  But there, in the back of the closet, the overlooked bat stared at me with baleful eyes wanting to know why it had been left out.

I’m sorry.  I really am.  You, giant red whiffle bat, have always been my favorite.

I got this bat at a Salvation Army store in roughly 1996.  It was in a giant bin of its brethren with an amazing price tag of 25 cents.  What could be more perfect for a kid who played an insane amount of backyard baseball games with siblings and friends?

We tried out a million different balls with this bat, trying to find the right combination for our yard.  Something too light like the foam tennis balls we had didn’t produce a satisfying hitting experience.  Too heavy, like a real tennis ball, and we risked the combination of hitting the ball too far into the neighbor’s yard (and/or their house) as well as breaking the bat itself.

As you can see from the duct tape in the first picture, the trial-and-error process had one important casualty:

I believe this is the second generation of duct tape holding the cracked plastic together.  It works just fine in this state, and can even produce some interesting effects you don’t get with a perfect round, smooth bat.

Eventually my younger brother and I discovered the perfect ball for our two-man game, which involved the batter getting to hit until the pitcher was able to catch a pop fly.  The answer was a mini inflatable volleyball, which when CRUSHED traveled 10 feet past the property line and was easy enough to snag with bare hands.

I also made an oversight in my January 11 post about sledding.

Former roommate MR pointed out that I neglected to mention the awesome sledding spot neighborhood kids utilized at the now-old Redskins practice site behind our neighborhood.

This was a place we reserved for really good snows because it involved a bit of a trek to get to, which is not ideal when you get to the point of being cold and want to get inside as soon as possible.

We had to go allll the way down our street, through a big backyard, into the woods, over (and hopefully not through) a creek, scramble up a sometimes muddy hill with the aid of tree roots and finally down and up a drainage ditch to reach the sledding start.

The great thing about the ditch was its steep angle, meaning you could build the smallest of jumps and let let the angle create one that seemed much bigger.  A tiny bit of speed made for some epic runs and even more incredible crash landings.  Looking back it’s a bit of a wonder no one got hurt either with the simple impact or the occasional crash into the exposed top of a rock at the bottom.

And now that I’m picturing this all again I’m remembering some blizzard that brought in plows to the parking lot behind the ditch, creating those huge walls of snow you see in a storm that size.  For us that meant a starting ramp 10 feet above where we were used to, and thus more speed than we could ever imagine on those sleds.

Kid snow days were so much cooler.