Spring break

Today's the day I take a break from baseball and blogging to celebrate my daughter's birthday.

We have several festive activities planned for the day, but not one of them has to do with baseball, unless I interject the thought somewhere, only to get shouted down by my brand new teenager.

In her honor, I'm displaying one of her passions of the past year. She is into shojo manga -- girly girl manga -- specifically the Shugo Chara series. Up until last fall, I had no idea what manga was outside of seeing some nonsensical cartoon shows on cable. But thanks to my daughter, I know it's a huge industry,  insanely popular, and that some of it definitely ain't for the kiddies. Even browsing through my limited bookstore, my eyes started blurring over the titles and varieties.

I still struggle to comprehend it -- but I know enough that you don't read the books from left to right. And I think my daughter is happy that I know as little as I do (but not as little as she thinks I do).

Thanks to her interest, she's now the best artist in her class and accurately draws many of the shojo manga characters.

She's a smart cookie. Wise in ways that I never knew (guess who helped me get the router set up here at home)? She even knows more about baseball than any other sport -- thanks to me and Mario Super Sluggers. But when it comes right down to it, she'd rather have her fashion Nintendo games, ipod, vampire movies, and Taylor Swift-ish music.

And, yeah, I'm all right with that.

See you later, when baseball is cool again.