mellicious | Entries tagged with baseball

As anybody who knows me at all can tell you, I'm a huge baseball fan, to the exclusion of all other sports, basically. I mean, I'll watch other stuff occasionally but I've gotten totally bored with football, plus the Texans totally suck, and have for a good while now. (And while I dragged Rob to so many Astros games he finally got interested in baseball as a defense mechanism, he's pretty much indifferent to all other sports.)

But I have to say, I got interested in the World Cup this year, pretty much for the first time ever. Here's my entire history with soccer: I think I went to some sort of pro soccer game once (late 70s/early 80s? was there some kind of attempt at a league around then?) and I actually played intramural soccer a little bit at UT. And I mean it about "a little bit." (The only thing I was good at at all was getting in the way of the ball.) But I didn't grow up on it, nobody American and my age did - certainly not in Texas, at least. Kids' soccer was a thing that happened considerably after I was too old for it.

Anyway, I was actually rooting for Argentina by the end, mostly because of Messi. That French dude (whose name I promptly forgot) is pretty good too, but I like for the old guys (what was he, like 35 or something?) to be able to end their career properly. And the US managed to not look too terrible either.

Maybe nobody cares but me, but I was pretty happy to see the MLB players and management come to an agreement this week. I was starting to prepare myself for a long drought. Baseball's really the only sport I follow any more. So spring training games starting like, Friday, woo!

Last weekend Rob went to Ohio (without me, because I won't fly any more) so there was no movie night last week, and we're a week behind seeing The Batman. (Actually in my head I call it "THE Batman", with a huge overemphasis on the "the", because that whole thing where they distinguish it from the others by "the" is kind of weird.) SO we went to see it yesterday and I actually really liked it. I had tried to avoid spoilers and so all I really knew was who played Batman and Alfred and Catwoman, and that it was 3 hours long and "dark" - I completely wasn't sure what to expect and maybe that helped, I don't know. I'm old enough that I'm pretty sure I remember going to see the old Adam West Batman movie in a theater - I would have been 7, maybe? - and so I have a long history with Batman movies. I've seen pretty much all of them, even Batman and Robin. And I think this one totally worked.

The only other movie that we've seen since the last time I posted was Cyrano, which I also liked a lot, except that I cried through about the last third of it and came home with a headache. And then I got that song stuck in my head for days, but hey, at least it pushed the Encanto soundtrack out of my brain for a couple of days!

(I saw somebody say online somewhere that The Batman made them cry, but I didn't have that reaction to it, thank goodness. My allergies are acting up and I've had plenty of headaches lately as it is!)

******************************************************

Movies seen in a theater in 2022

The Batman
Cyrano
Belfast
Spider-Man: No Way Home (twice in 2022 and once in 2021)
Ghostbusters: Afterlife (also one we'd seen in 2021, because nothing much came out in January!)

...and Rob also saw:

The Cursed
Scream

I looked back through my planner at every weekend all summer, and I don't seem to have gone to movies much at all. We went to see a couple of things we'd already seen before - Captain Marvel and Endgame, and also Field of Dreams - it was one of those Fathom Events things - I think it must have come out 30 years ago. (God, Rob and I were practically newlyweds. I remember going to see it vividly. We mostly only went because Gene Siskel liked it! Added: I said this to Rob later and he said no it was Ebert who liked it and Siskel who didn't, and I think he's right.) It held up surprisingly well. The only new thing I could find that I went to see was the Spiderman movie. Rob went to a lot of movies without me, especially lately when I've been feeling so tired. He went to see a bunch of horror movies - "Midsommar" he really liked, and I think he went to see the "Annabelle" movie twice, and there was more. And he finally went to see that "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" thing a couple of weeks ago when he couldn't talk me into it. He really liked that one too. I made him tell me how it ended - sometimes I prefer to know, anyway, and I might go see it later if it's still hanging around. Hopefully there will be some things this fall that I'm interested in seeing that weren't made by Marvel or Marvel/Sony.

Let's see, we watch stuff on Netflix and Prime - Rob played out on The Expanse series halfway through the first season, but I was more into it, having read most of the books, and I eventually finished all three seasons. We watched "Good Omens" of course (I had read the book but Rob hadn't, but he seemed to like it pretty well just the same) and lately we've been watching "Turn: Washington's Spies" which we both like a lot. I've been watching "The Magicians" off and on but haven't caught up on that, so don't tell me any spoilers for later on! That's all I can think of offhand. We still watch far too much MSNBC, and lots of baseball this time of year.

Oh, yeah, baseball - we turned on the baseball game quite late on Sunday - it was a very early game, and so it was like the 8th inning by the time I got up. Rob was watching something else, and when we turned the channel he said, "Wow, there's still no score." So we actually saw all of the (very brief) part where they scored. We didn't realize until it was over that it was actually a no-hitter for Verlander, and then we watched all the post-game stuff and then I went back and watched the whole thing from the beginning (and actually I went back later and just watched the parts where Verlander's pitching). That kind of thing is always fun - if you're on the winning end of it, anyway.

I haven't been completely absent from social media lately, but I've been fairly quiet, I think. I tweeted occasionally, and I posted some nail pictures on Instagram when I remembered to. I posted less on my nail blog than I have in years, though, and didn't post here all summer. (I'm so glad this summer is over, and I'm never particularly a fan of summer at the best of times!)

Movies seen at a theater in 2019:

1. Bumblebee

2. Into the Spider-verse (our second time)

3. Lego Movie 2

4. Captain Marvel (three times)

5. Shazam!

6. Avengers: Endgame (four times)
7. Field of Dreams
8. Spiderman: Far From Home

I am not really loving life right now, to be quite honest. For one thing, middle age SUCKS - I have a needle biopsy coming up and I really hate the CPAP (not really a surprise). I'm not actually giving up on the CPAP or anything, it's too early for that. Also apparently I have REALLY SEVERE sleep apnea so I need to just suck it up on that. I'm just bitching, mostly. Also it was kind of stressful at work today - it's that that time of the month, so to speak - we're always busy when the month turns over. So I really just need to go to bed, probably, but I'll say a couple of things first.

Bumblebee ended up being the only movie I saw in January. Rob went by himself to see Glass and Vice, and maybe a horror movie too, I forget. There was just nothing else I really wanted to see. We did rent Once Upon a Deadpool (I already bought Deadpool 2, and they're too similar, I don't think we need both) and it was fun - and an interesting concept, too. Maybe it'll become a trend, I don't know.

Let's see, I'm still watching The Expanse, I'm well into season 2 now (hi Bobbie! I was really excited to see Bobbie). On the books, I paused after the third book to re-read The Curse of Chalion for the umpteenth time. Now I'm trying to decide whether to go on to Paladin of Souls or go back to the Expanse series (I think the next one is Cibola Burn, or something like that). I also have a ton of other unread books on my Kindle, of course. I'll get around to... well, most of them... eventually. - Oh, also (back to TV now) we're three or four episodes in on the Lost In Space re-do. I like it more than I expected to. (I kind of like the old one even though it's really terrible. But this one is pretty good, actually.)

Have I mentioned that I have decided I am no longer even pretending to be a football fan? I used to be, but I've been losing interest for years. I would periodically re-gain some interest when the Texans or the Longhorns did something, but really I'm just not very interested. I think we're going to go see Into the Spiderverse on Sunday instead. (I love to go out places during the Super Bowl, it's so blessedly quiet.)

(Almost time for baseball, woo! Apparently we signed another pitcher in the last few days. I'm not sure if we ever got another catcher, but eh, we have some guys. Nobody can really replace McCann, I think.)

OK, I'm going to try to talk about baseball, but it's difficult because I have SO MANY FEELS about it and they all try to come out at once. Luckily for you guys, I remembered that I actually wrote something down a few weeks ago, and it's much more coherent than I manage to be most of the time. So that's what's below, pretty much verbatim.

Here's the thing - the Astros have been losing as long as I've been alive. Or not quite - I'm 57 and the Astros are 56. But that bit of nitpicking aside, I have to admit that I didn't really grow up an Astros fan, because the Astros were so terrible I couldn't get interested. We went to the occasional game - supposedly I was taken to some Colt .45s games when I was 3 or 4 years old, but I wouldn't have known it from a little league game at the time. Once they moved into the Astrodome, the building itself was at least impressive to a child.

Later on, they started giving out free Astros tickets if you made the honor roll or something like that, and those are the first games I actually remember going to. The Astros almost always lost when I went. In those days you played your own division far more than they do now, and the Astros were in the NL West, along with Cincinnati, don't ask me why. Those were the days when the Reds were known as the Big Red Machine, and I can say very definitely that I saw Pete Rose and Johnny Bench and those guys play, a number of times - which I guess is why the Astros always always lost, come to think of it.

The Astros didn't finally make the playoffs until 1980, but I was in college then and I mostly wasn't paying any attention to what went on in Houston. I did gradually start paying more attention, though, and by the time I moved back to Houston in 1986, the Astros were much improved. So that's when I actually really became a baseball fan. We went to a few games in 1986 - I particularly remember the one the night before the Astros clinched the division, in which Nolan Ryan pitched and struck out 12. The next day Mike Scott threw his no-hitter. Then the Astros proceeded to get eliminated by the Mets, pretty spectacularly. That was the way it always went, for a long time. I've talked to a number of long-time Astros fans who say the same thing - it's just almost inconceivable that they actually won the World Series. Right up until the last out, we all just sat there and waited for the big heartbreak. You can tell yourself all day that this team was different - and clearly it was true, and there was a part of me that really knew that and believed it the whole time, but it still doesn't stop you from believing that something bad is going to happen. When they actually won, both in the NLCS and in the World Series, I wasn't jumping up and down and screaming. I just sat there and literally said, "Oh my god. Oh my god" over and over.

I'm sure this is true of other baseball teams - the Red Sox and the Cubs come to mind. We're not the only team that ever had this problem, I know, but at least the Red Sox and the Cubs had won a World Series in their history, even if that was a long, long time ago. I think there was something especially sort of pathological about the way that Astros fans felt about it. We just waited and waited for the blow to fall, you know? and when it didn't come, we didn't quite know what to do for a while.

(I'll write something else and talk about Altuve and Springer and all that later. This certainly isn't all I have to say on the subject!)

I think I intended to talk about baseball tonight. Or about television - I think that was because I talked about movies last night and television seemed like the next progression or something. My brain is kind of pinging all over tonight, though, so I don't know what you're gonna get.

If you read the entry from yesterday, but didn't read the comment that was added late in the day, MissMeliss reminded me that the actual title of the book that I was talking about at the end of that entry (although it's not the original title) is normally And Then There Were None, not Ten Little Indians as I was thinking. I think I just had the name for that poem - as I think I must have learned it - stuck in my head. And I read the Wikipedia entry and she is also correct that there's no Poirot, but I won't say any more than that about the plot. It's summarized at that link if you want to know. I can't believe I forgot, actually, now that I have been reminded, but in my defense I think it was somewhere in the range of 30-40 years ago that I last read it.

What I was going to say about television, really, is that I don't seem to be any good at binge-watching. I can watch maybe two or three episodes of something and that's usually where I'm ready to stop. And then I don't come back to them for weeks or months or sometimes more. (I'm still on season two of Agents of SHIELD, for example.) I'm trying to finish Iron Fist, even though it's not all that good, just to be completist, I guess, so I can eventually watch The Defenders. But I also haven't finished season two of Daredevil so if I'm really being completist I need to go finish that also. (I was watching Daredevil with Rob, but I think he's lost interest and I should give up on that part.)

I had watched one episode of Victoria and one episode of The Crown, and I liked them both a lot, but I had never gotten back to watching either of those. But last month when Rob went to Ohio to see his brother, I went to see my aunt for the weekend - she's always telling me to come visit more and I hardly ever do - and she and I bonded over The Crown. She is apparently a big watcher of Masterpiece Theater, and so she had seen Victoria (season 1, I mean) but she somehow had not heard about The Crown even though she has Netflix and when we looked it popped up on her recommendations. So we watched the first episode - I'd already seen it but I figured I could use reminding anyway - and then went on and watched a couple more. And I did watch some more of Victoria since then and I need to go ahead and watch some more of both of those because they're really good.

I really don't watch much series TV, when it comes down to it. The Netflix Marvel shows are probably the most of anything I've watched in ages. (Rob & I both watched one season of Daredevil and then Jessica Jones and Luke Cage and part of season 2 of Daredevil before we played out on that.) We watch a lot of MSNBC and a lot of baseball for six months a year - or seven, this year. (I'll probably come back to that subject another day. It's all I can do not to start typing about it in all caps, shall we say. If you read my Twitter you've undoubtedly already seen that once or twice.) ...And so those two between them take up a lot of TV time. We both work the evening shift and when we get home we typically watch Rachel Maddow and then Rob goes for a walk and I usually start watching baseball, if it's that time of year. (Sometimes I watch the whole game and sometimes I don't. Since I generally know already whether they won or lost that plays into how much I watch, quite often - if it was a blowout and they lost, for example, I sometimes don't bother at all! But this year that didn't happen much.)

Anyway, Rob watches stuff that I don't - I stay up much later than he does, and he gets up much earlier and watches a lot of TV then, I think. (Our bedroom walls are thick so we don't hear each other doing this unless the TV is turned up very very loud.) Rob also watches The Walking Dead (and now Fear the Walking Dead also) on Sundays but I gave up on that after season 2 - it wasn't really the violence per se, it was the worrying about who was gonna die next - and so now I go in the bedroom and let him watch and come out for Talking Dead afterwards. I can deal with Talking Dead just fine, a nice nerdy show that I know what to do with.

It's baseball season! I don't know if people who know me online necessarily know what a big baseball fan I am, because the "peak" of my baseball fandom happened before I even had a computer at home. (I think I inherited my dad's old Compaq in the fall of 1999, that was my first home computer. Little did he know what he was letting loose there.) I used to go to about half of the Astros home games in the last four years they were in the Astrodome; I probably went to about 200 baseball games total between 1996 and 2000. (Often with Rob or with friends, but also often alone.) Once they moved to the "new" park in 2000 it became a much more expensive hobby - I can't imagine any circumstances other than, y'know, winning the lottery under which I would see live baseball that much again. (If I was rich I would buy a townhouse near the ballpark and season tickets.) So I gradually went to fewer and fewer games, but we still watch a lot on TV. That's partly because it's just so much more expensive to go to games now, but it's also just life circumstances. In those years I had a day job and Rob had a night job, so I partly went to the games rather than sit at home alone. In the late 90s you could walk up on game day, especially on weekdays, and usually get a single in the field boxes behind the plate - it was $25, which is what an upper deck seat costs now. (Or if I was feeling broke, the good upper deck seats were only $7.) Rob started out not a baseball fan at all and I would drag him along some of the time, and he would eat his way through the games, pretty much, but he gradually got more interested. (I realized this was happening when he started asking me questions about double-plays and such.) By the time the Astros traded for Randy Johnson in the second half of 1998 he was really into it, too.

I'm partly thinking about baseball because I made a comment on Twitter over the weekend that baseball is one of the few things tying us to an actual TV any more. You can get MLB.tv but it still blacks out home games. We haven't figured out a way around that one yet.

(Rob also watches that goofy channel that shows all-old-TV-all-the-time, but there's bound to be some sort of substitute for that.)

Let's see, we watched a couple of episodes of MST3K, and I think that was the only thing I watched on Netflix over the weekend. MST3K was pretty good. Rob used to watch the old MST3K a lot more than I did, so he said it was taking him a while to adjust to the new robot voices, especially. I thought the skit parts of it hadn't quite jelled, maybe, but the jokes during the bad movies seemed just as funny to me as ever. (The first movie is a 1961 Danish (Danish?!?) monster movie called Reptilicus and it is just the most MST3K movie you can imagine.)

And in the middle of the night last night I watched the new Doctor Who. (U-verse was down all night Saturday night, which is the kind of time when I start thinking about whether we get our money's worth out of old-school television.) I liked "The Pilot" a lot. I liked Bill and I liked Nardole and I liked the Doctor more than I have a lot of the time in recent seasons. (I love Peter Capaldi but I think his doctor is either harder to write for or the scripts have just gone down in quality generally. Or maybe both, but I don't have the sort of DEFINITE OPINIONS on this question that a lot of people do.) This episode managed to be simultaneously very creepy and quite funny. Also, while I pretty much expected to like Pearl Mackie as Bill, I really liked her much more than I thought. And I liked the way Bill was clearly gay without anybody ever having to label her as such. SO refreshing. (Admittedly, that might have been why they announced it quite loudly ahead of time, so not too many people were surprised. I only float around on the edge of Doctor Who fandom, though, so I don't know how much flouncing around about it is going on over there.)

I feel like I'm forgetting something else that I watched that was worth noting. If I remember I'll come back and talk about it later!

Current Mood: blah

(Look! Texans icon! I made it myself!)

More Houston-Galveston stuff, some of which refers to yesterday's entry:

Aw man, I knew it was probably coming, but Jim Deshaies is leaving us for the Cubs. I adore that man. (But I'm not sure I adore him enough that I'll go watch Cubs games just for him. Of course, if the Astros are bad enough this next year, that may start to look like a more attractive option.)
In other (ex-)Astros news, Brad Lidge is probably retiring. Also, bonus footage there of the Astros clinching in 2005. (Rob and I were watching the faces and in some cases the jerseys during the scrum, and going, "Berkman! Biggio! Clemens!" Damn, that was a good team, even if they couldn't win a WS game.)
I had to go to Galveston today for a doctor's appointment, and the other Carnival ship was in today. I got out of my appointment right at 4:30, which I have learned over the past couple of years is about the time that the ships usually depart. You could tell that anyway, because when I got back downtown, half the passengers were lined up looking over the railings. To me this always brings to mind old black-and-white movies where the passengers line up to wave at their loved ones who are waving back from below. But nobody is going to stand around to watch you leave when you're just going sailing around the Gulf of Mexico for five days or whatever it is. Plus most of the passengers arrive on buses or park remotely, so there's nobody to watch, in any case. (I'm sure the passengers aren't really lining up for that at all, they're just watching the ship pull out. Still amuses me just the same.)
I said confidently yesterday that the Texans game was taping (by which I actually meant DV-R'ing, of course, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it) so of course when I got home it hadn't worked properly, and I only got the last hour or so. I didn't really care that much, anyway, but I really should probably investigate what happened there. It seems to have switched on at three o'clock or something, and our games are nearly always at noon. Honestly, U-verse, you're supposed to just read my mind! (And often it seems to. I'm terribly spoiled, really.)
Also, the Texans have serious injury problems. They coped with it pretty well, yesterday, but that was just the Titans. New England may be another story.

Note to self: 45 minutes is too long of a drive for a routine doctor appointment. (As the university knows full well, it's why they have about a zillion clinics scattered all over the north half of the county.)

(I was going to add a picture of the rather excessive holiday decorations around our apartment complex, but my phone isn't cooperating. Sorry.)

I got home from class in time to see the Rangers win, woo! I'm not sure where along the line during the last year I became a Rangers fan - I think it was partly because my DV-R didn't know the difference between Astros games and Rangers games, so it recorded the Rangers games periodically when they turned up on Fox Sports Houston, and I usually watched them. Also, there's the whole Nolan Ryan factor. Nolan looks a lot like my dad these days, which isn't particularly a recommendation, but the man could pitch - actually it appears that he still can pitch, if you look at that "ceremonial" first pitch he threw the other day - and it also seems that he can run a baseball team. And of course there's also the fact that they're playing the Yankees (sorry, Robert). I'm not sure when I became so anti-Yankee; I haven't always been that, either.

(I still hate the Cowboys, though; that one's not likely to change any time soon.)

I haven't written about online games in ages - well, I haven't written about anything much this year, admittedly, but that's another story. Anyway, we have abandoned DDO (which we in turn abandoned LOTRO for a while back) temporarily in favor of Guild Wars. This was not really

columbina's choice; I have Issues with DDO which he doesn't seem to share - it may be a Win7 thing, we never have quite figured it out - and while I'm not ready to give up on DDO, I was not enjoying it too much. I'm sort of hoping they will eventually fix this, but in the meantime, GW2 is supposed to come out someday relatively soon (they are still being coy about exactly when) and they have been releasing some new content in GW in anticipation of that. And there ~~are~~will be goodies available in GW2 that depend on how much stuff you have in your Hall of Monuments in Eye of the North, which is probably the big thing that lured me back.

There is a Calculator for figuring out how many goodies you're going to get on the GW2 site. I was at 15 points (out of a possible 50) when I first looked a couple of weeks ago, and I'm already up to 21. Forty or fifty points isn't realistic for me after the two-year layoff, but the rewards run out at 30, anyway, and that might actually be doable. My "to do list" says I can get to 30 with two more titles (like finishing the original Prophecies game, which I never did do), 2 hero statues (I have lots of heroes; the trick to getting the statue is to get them fancy armor), a rare pet, and 5 fancy weapons. If I really work on it, that might be doable.

We went to a baseball game Saturday night, and it's probably the only game we'll go to all year (although we still watch on TV all the time), but boy, did we pick a gem of a game to go to. The funny thing is that it didn't feel that much like a gem, and I'm not sure why. If we hadn't been sitting where we could see the strikeout count, I'm not sure I would have even noticed how many Pirates were going down. The starting pitcher struck out 14, and I think there were 17, altogether. And Bud Norris (who? yeah, I said Bud Norris) had a single and a double of his own, besides the 14 K's, so he had a really good day, overall. One reason it didn't feel too utterly gem-like was that it started off badly - the first batter tripled, and the second one homered, so we were down 2-0 before a lot of people ever got to their seats. And I think probably the other reason was because it was Bud Norris, and not some guy that anybody's much in awe of, normally. I've seen a 14-strikeout game before, but that one was Nolan Ryan, and it was 1986 and the Astros were on the verge of winning the division - I'm pretty sure it was the day before they clinched, and also the day before Mike Scott's no-hitter - and the atmosphere was really, really electric. This one just didn't feel much like that. But Bud pulled his shit together after the bad start, obviously, and the Astros battled back and scored three runs late, so the crowd got back into it, and the Astros won, and life was good. Especially for this guy named Bud.

The All Star game is a poor substitute for real baseball.

No, we're still not evacuating. Yet. The damn thing is going to be awfully close, though - the E-word is not completely off the table.

Gawd, the "Fringe" pilot cost $10 million to make? Hmm, well, I failed to get full value out of it, considering I thought the face-melty introduction was silly and turned baseball on instead. We didn't even make it to the credits.

Have we discussed baseball lately? Like the fact that the Astros have the best record in baseball since the All-Star break? Like the fact that they called a guy up from Round Rock on Monday, who showed up too late for batting practice but still hit a homer on his first pitch in the majors? Things like that have been happening right and left - well, ok, maybe not exactly like that one. But it's been fun to watch, lately.

Obligatory link about That Woman (the one whose name I am tired of hearing already): Gender? No, Culture

Here's where Ike is supposed to be going - right in a half-circle around us, practically:

(Also, I keep typing "Iko" instead of Ike. Hi

iko!)

Ugly game. Great seats, though!

I would like to point out something important about the allure of minor-league baseball. This is the view from the $12 seats at the AAA game:

(Dell Diamond, Round Rock vs New Orleans, April 08)

vs the $12 seats at a major-league game:

(Minute Maid Park, Houston, Astros vs Dodgers, July 2005)

The Amazing Race is really entertainingly strange this year. The comedy gold (if that's what you'd call it) is mostly coming from a pair of crazy old men, or older men who act crazy, anyway - I don't think they're all that old, by real-world standards. One is competing with his daughter and the other with his grandson. To make it even more confusing, they're named Ronald and Donald. You can read all about them in the EW recap here.

( Cut for spoilers... )

Remember the other day when I mentioned that I didn't think trading Brad Lidge was a very good idea? Apparently I am not the only one thinking about this question. (Warning: that link started playing video at me when I clicked on it. Not really good if you're at work. Which I know *some* of you aren't, today!) And their analysis is that Philly got a good deal, which by definition rather means that Houston may have gotten a bad one.

I have been cranky today about being at work when other people get the day off. It's very annoying. I thought state employees were supposed to get every holiday known to man.

Oh, another Astros-related thing: their star rookie Hunter Pence is in the new issue of PCGamer. Apparently he plays World of Warcraft.

I am feeling terribly foggy-brained the last few days. Not that it's unusual for me to have trouble concentrating, but it seems like it's unusually bad. Maybe because I haven't been sleeping too well. I don't know why that is either, though. New house? I don't know why that'd bother me but it's possible. It's not the thumping I was talking about yesterday - that's not audible at all from the bedroom, only the living room.

I subscribed (well, I haven't actually paid yet, but I committed to subscribe) to a year of

elisem 's Beads of the Month program (aka

botmo ). I suspect that Rob would not approve, but, well, frankly I'm just not going to tell him for a while. The beads won't start coming until February or so anyway! Is that a terrible thing to do? I've been admiring from afar for a good long while and they were starting a new year and it just seemed like time. I have this jewelrymaking jones that I obviously need to work out of my system. (I suspect that "working it out of my system" could get very, very expensive, but oh well.)

( This and that )

In case anybody is hard up for reading material:

(Although I warn you, the quality of the posts is... well, let's call it somewhat spotty. There are 6000 or so people signed up for this thing, after all. Also the randomizer doesn't actually seem to be very random, considering I got more than one repeat in twenty or so total clicks.)

(I took the word "blog" out of that last sentence in deference to

columbina , who loathes it. I hope you appreciate it, Col!)

So, I don't know how many of you were paying attention, but Craig Biggio of the Astros got his 3000th hit last night (also nos. 2998, 2999, 3001 and 3002 - a five-hit game), in what for that and other reasons was a really wild game. (This page has the SportsCenter video recap, and here's Jayson Stark of ESPN on how good Biggio really is and how come nobody outside of Texas usually notices.) This is Biggio's 20th season with the Astros - that in itself is pretty unbelievable, staying with one team for so long - and then, think about it, he had to average 150 hits a season all that time. No wonder so few people have done it.

(Added: another good article)

In other news, I am really tempted by the Ken-as-Legolas doll, now that it's half-price. Silly of me, I know. But at least I'm not buying an iPhone!

"They just build and build, like nothing else in baseball. The way that Justin Verlander struck out the first two Milwaukee batters of the game Tuesday night, you could think: That would be no-hit stuff if he could sustain it for nine innings. When Verlander struck out seven in the first four innings, you could think: This might be the best he's ever looked. And when he wheeled into the seventh, you could think: He's gone from not allowing any hits to seriously working on a no-hitter. From there, the adrenaline and the bedlam and the Tigers' defense took over."

From here (I'm pretty sure that's a page you can get to without having a subscription) - scroll down past the NBA stuff and there's a pretty good round-up of pieces about Verlander and his stuff.*

* "Stuff" being a technical term in baseball, you understand.

I am supposed to be leaving to go to Bryan at noon, and I have plenty of work to do, so what have I been doing this morning? Looking at Vegas hotel prices. I told Rob he owes me an anniversary trip, and Ohio doesn't count. (But I have no idea when we're going. What with the moving sometime this year and everything, it could be next winter before we get around to it.)

I also haven't packed. I was really tired last night and I just went to bed early - unusual for me. So I have to go home and pack when I get off work. This is no big deal as far as clothing and such for two nights, but we are also supposed to be quilting this weekend so I have to gather all that stuff up again.

The whole weekend is sort of an experiment, anyway - remember how I used to complain about my aunt all the time? (Some of you probably do, at least!) Well, so, a whole weekend alone with her, more or less - we have been getting along better lately but this could be straining the point. But at least we have something to do, and her kids will be around some, presumably, so it will probably be ok. I've just gotten a little nervous about it as the time has gotten closer.

From the WSJ:

( How good does Clemens need to be? )

Regarding my last couple of entries, in which I bitched about the cold weather and the price of baseball tickets, I am informed that I am no longer allowed to gripe on those two subjects. Apparently those are reserved for Bostonians.

I heard some Survivor on the radio (had the 80s station on again) and that reminded me of something funny from the baseball game: between innings, they had the two guys come out who do those Bud Light "Real American Heroes" commercials - the announcer and the singer, who not-so-coincidentally is the former lead singer of Survivor - and they did a special version just for the Astros game. Mostly what I remember is something about Houston being a real city with real people and real food, etc, etc - "In other words, this ain't Dallas!" Which of course got tremendous applause. (For you non-Texan types, Houston and Dallas do not generally get along. To put it mildly.) I am guessing that those guys do a regular circuit at baseball games and other such places where large quantities of beer are consumed, but I still thought the concept of seeing a live performance of a beer commercial was, well, an interesting one.

The Astros actually won their games the last two days, and today they were snowed out (in Chicago, not here) so hey, they swept a series! And they are on to Philly or someplace next, so we can expect more nasty weather, probably.

Current Mood: amused

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Entries tagged with baseball

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