Wow, this fascinates me, and disturbs me almost as much. It’s an article about Ian Silva, a man in Australia who, through a combination of interest in maps and baseball, has created a very detailed, imaginary world. Complete with maps that look straight out of a real atlas and exhaustive records of the baseball league. People in the Koana Islands love baseball. The first league play started in 1882, barely six years after the MLB.
We have neighbors who are recent empty-nesters. For the first few years we lived here, we watched them come-and-go on weekends to their two boys’ various activities. When we would stop and chat in the front yard, the dad would always warn us of what was in our future. “Enjoy this time,” he said. “One day you’ll be coming and going constantly to practices, meetings, games, performances, and whatever else your girls are doing.
Because nothing is more boring that reading about someone else’s fantasy sports team, I’ll just say I’m reasonably pleased with my lineup after last night’s draft. I had the third pick, planned on taking Marshawn Lynch, and went with Adrian Foster when the guy with the #2 pick snatched Lynch up. We have only eight guys and drafted 15 rounds, so we raced through it in about 90 minutes. There was a group of 12 people near us also drafting.
I didn’t mean to jinx the Royals a week ago when I wrote that the series against Boston would likely be the high point of the season. And while it remains to be seen if their glorious month of baseball has come to an end and they will scuffle through the remainder of the season, things certainly don’t look promising. Losing three of five in Detroit was perfectly acceptable, although blowing Saturday’s game was galling.
As I mentioned a couple weeks back, it’s been five years since I first posted my 20 Favorite Songs of All-Time list. Which means it’s time to review and tweak the list. There wasn’t any great, complex methodology to this. I simply took the original list and evaluated those 20 songs against each other. There was some movement, and one replacement, adding a song I nearly put on the list five years ago.
We kick off the first full week of school today. Which means we can begin setting some routines around here. M. was the first to show signs of being tired last week. She had a meltdown one night about doing her homework. It was an easy assignment based on her summer activities and she decided she’d rather have a meltdown than take two minutes to do it. It wasn’t just about being tired, though.
L. is one smart cookie. I offered to take her somewhere for lunch yesterday after her sadness about M. and C. going off to school.1 She quickly agreed and reminded me that a year ago on the sisters' first day of school, I took her to a bookstore and she got to pick out a book. Can we do that again, she asked. How could I say no? We cruised over to Barnes & Noble and browsed through the children’s section.
(Administrative note: I’m in the midst of another big, blog redesign project. It will likely take months to complete and I’ll explain more as the re-launch gets closer. Part of that is no longer posting pics of the girls here. I figure most of you who are close to me are either A) friends on Facebook or B) know how to reach our family picture page. So that’s where you need to go to see the obligatory First Day of School pics.
Man, what a ride. I have a feeling, when we look back on this season, we’ll look at last weekend, when the Royals hosted Boston, as the high point. Big crowds, including the first August sell-out since 2003. Exciting games, including the great, six-run sixth inning Friday night. And a feeling that the Royals mattered again. MLB.TV was acting up much of the time, so I listened more than watched. What struck me were the roars from the crowd.
The shift has begun. We put the girls to bed just after 8:00 last night. They had swum quite a bit during the day, so two of them were tired. M.’s light was still on at 9:00, so I think she was reading. But C. had her radio cranked up and was singing away, as happy as could be. It’s funny how kids think a closed door means no one outside the room can hear what you’re doing.
I think we’re ready, all of us, for school to begin. Trips to the pool have been the cornerstone of my daily plans for the summer. Give the kids time to veg in the morning, get outside a bit before it heats up, maybe run an errand or two after lunch, then spend the afternoon at the pool. But we’re going on week three of strange weather. When it’s warm and muggy during the day, it’s often been cool at night, making the pool water chilly.
I’ve enjoyed the recent references amongst my Kansas City friends on Facebook to one of my favorite restaurants, Il Centro. Adding to the fun is the, now, obligatory comments about how everyone was sure to pronounce the name correctly. For the non-KCers out there, as an Italophile, I was quick to correct my friends who called the spot “eel sen-tro” rather than the correct “eel chen-tro”. What was the point of that year of Italian if not to help people with such mistakes?
Last weekend I was sitting around, enjoying an 80-Acre Hoppy Wheat when Madness' classic 1983 tune “Our House” came on the radio. Being the reflective cat I am1, I savored my beer and considered that I very well could have been listening to the same song exactly 30 years before that moment. I also thought if you had to sum up the 80s, that would be a pretty solid song to do so.
You must forgive me. I’ve been on a bit of a reading roll lately, ripping through these five books in three weeks, along with a couple other more technical works I’ve been reading bits and pieces of between. Honestly, I kind of forgot all the details of the first. So shorter comments this time. I’ll try to keep up with my books better going forward. The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile.
It’s been a few days since we’ve been to the pool. The weather began to change the middle of last week, we were at the LVS over the weekend, and so far this week it’s been too cool to get in the water. With just two weeks until M. and C. begin school , we’ve enjoyed our first year as members of a pool. We had been averaging four trips a week until this week, usually for about two hours at a time.
The Royals are doing it all wrong again. After a quarter-century of losing, they decide to rip off a hot streak just as this year’s trade deadline approaches. In the process, they’ve likely tricked General Manager Dayton Moore into thinking they still have a chance to sneak into the second Wild Card spot and thus stop any attempts to move Ervin Santana or members of the bullpen for someone to fill the hole at second base, or other parts that will help when the team reboots next spring.
Nine years and one hour ago (as I type this) M. came into the world, screaming and demanding attention. She hasn’t shut up since. I kid! Kind of. Our girl loves to talk, as she is quick to admit. Now she is in the midst of 30 or so hours that are all about her, which is her idea of the perfect day. We had our annual dinner out at her favorite restaurant, Macaroni Grill, last night.
I’ll admit, sometimes I feel like my life is one big first world problem. I’m super fortunate that while there are some annoyances that test my patience each day, some wrinkles I’d love to have smoothed out, I face no true, big problems. I try to remain mindful and thankful of that at all times, as I know how quickly things can change. With that in mind, I’ll share my current, biggest, first world annoyance: I often have no idea what day it is.
The horse is long out of the barn. That’s my reaction to Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke’s announcement earlier this week that he was pulling his solo and Atoms For Peace music from the streaming service Spotify to protest the minuscule royalty payments it, and other similar services, issues to artists. I absolutely agree with his point: there needs to be a model for online music that balances the interests of artists who perform and write music and are entitled to fair compensation for their works, of consumers who want easy access to huge libraries of music, and the need for companies that serve the music up to make some money for their efforts.
This year’s All-Star Game retrospective won’t be quite as exhaustive as some in the past have been. By the time S. was home from a meeting and the girls were in bed, it was the top of the third. Fortunately, it was still 0-0 so with the exception of Robinson Cano getting plunked, I saw just about all the best game action. Obviously the story of the game was Mariano Rivera’s final ASG appearance.