Tag: baseball

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Crippling gout and the bookcase swap

I had a dream that I had a crippling case of gout, and that my toes were completely out of alignment – like my pinky toe was at a 90 degree angle outward. When I woke up, my feet were really hurting. I hate when shit like that happens.

There must be a low pressure front moving in. I have four barometers in the house. Two are attached to my ankles and are size 11. The other two are chasing each other around the house like mad. If I want to know if it rains, I check my feet, and then see if the cats are insane that day. Works better than any mercury in a tube.

I finished moving paragraphline.com. Check it out and let me know if you find anything’s broken. There’s a lot of work to do, and I need to set up the blog and start posting news there.

I have to go to Denver next week. Highs in the low 90s, lows in the upper 50s. It’s bad enough that they are getting militant about carry-ons and luggage and I will have limited room, it’s worse when I have to pack both shorts and a jacket. I also realized last night that every single piece of dress clothes I own does not fit me whatsoever. All of my dress pants are 38s, and now when I wear a 34, it’s loose and needs a belt. I was also buying 2XL shirts, and now I’m right on the verge of going down to L. And 90% of the shirts I have are long-sleeved. I think there’s no way around a trip to Old Navy today to get a couple of shirts and a pair of pants.

I am not excited about a 6:20 AM flight Monday. I am getting excited about going to a game at Coors Field on Tuesday. The Rockies have really slid going into the All-Star break, but they were playing good last night, so maybe they’re over the hump and there will be some good baseball. They are playing the Dodgers though. The only advantage is that the Dodgers are currently a second baseman and two outfielders away from having an entire baseball team on the disabled list. Juan Pierre, Scott Proctor, Brad Penny, Mark Sweeney, Tony Abreu, Rafael Furcal – and Takashi Saito is probably out for the season. Fingers crossed.

I have lots to do on the gas book. It’s going well, but I am scrambling – I hoped to get a draft done by the end of the month, and that’s not looking as well as I thought.

My other project was swapping two of my bookcases, so there’s a shorter one next to my desk. I had this monsterous tall bookcase on that wall, and when I was at my desk, it made the room look darker. Now there’s a smaller one made of light wood there, and it does make it brighter. It really ties together the room. (No wait, that’s a rug.)

OK, off to read about natural gas cars.

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general

Phillies @ A’s

Hello, still from San Francisco. Things are going well here, although I am still thrown for a loop by the cold. But last night, A met up with us and we went to dinner at some freaky Pan-Asian place. It’s always good to see A, and the food was pretty decent, although I had great paranoia that I would ruin my diet for the rest of the century. When I got home and added it up, I actually should have stacked on another satay or two.

Today, I went to see Oakland host Philly, and as always, you get a nice bulleted list.

  • For the record, I have not previously been to Oakland’s coliseum, and I had never seen the A’s. I saw the Phillies last year at Coors Field twice; once for the infamous tarp incident, and once at Coors for the final game of a 3-game sweep in which the Rockies won the pennant.
  • This is the first game I’ve been to where I’ve used public transportation since a Yankees game I went to in 2006 when I still lived there. I walked down a few blocks to the Powell Street BART, then walked from the train to the stadium on the other end.
  • After riding the NYC subways, the BART is hilarious to the point of absurdity. There’s carpet on the floors, the seats are padded and upholstered and nicer than most plane seats, and nothing smelled of piss. Nobody asked me for money (within the train), and they have digital message boards telling you when the next train is arriving. And cell phones work in the trains. If you magically transported a BART line to New York, it would be destroyed in 17 seconds. I don’t understand how it works here, but it was nice.
  • I wrote in my journal and then read a book, and couldn’t remember the last time I did that on a subway. It was a real throwback.
  • A lot of Oakland reminded me of some Chicagoland stretched-out urban sprawl, but with water and shipping cranes, and that’s not so bad. I always imagined it would have entire city blocks on fire and bodies hanging from lampposts and laying in gutters, but maybe that’s just because of the Raiders.
  • After I got out of the train, I had this weird jog where I had to go down the stairs to the main level, and then go up a set of stairs and over to a huge half-mile long ramp that led to the stadium. I got there at 11:00 for a 12:30 game, so there weren’t any people on the walkway.
  • The McAfee Coliesum is used for both the Raiders and the A’s, so as I walked in, I got all of the usual propaganda for both teams.
  • The will call window is set up so that if you ignore all of the signs and walk about a hundred feet to the right, you are there. If you follow the signs and go left, you have to walk all the way around the entire stadium complex, which is about 47 miles in circumference. Guess which one I did.
  • This was another geriatrics and pediatrics game, and a fleet of buses showed up with summer camp kids, all dressed in identical-colored shirts. And of course, the Taliban could cause as much terror as ten school buses of fourth graders, even if you spotted the jihadders a dozen crates of stinger missiles. As far as the geriatric part, there were more Rascals than an Our Gang marathon. But I mind the old folks a lot more because it’s easier to beat a kid until they shut the fuck up than it is to beat a parapalegic until they can miraculously walk again.
  • There were a lot of Phillies fans. A LOT of Phillies fans.
  • Complaint one about the mixed-use stadium: the concourse looks like a maximum-security prison built to riot-proof specifications in the 1960s. After seeing AT&T Park yesterday and then seeing this, it was a lot like touring Frank Lloyd Wright houses, and then taking a tour of a high-security mental institution built by a county government where a board member had a brother-in-law that owned a concrete plant.
  • My seat was not bad; I was 15 rows up and in the middle of the section immediately to the first base side of the backstop net. These would be seats only available to dugout club members at a lot of parks, but I bought mine for $50 online. I had a pretty excellent view of the game, and if I walked up to the front of the section, I was directly on top of the visitor’s dugout.
  • Complaint two about the mixed-use stadium: the seating is really fucked up. First, things are a lot steeper than they are deep, which is standard for football, but it made things weird. Also, the outfield has two little clips of section at the club level on either side, but no ground seats, and this huge blank spot of no club seats. Then there are two levels of suites above that. The whole thing makes it look like they started with a 14,000-seat minor league field, and then added layer after layer of decks above that to pump it up for football.
  • The only A’s I know are either retired, traded, or dead. If I was playing a video game where I could pick Jason Giambi and Catfish Hunter and Cory Lidle, I would know what was going on, but I didn’t.
  • The national anthem had a flyover with a Coast Guard helicopter, which was weird.
  • There were far more hipster doofuses at the game than I’ve seen anywhere before. I guess if you’re going to be stylishly ironic and get all tatted up and wear an undershirt only and thick glasses, Oakland’s a good place to do that, and the A’s are a good team for you.
  • The game started, and this was very much an AL game, where everything was either a strikeout or a homerun, and the term “manufactured run” draws a blank stare.
  • Complaint three about the mixed-use stadium: as this is a football stadium, they added a shit-ton of seats to make it gigantic, including a giant deck of seats across the outfield at high altitude that increased the capacity to 60,000. The attendance at this game: 17,000. To “alleviate” this, the upper deck seats are all covered with huge vinyl banners with various logos and years of championships in giant letters. But still, when you look across at this gigantic section of 20,000 wall-to-wall seats, it’s pretty depressing.
  • There was an inning when I almost thought they would have a grand slam, but it didn’t happen. Someone did have two home runs. There were a lot of strikeouts. Are there other things that can happen? Maybe they can just flip coins from now on.
  • I do have to say the weather was pretty decent. It touched the 70s, and I was in the uncovered area, so I got some sun. The wildfires have been kicking up a lot of wind and soot, which has been on-and-off screwing up pitching at both parks, but it didn’t bother my eyes or anything.
  • The big screens and scoreboards were football-type, so there was one small video screen, and one Dodgers-style amber monochrome screen, and another set of two on the other side. They weren’t as good as Coors field, but they weren’t as bad as Dodger Stadium. There wasn’t any walkup music, and the announcing was at a minimum. I listened to the game on the local AM, and the announcers were not that colorful, but they did have a lot of stats and history, and talked a lot about the historic Phillies-A’s rivalry when they were both out in PA.
  • The game was FAST – just over two hours. Oakland shut out the Phillies, and scored five.
  • One more complaint about the mixed-use stadium – it was NOT designed for egress. It took forever for the mass of people to slowly leak out of there. I don’t know what would happen if 60,000 drunken Raiders fan were leaving at the same time

So they game was eh, the stadium was not great, but I did have a pretty good time of it anyway. And I’m glad I went, because allegedly the As are getting a new home in four or five years, and I’m still pissed that I never went to Shea Stadium, and now I never will.

Gotta go wash off suntan lotion now.

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general

FINISH THIS IN 90 SECONDS

It appears I will be in San Francisco next week. I don’t remember, other than A, who does or does not live there these days, so if you do, ping me. I am not sure what I would want to do there, other than maybe go to Alcatraz, and I am not sure you still can. It will be interesting to see the city again. I was in the area in 2006, and before that in 1996. Maybe I should get a map this time.

I just bought a ticket to the A’s-Phillies game next week. I was going to go to a Giants game, but they’re on the road. I really don’t care about the Giants, but I would like to see their new park. I don’t know much about the A’s, and I’ve never seen their stadium, so that crosses two things off my list. And maybe I can catch a park tour at AT&T and see it that way.

I got a fairly okay seat for the game – a couple sections over from the plate, 15 rows up, in an MVP box. $50, plus fees and delivery on a ticket I pick up and convenience charges, so $672.87. I have this other pet peeve about all MLB-related sites – when you fill out their giant form and there is a flashing thing saying “FINISH THIS IN 90 SECONDS YOU DUMBASS” and you finish it and submit, and it bounces back with “ERROR – THE DIGITS IN YOUR PHONE NUMBER MUST BE SPELLED OUT IN LETTERS,” so you hurry to finish it. But meanwhile, all of the checkboxes you cleared for “Put your name on a mailing list and get 50 piece of spam an hour for the rest of your life?” are all RE-CHECKED! And if you don’t catch it, they sign you up for some promotional crap forever. I think they do this on purpose. Just like how the MLB media player page has “save your login” checkboxes, but forces you to log out and log back in every time you listen to something. Fuck!

I went to Home Depot yesterday to get the torx screwdriver. There’s an entire village of dudes camped out exactly 100 feet from the entrance, waiting for day labor work. It’s pretty disconcerting – I wonder if any of them get work, or if this is some kind of Grapes of Wrath thing. There is a McDonald’s in the Home Depot, which is also weird. And a quick check showed no Nibco PVC fittings, but plenty of ABS and copper. I don’t know if that ABS is made in Goshen where me and my dad worked. I know the copper isn’t made in Elkhart where I worked, because that plant is long gone. The box labels only have the Elkhart corporate address. It’s always funny, because if you look at enough boxes, you will always find a crudely-sketched map of an entire plumbing system freehanded on the back of a box, from a plumber mapping out what he needed to buy.

I’ve got to get moving. I still want to get those widgets going, but they are all insanely stupid looking. I ditched the Amazon one, which seemed to be causing the most problems, though.

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general

Beavers @ 51s

I went to a minor-league game last night, the Portland Beavers versus the Las Vegas 51s. Here’s my bulleted list synopsis.

  • The 51s play at Cashman Field, a 9300-seat park built in 1983. It’s located in North Las Vegas, just a few minutes north of downtown.
  • I thought the park was way north, so I ended up getting there way too early, and was probably the first person there.
  • It’s a nice little park, very well-kept and modern looking, and resembles a college field in size and general feel.
  • I got my ticket and waited at the gate, as a group of hyperactive t-ball kids quickly drove me insane.
  • The 51s are a Dodgers farm team, the Beavers a Padres team. So wearing a Rockies jersey, and even more, a Torrealba jersey, was a big mistake on my part.
  • Inside the park – there’s no upper deck, other than the radio booths. There’s also no seats other than those on the first and third base line. Past the outfield wall is nothing but desert. There are no bullpens; teams warm up pitchers in a widened area where a warning track would normally be. The whole thing gives an illusion that it’s a very small park, but the field is as big as a regular MLB field.
  • My seat was about four rows up, directly behind the plate. They were $12. Also, they were real seats, and the ushers brought you to your seat.
  • Wandering around, I stopped at this table pimping the new Mike Myers movie, and the woman working there talked to me about the Rockies. It turned out she lived there before, and I should have been able to tell, because she had that leathery tan that made me unable to age her at 20 or 40.
  • The gift store was decent, although they had a lot of Dodgers stuff and not enough 51s stuff. I picked up a t-shirt after arguing whether it would be worth it or not to get a windbreaker or warm-up jacket. Also, the store was air conditioned.
  • The heat – it was a high of 108, which is a temp so hot, that even when the wind picks up, it’s more like standing in front of a blowdryer. The seats under the press box had those water-misting coolers set up, but I did not sit under there. After a while, it slowly cooled off, or maybe I just got used to it. It went from unbearable to pretty bad over the course of the evening.
  • There were only a couple of places for food, so I got two hotdogs.
  • The game began, and I realized I did not know or care about either team, which changes things considerably.
  • I was close enough to clearly hear the umpire’s calls, and hear the ball hit the glove on each pitch, which was cool.
  • Kerwin Danley, the umpire we saw get hit in the throat with a pitch in a Rockies-Dodgers game I was at, was first-base umpire, on a rehab assignment.
  • I can’t even remember the play-by-play much, since I didn’t know anyone. There were some spectacular errors – if you popped it back close to the wall, in a place that any MLB player would catch it, you’d most likely drop it for a base hit, because nobody could field well. Both pitchers were also pitching an incredible number of balls, although there was some speed there.
  • One player – Chip Ambres – managed to hit a home run over the left wall in his first two at-bats. Then someone in our section started yelling “COME ON CHIP! LAY A BUNT DOWN! BE A TEAM PLAYER!” What was weird to me is that this wasn’t a giant stadium, and we were like 30 feet from him, so you know he heard everything people were yelling.
  • Our row won tickets to the aforementioned Mike Myers tickets in a random drawing. Actually, the row in front of us won, but nobody was sitting there.
  • The guy sitting next to me was an umpire for high school and junior college baseball. He knew a lot of the other umpires, and it was also interesting to hear his commentary on “that’s a tough one to call” sorts of things.
  • The mascot came out, “Cosmo”, who looked like a large Jar-Jar Binks in a uniform. When he was in our section, he gave me shit about my Rockies shirt.
  • In the 6th inning, a rally started when a pitcher walked something like ten people in a row, and then they started driving in the people on base. That ultimately meant 13 runs in the inning for Las Vegas, which entitled everyone to a free shrimp cocktail at some shithole casino downtown.
  • The game went downhill from there. Things started so slow, and then got fast at the end. The big thing in AAA is that teams are so mismatched, and that means uneven games.
  • They put me on the “jumbotron” because of my Rockies shirt. I put that in quotes because you can buy a bigger screen than their scoreboard at your local Best Buy.
  • They sold about 2000 tickets, but I think 2/3 of those people left by the 6th. By the 9th, it was absolutely quiet between pitches. At the end of the game, maybe a couple hundred people remained.
  • Final score: 14-8. Playing time was a bit shy of four hours.

OK, I need to find a swimming pool.

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general

Cardinals @ Dodgers

I think most of the kinks are out of the new journal improvements. They should be largely invisible, but the backend of the system is much simpler, and most of it is now written in PHP. I still have not gone back through the old entries, but I will get there. Another change is that individual entries will no longer have a time on them, just a date. I used to do it this way back in the 90s, mostly so I could write at work without getting busted.

And yes, all of you in the “blogosphere” who are celebrating your one year “blogoversary” – my first entry here was ELEVEN YEARS AGO last month. I think most bloggers were still playing with their Blues Clues toys eleven years ago. (To be fair, I am sure some of them still are.)

We went to another game on Saturday – Cardinals at Dodgers. Sarah and I went with Julie, and here’s the bulleted list:

  • We got to the park with a few minutes to spare, and did a million different things to mentally denote where the car was. “Under the 10 globe, next to the biggest tree, across from the US Bank building on the horizon” and so on.
  • The parking lot “sorters” were completely useless. We wanted to ask where we could park to be close to our section, but anyone we asked either told us to ask someone else, or just screamed “GO GO GO GO GO!” while waving around a flashlight wand.
  • We were at 154 Loge, which is a deck back and slightly back from first base, about 3/4 up. They were OK seats, but these are $50 seats, and would be $30 seats at almost any other park except Fenway or Yankees Stadium.
  • Julie went the night before, and the game was half-rainy and cold all night, then started to pour rain in the last inning. Dodger Stadium is a no-umbrella stadium, and we forgot our other raingear. It was cool and dreary when we got there, so we expected the worst.
  • There were a lot more people in Cardinals gear than I expected. The people sitting next to us were from St. Louis.
  • Brad “I almost killed an umpire” Penny was pitching. He immediately started fucking up, and in the third inning, gave up four runs.
  • I did not listen to the game, because Vin Sculley has gone completely sideways, and not in the fun, drunk grandfather way like Harry Caray. (example. And while we’re at it, go check out http://helloagaineverybody.com/)
  • I brought a bunch of popcorn, and then ordered a pita plate, which was not as good as the one in San Diego, but I avoided Carl’s Jr. and Dodger Dogs, so I did good.
  • Some douche in the deck above us was dumping food and drink from the balcony, which was hitting about ten rows in front of us, causing some guy to get up and scream at the people. Eventually, one of them was so stupid that they dropped their phone, and the guy grabbed it and started screaming “COME DOWN HERE AND GET IT, YOU FUCK!”. Eventually the cops caught the guy, and the whole section cheered.
  • The Dodgers always do this “match up” video thing where they have one outstanding fact about each team, and they’re getting stupid. Like “Cardinals Fact: Albert Pujols killed a pitcher the other night with a 674 MPH line drive. Dodgers Fact: Dodger Dogs no longer contain trans fats.”
  • After the game was 4-0 for a few innings, it got fairly boring, and most people were more concerned with playing with the beach balls going around the stands.
  • The torture cells in Guantanamo have better bathrooms than Dodger Stadium. Seriously, just have some dignity and piss your pants. Or wear Depends.
  • It got really cold, and we hoped they would not call the game. But it eventually petered out with the Dodgers not scoring, and the Cards not tacking on any more, so 4-0. The Cardinals got a game closer to the Cubs, and the Dodgers dropped a game, which always helps those of us with favorite teams struggling at the bottom of the NL West.
  • We actually found the car and got out of the stadium in record time, which was the real victory.

There’s another ship on Mars, which is pretty freaky. I forget the URL, but there are pictures. It’s on the North Pole, so they are either looking for water or the Martian Santa Claus.

Gotta go celebrate Memorial Day now…

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general

Cardinals @ Padres

Last night I went to a Cardinals game in San Diego, my first time down there for a game. I have been to San Diego before; I went to a conference for a week in 2000. But aside from the Denny’s by my hotel, all I did there was read books (I guess I did find a Border’s) and I made one trip up to LA for an evening. On this trip, I went with my NY friend and former AITPL contributor Julie, who drove. We also picked up a college friend of hers in Carlsbad for the game. Anyway, here is the beloved bulleted list:

  • We had no traffic problems whatsoever getting there, and made the trip in about two hours, thanks to HOV lanes.
  • The area around the stadium is all entirely new, and exactly resembles the townhouse apartments and condos that have magically appeared around Coors Field in the last few years. It seriously looked like they ordered the same buildings from the same catalog, with the same colors and even some of the same names.
  • I was looking at one apartment building thinking “damn, that looks exactly like our place in Denver”, and then I realized it was on the corner of Market and Park. Our old place was on the corner of Market and Park. And our place overlooked a parking lot used on game day, and so did this.
  • PETCO Park was built in 2004 by HOK Sport, who has designed many of MLB’s parks, including Coors Field. It’s one of those throwback-yet-super-modern designs that are all the big deal in baseball.
  • Things I liked:
    • The park is very integrated into the surrounding area. There’s an Omni hotel that is connected directly to the concourse, and it has its own box for guests. There’s a city park that’s connected to the back part of the concourse. It slopes above the furthest part of the outfield, and for $5, you can sit out there during a game. Also, they saved a hundred-year-old building that was supposed to be demolished (the Western Metal Supply Co.) and restored it to use as offices and a store.
    • There’s a lot of food, and a lot of weird food, like a fresh seafood place.
    • There was “Fielder’s Choice”, a restaurant of just healthy food.
    • The bathrooms were excellent, with honest-to-god full urinals. F the Dodgers and your stupid waterless trough urinals!
    • Good (but not great) scoreboards and signs.
    • The fans were fairly civil (but I didn’t wear Rockies gear.)
    • Parts of the stadium are these weird angular buildings that look like something from Total Recall.
  • Things I really didn’t like:
    • Not a big fan of the Padres.
    • We were in fairly good seats at the top of the field level, and a bit behind third. But our seats partially blocked the scoreboard.
    • I still think Coors Field has the best dimensions and position of stands around the field of any park out there. PETCO is smaller, but it appears splayed out more, and I think that’s because of the illusion of the outfield not being perfectly symmetrical, and dodging around the existing structures and park in center field. It just seems like the close seats are further out from the field; Dodger Stadium is like that, too.
    • There was a really close Giants-Rockies game at the same time, and I spent the entire game glued to the other games scoreboard, which gives you no info but the score and the inning, and it was like watching a clock with only an hour hand. The Rockies lost by one point.
    • I brought my AM radio, but the announcers were fairly horrible. They were both mumblers, and emotionless mumblers at that.
    • They didn’t really have a lot of walk-up music, or at least it wasn’t that loud.
    • The one exception was when Trevor Hoffmann, the closer, came out, they played the start of Hell’s Bells really, really, really loud. I’ve seen him fuck up enough that they shouldn’t make a big deal out of him. It’s like if you tried to film a Beatlemania-type movie about Dick Cheney.
    • There’s a lot of strange Catholic imagery (Padre => Father => Friar.) Their mascot is this weird friar guy, which is even more odd when you see him playing air guitar on the sidelines or whatever other weird shit mascots tend to do. Everything goes along with the friar theme, like Friar Dogs, Friar Fries, etc.
    • Getting from point A to B on the concourse was more involved than it should have been; it wasn’t all on the same level, and there were a ton of zigzag ramps.
  • Not good or bad, just different:
    • There was a lot of nautical themed stuff, like scoreboard graphics of sailboats and piers and fishermen. I think baseball teams should do a lot more of this to make each park bring out the unique aspects of each region, instead of just looking like yet another HOK-designed park.
    • The Padres are HUGE about the military. There were a lot of Navy and Marines folks at the game, although not in uniform. (Sometimes, entire sections are in uniform.) There were a lot of Navy propaganda stations on the concourse, including a big scale model of the aircraft carrier Midway.
    • Traffic was a little clogged getting out of the immediate area, but once we got to I-5, it was open throttle the rest of the way home.
    • They had the camo jerseys, which I wanted to buy, except I don’t like any of the Padres, I don’t want a Padres jersey, I don’t want to spend money, and someone else doesn’t want me to get a camo jersey. Fair enough. I’m saving for that Nolan Ryan throwback jersey anyway.
    • I managed to stay with my diet for the most part, save two regular Cokes at the game. I figured I would go 4000 calories over, but I think it was about 450 over. I’ll go for a long walk today.
    • Cardinals lost. I was indifferent about this one, but Julie is a huge Cards fan and I don’t like the Padres, so I was rooting for them. It’s also good to see Pujols play, unless it’s against the Rockies.

Anyway, I’m going to Cards @ Dodgers on Saturday. Should be fun!

Other news, I have been filling up my iPod with free music, and maybe I will review some of it, or at least provide links. Until then, I need to get some writing done.

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general

WELL WHY DONT YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH

I’ve had many horrible dental procedures over the years. I’ve had crowns, titanium posts screwed into my jaw, root canals, redone root canals, a lasered root canal with no anesthesia, impacted wisdom teeth extracted with only a local, a wisdom tooth that broke and the roots got stuck, necessitating the incompetent dentist (that looked exactly like Craig Kilbourn) to pack my mouth in cotton and send me across town to the hospital to wait for hours on a surgeon, a crown that came off during a cleaning, and some filling drilling with no anesthesia. (And yes, everyone that hears this says “WELL WHY DONT YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH”, and it’s more complicated than that. A lifetime of Cokes is a problem, but so is 18 years of well water with no fluoride, and a medication that really puts the zap on your teeth.)

Last week, one of my fillings came out, while flossing. It was a slice on the back of one of my front teeth, which makes things complicated. The new dentist said I’d need that crowned, and that’s what I would have guessed, so there goes $1200. (Plus another for $1200, minus 50% insurance, so $1200.) But if he puts a shiny white new crown next to my other not-so-white teeth in the front, I would look stupid. (I could have opted for a gold crown and became a pimp, but it’s hard to be a pimp in a Toyota Yaris.) So the newest torture is that I have to bleach all of my teeth to a pearly white to match the new stuff. And I’m not against having movie star white teeth, but there’s more to the story.

The way this works is, he made imprints of my teeth with a weird rubber junk. Then they made ceramic positives from them. (I got to keep them, and they are weird. here are pictures.) Then they made little clear trays from those, and gave me a syringe of a high-powered bleaching gel. This differs from the stuff you find in the drug store in the toothpaste aisle because the tray is form-fitting, and the gel is ten times stronger. So I fill that up and put it in for a half-hour a shot, twice a day, and in a few days, my teeth will be bright white. And my existing dental work won’t be, which will require some resurfacing on a few teeth at a later date. And there’s one crown that is already white, and two more on the way.

This issue is this: the bleach opens up these “pores” in your teeth and infiltrates them, zapping out all of the dark stuff in the enamel. And if you eat any staining stuff during the regimen, or for the same length after the treatment (i.e. four days of bleaching + four days of recovery = eight days) the staining stuff will get in and make it worse. So, no soda, coffee, tea, tomato sauce, and anything else that would stain a white shirt. And as you know, I drink several servings of beverages in that category. Furthermore, any citrus food or drink will basically feel like you’ve put battery acid in your mouth. And I am trying not to drink any sugar because of my diet. So what does that leave? Water. And milk, but I hate drinking milk. I guess there are various soy milk things, but let’s get back out of the milk category here. I think there are a couple of clear energy drinks with no sugar and a million milligrams of caffeine. At any rate, yesterday was a pretty crashed-out day for me. But the teeth are getting whiter.

And yes I saw the Manny high-five catch. For those wondering, a player can get ejected for any interaction with a fan, which includes high-fiving them; it’s in the rules. It’s the same as if a fan hit a player from the stands – they would be in the parking lot in seconds. Anyway, if you’re at all interested in seeing Brewers announcer and sports legend Bob Uecker in a swimsuit (and I mean 2008 Uecker, not 1854 Uecker), check out page 51 of the latest Sports Illustrated, the one with Danica on the cover. Anyway, I always love those behind-the-scenes articles, and there’s a good one following the Brewers on a brutal 10-game trip. I don’t usually read SI because you can get the gist of the whole thing by reading their web page, but they gave me a free subscription when I got the MLB audio season pass. And that has been fairly worthless, other than the chance to hear the Rockies get beat for the tenth time in a row. Colorado is now last in the NL West, and I don’t think they will do much more than third or fourth this year. Arizona is definitely first, and I am sure they will go to the World Series. Oh well, at least they aren’t last in their division with the biggest payroll in baseball.

Two games next week – Cardinals at San Diego on Tuesday, driving down with my friend Julie to see Petco Field for the first time. (I don’t know if it’s where the pets go.) Then on Saturday, it’s Cardinals at Dodgers. Not really looking forward to Dodger Stadium after last time, but at least it’s not the Rockies, and the Cardinals are doing better this year. Still, I can’t wear a Rockies jersey there. I really want to get a vintage Astros jersey, maybe Nolan Ryan, when they were all psychadelic dayglo orange. But those jerseys were pullovers, not front button, and any jersey costs a hundred bucks, so I’ll stick with a t-shirt.

It’s beautiful outside. I should go out there.

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general

Twilight Zone

Ah, the Twilight Zone. I’m in the middle of a half-dozen or so episodes that show up every night on cable, halfway paying attention. It’s always fun when another episode rolls onscreen, and I can remember the general plot of the episode before Mr. Serling appears. The current one is some weird Civil War-based (read “we have no money for a set this week”) story about people returning from Gettysburg down a trail, and a widow seeing soldiers that are really dead. Or something. It’s better than watching NBA wrapup coverage, anyway.

Baseball season and the Twilight Zone always go hand-in-hand for me. When I was a kid and in love with Serling’s master work, I would stay up late to watch the episodes on WGN. They were on at 10:00 Monday thru Friday, and in grade school, that meant I could only watch on Friday, unless it was a vacation, then I got in five episodes. Anyway, WGN was the home station of the Cubs. And when there was a west-coast away game, sometimes the 10:00 time slot would get pre-empted for a little Cubs@Giants action, which always thoroughly pissed me off. And considering this was the early 80s, when only the Mets kept Chicago out of the dead last spot in the NL East. But aside from that, most commercial blocks had a bumper announcing the next game.

Much like the Cubs, the only think keeping the Rockies out of the bottom slot of the NL West are the Padres. The pitching rotation has fallen apart; defensive ace Troy Tulowitzki will be injured for weeks if not months; the big bats are not so big; and things are not well. And the thing is, last year, my first game was on June 7th, and they were not doing that well prior to that. Maybe if I would have started in April, I would have seen as many losses as I have this year. I think the rational thing to do would be to give it up and become a Dodgers fan, or even better, a Diamondbacks fan. But for me, it’s about the nostalgia (which is the wrong word, when describing a team I’ve followed for less than a year – loyalty maybe), and because I am not paid according to the team’s performance, it doesn’t matter that much. They won today, so that’s good.

I am drinking a large glass of sugar-free Kool-Aid right now, and it’s not a 100% replacement for the real thing. But I am slowly getting off the sugar kick, and I even drank a Coke Zero without retching yesterday. The whole diet thing is getting better, and as of yesterday, I’m below 200 pounds for the first time in about ten years. The headaches and random crashes are about over, and I’m running fine on the smaller amount I’m eating. And to be clear, this diet is not a “diet”, like where you only eat grapefruits or bacon bits or whatever. It’s just portion control, a hard limit on fast food, and cutting out all of this sugar. This is roughly like what I did in 1997, and I was able to drop about 30-some pounds with no problems (until I went back to Cokes and junk food.)

I have a new idea for a blog-like project, and I have been hacking away at that. Stay tuned.

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general

Back from Denver

I’m back. I have been since Friday night, after a minor scare in which my airline (Frontier) went bankrupt on the day I was supposed to fly out. Luckily they were still flying, because I probably would have hitchhiked home, or maybe bought a $8000 plane ticket, just to get out of there.

I think everything in my last post summed up what the return to Denver was like, although by the end of the week, it was greatly magnified. I realized there is no single place in Denver I really wanted to eat, except for McDonald’s or maybe Qdoba. And I was staying in a hotel by the office, which is in an area that basically has a Target and a gas station. (Also, five miles away is a Sonic.) So when I got out of work each night, all I wanted to do was sit in bed and flip channels, jumping back and forth between nine different CSI/Law and Order shows at the same time, while watching my hands turn into dust from the lack of humidity. And now I’m filling out an expense report that’s basically 17 receipts from Burger King.

The game on Tuesday was great, though. I got there super early, and parked in the lot that was right outside our apartment and my office, the one I used to watch from my desk. It was only $10, which gives you an idea of the relevance of a game early in the season against the Braves. Anyway, I went to Breckenridge, one of the sports bar places on Blake Street, to kill some time and watch Detroit lose again. I am not a big sports bar person, but this place had some okay food and nice people, so it was a good place to go for some nachos (unless it was during a Broncos game and you weren’t a Broncos fan.) Instead of going in gate B, where I usually went, I got there early enough for batting practice, so I went in the outfield bleacher entrance, and got to watch the home team belt out a few. It felt so good to see Coors Field again, to look out and remember all of the places I sat – this one for the NLCS, this one for the World Series, this one for the tarp game when it poured rain sideways, and so on.

Once they opened the concourse and I walked over to the Sand Lot bar, I smelled the hot dogs on the grill and that one scent immediately represented the whole baseball season last year. I got my bratwurst, watched the visiting team bat, and listened to that Rob Thomas song “Streetcar Symphony”, which they always play before the game, and is another thing that immediately makes me think of the summer months I spent up in section 331, watching the makings of that 20/21 streak brew on the field.

I had club seats (which is now called the Wells-Fargo Club level), so I caught an elevator up there, got my cracker jacks, and settled in. There were some small updates to the stadium, mostly a lot of propaganda about being the 2007 NL champions: a new logo on the top of the scoreboard, the tops of the dugouts, flags above left field, and so on. The scoreboard had a slight improvement in graphics, and I got to watch the new round of Rockies commercials, which are pretty awful. They also have these new player blurb things in the pre-game slideshow that are a good idea, but are fairly pathetic. All of the trivia stats are things like “tied for 4th place in total RBIs for the team record for players with three vowels in their name”. Christ, a two-second web search could pull up more impressive factiods. How about “career leader in batting average for all active MLB players” (Todd Helton), or “highest batting average, hits, RBIs, doubles, extra base hits, and total bases in the NL in 2007”. (Matt Holliday) Eh.

(Here’s a weird fact – Todd Helton played football in college and was backup quarterback to Peyton Manning. Outfielder Seth Smith also played football in college and was backup quarterback to Eli Manning.)

Anyway, the game – it was cold as FUCK. It started at about 50, but the winds picked up, and after about the second inning, I started hoping it would start snowing after the fifth inning so I could leave. It always feels so weird to be in this below-zero weather and remember when it was like 105 degrees last summer, and I was going to day games with my laptop bag packed in blue ice packs so I could stick my hands in them and try to avoid heatstroke. But I had the similar strategy of retreating to the clubhouse after the third inning, except instead of sucking in the air conditioning, I was sitting over a heater, trying to get the feeling back in my fingers and toes.

The game rambled on, and the Rockies pulled it out, although it was not as interesting as the game the next day, in which the pitcher hit like five Rockies, and in the sixth inning, there were two three-run homers. Another weird moment came when I pushed through the crowd going out, and found I had to walk the same way “home” as I did after all of the games last year, except this time, instead of going in the apartment building, I walked past it, got to the car, and drove half an hour.

I think that’s the thing that fucked with me the most. I am really glad I moved to LA. (Hell, going from a snowstorm to 90 degree weather and tropical humidity tells me that.) But when I was in Denver, I really wanted to come home to 2200 Market and see Sarah and the cats and all of my stuff waiting for me. When I was at work, I really thought I’d hop on I-25 at 6:00, head north, and open the door to two four-legged ravenous felines awaiting their dinner. And to see that apartment sitting vacant made me sad in a really weird way. And some people’s reaction to that would be “oh, you miss Denver”. But it’s not that. It’s definitely more complicated. Anyway, by Friday, I was desperate to get the fuck out of town, and I did, and I am so happy to be back here. I’m glad I made a few bucks, but there’s something to be said about looking out at palm trees and a high of 79 today.

So I just dropped Sarah off at LAX – she will be gone until Wednesday on a quick business trip. In the meantime, I have a complete fuckload of stuff to do. Everybody in the world wants work from me this week, and THIS week happens to be a short week, and I have so much to do for this Milwaukee trip, which is for our wedding reception family reunion thing. I am supposed to be putting together this slideshow on the Mac, and despite all of this iBullshit, there’s not an easy way to do exactly what I want. Now I am making a book in iPhoto and then exporting the book to a slideshow, and exporting that to a movie. So that’s a major pain in the ass. And I hope this whole thing can go without a major hitch, although I now have about 150 people who are all expecting an entire weekend of facetime with us, and when you do the math, you realize a certain amount of load balancing has to happen. And this isn’t an IP network, so I can’t just go lease a Barracuda appliance to get this to work, so people will inevitably get pissed off. Also, I still don’t know what I’m wearing.

With that, I should get to work…

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general

Married

So, I got married. On Friday the 19th, Sarah and I eloped, went to the courthouse, signed the paperwork, exchanged rings, then had a nice dinner later in the evening. Then on Saturday, we flew to the Bahamas for a week of not-working and honeymoon and whatnot. American Airlines completely fucked up the vacation by routing and rerouting us all over the western hemisphere to get to Miami, fucking up our upgrade to first class, almost stranding us in Atlanta, and then losing Sarah’s luggage for almost five days. But we had a lot of fun and did a lot of nothing.

I should also mention, as an aside, that we went to game 4 of the World Series on Sunday. It cost me $500 for club level tickets, but there were still a large number of Massholes to deal with. The better team won, however. (When you define better as having over three times the salary.) And last night, we went to the Broncos-Packers game, but missed the first half because it was impossible to park. It was interesting to see a game at Invesco, which holds about 77,000 people, and was louder than fuck. I can’t say I would want to start being a football fan, but I’m glad I saw the one game.

Anyway, the Bahamas. I need to write the whole thing up at some point. We stayed at The Cove at Atlantis, the newest addition to Paradise Island. Our suite had a view of the ocean, a patio, two HDTV flat screens, and a bathroom roughly the size of a dorm room in college. Even though there was miles of white sand beach overlooking the water, there were also umpteen highly overdesigned swimming pools and water rides, including a huge slide that goes through a tube that bisects a tank of great white sharks. My favorite ride was the tube rapids track thing, and I got completely sunburned on it. Luckily, you can buy codeine over the counter in the Bahamas.

We went into New Providence and the town of Nassau three times. (Once to buy stuff, including clothes for Sarah; once on a bad bus trip; once on a much better tour from a limo driver we hired.) Paradise Island is naturally separated from the real town, showing that they learned something from Disney. It’s hard to get away from the resort, so they charge you $5 for a can of coke. In Vegas, I’d drive to Safeway and buy one; here, you have to find a cab and fight your way into town.

Most of the Bahamas reminded me of the African/Ugandan landscape of The Last King of Scotland, mixed with a bit of Pappilon. Buildings were either elaborate British colonial, or squat concrete block, usually painted a coral pink. People drove on the left side; the road was filled with right-hand-drive Toyota and Nissan trucks you’ve never seen in the US, and hucksterism abounded. Everyone spotted Mr. White Devil at a range of a hundred yards and immediately started in with a sales pitch for some fine conch shell-fabricated jewelry. The resorts were super ultra high end, and the city was complete poverty and desolation. It was interesting to see the two so close together without a war going on. Anyone bitching about the widening gap between rich and poor in this country really needs to go check out what the fuck’s going on down there.

So yeah, I went in the pool and the rapids ride a lot. We ate a lot. We went to a comedy club and saw Mo Alexander, who is the funniest fucking comic still living. No gambling. A lot of pictures (coming soon). A good time, aside from the luggage (fuck American Airlines) and the sunburn (fuck sun.)

And if you are hurt and offended that you didn’t hear first that we eloped, get over it. Even our families didn’t know. We were planning a big wedding next spring, but we realized it would be cheaper to buy a Lexus with every option available.

So that’s done. Baseball’s done. I think AITPL #12 is close to done, or at least the sales of it are. Maybe I can take up knitting. Or build a boat in my parking space. Actually I found out that if you spend $500K on real estate in the Bahamas, you get residency, and you never pay taxes again. So maybe I should start listing more shit on eBay.