lilairen, posts by tag: baseball - LiveJournal

So teinedreugan and I went to the family Easter service at a local UU church today to see if it was a place that I might fit in.

Let's just say the head minister got up and:

"It's also a holiday today, what holiday is it?"
"EASTER!"
"And what else?"
"PASSOVER?"
"And what else?"

*long pause*

"OPENING DAY!"

At which point the congregation started singing "Take me out to the ballgame."


Other notes: The service opened with a bit of Vivaldi's "Spring". Three of the choirs performed. There was a puppet show. KJ got to pet a rabbit. Spoke with the head minister (who mentioned the Spaceman had preached there last summer), the volunteer coordinator (who came to say hi) and some other folks. They did our favorite Easter hymn, though since it was the UU version I could only sing along with the "Alleluia"s. We departed because teinedreugan was fried and KJ was trending towards nap, through a milling crowd of small people hunting eggs and cans (the cans presumably for donation); as we drove past on the way home I saw several of the kids up a tree.

"So," said the woman with the stroller and bewildered toddler, "when are you due?"

"Monday."

After the silence, "... cutting it a bit close there ...." she said, as the doors opened behind her, with an edge of nervous laughter, as if I was more than twenty minutes from home and the baby like to appear in that timeframe without warning, as if I should be spending more time hiding, just in case, to be safe.

People confuse me.


The Spinners lost. There were some nice plays. If that's not the first ballgame I've been to that I didn't score, it's been years; it was oddly nice to just watch the game, leaning on artan_eter's shoulder, with teinedreugan dropping his hand over the rail every so often for me to hold when he wasn't playing with the camera. I did not get a hot pretzel, though they smelled wonderful.

I like minor league games more than the majors, in a lot of ways; it's easier to just snuggle into the undemanding bosom of Baseball and let the feel of the game roll without the overwhelming This Is The Big Leagues Baby ambiance. It doesn't demand, it requires nothing but the smooth clean arc of raw physics and a sharp slide across grass in the hope that man vs. physics might come up man. It's easy to love baseball in the minors. The children chase foul balls like pack hunters, the ushers and stadium decorations try to get people to do the wave, toddlers race the mascot around the bases between innings, and the white figures and the grey figures do battle armed with parabolas.

As the man said, your immortality is measured in outs.

For some reason, I wanted this quote here. I'm not sure why.

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. - A. Bartlett Giamatti

I'm glad Dad suggested I get out to a game before the baby makes doing so awfully complicated. It's an ineffable thing, baseball, baseball and me.

I am so emotionally iffy I turned down an offer of a ticket for tomorrow's game.

Wish I knew WTF is wrong with me.

artan_eter: You look ... like you're watching someone torture a kitten.
Me: I'm reading the Red Sox newsgroup?
artan_eter: That would do it.

So I've been having some disjointed conversations:

Kiya: You know, I was going to say that the two conversations I'm having at the moment on IRC are sort of surreal in juxtaposition, but I'm suspecting that Sox fandom is having one of its strongly-resembles-a-BDSM-relationship periods lately.
kviri: <snrk>

On practicing with the drum:

Brooks [brooksmoses] unidles, reads scroll. Whitney, you need practice so you can remember which hand is tek and which is ka, and then you can reember left and right if you can reemmber whether tek goes with left or right. Which you can probably do with a suitable Red Sox reference, if you're lucky (though he's probably a leftie, and tek is your right hand, isn't it. Sigh....)
Whitney says, "He's a switch hitter."
Whitney says, "And thus No Help At All."
Brooks says, "Well, that at least matches your _current_ state of remembering which is which. :p"

Remembered to try to find information on Algonquin and/or Iroquois symbology; failed to succeed.

340 words this weekend. Very busy and feeling unwell.

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Apparently one of the first things Schilling did after getting his contract settled was to donate half a million dollars to the Jimmy Fund (the charity that the Red Sox promote).

Also, apparently his contract forbids him to post to the Sons of Sam Horn message board after midnight. I am massively tickled.


Section 63: 1341 words. Done.
Section 64: 580 words. Done.
I think I want to think about 65 some more.

That's 1921 today, 19400 for November, for an average of 692.857143 wpd. I set myself a goal of twenty kilowords for the month yesterday; I think I can swing that in the next two days.


Oh, hey, keshwyn, I mentioned that someone did a really fine pomegranate poem recently -- this is where it is.


Mmm, storminess outside. Yum. No thunder, but lots of wind. (Winnnnnnnnd!)

Still need a 'misc' icon. I'll settle for generalised goodnaturedness.

Sounds like the confirms from dubious sources are being confirmed by genuine sources.

Sox got Schilling.

Here's hoping that settles the rotation down a bit.

It's too much to hope for that this'll stop the stupid political flamewars on asbb-r, though. Hot stove season is murder on usenet.

It probably says something about me that I think that pitchers and catchers reporting is a significantly more important aspect of February than my birthday.

(84 days and counting . . .)

Because I haven't written about anything since we went to the movies.

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Still suffering from the d'waaaaanas. This may improve if I wind up feeling less vaguely icky.

Need to repot a plant. I think I'll do that now while I'm thinking of it.

That was . . . exciting.

But we have Derek Lowe, who has pitches that turn right.

And good gods, I hope Johnny Damon's all right. Owwwww. (And also, someone please shoot whoever at Fox decided that we needed to see the collision forty times.) I'm lighting a candle for him.



And now I've ripped an MP3 of "Dirty Water", because I feel a need to have it handy. (And while I was at it I snagged a couple of discs out of the stack it was in, so I've ripped some James Taylor and am currently pulling Depeche Mode. My iTunes only gets weirder.)