kiya

"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.

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

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.

( Silly D&D character class quizzy thing which amuses the heck out of me. )

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 . . .)

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.)

Damn, that's the first time I've heard 'em play all of Dirty Water at Fenway. They usually don't seem to play the frustrated women verse.

And if I were only in touch with Maren, Marcie, and Ali, I would say, in this moment: "BOSTON!!!1!"

Ahem.

On with the cowboying up, then, shall we?

brooksmoses and I went up to Lowell yesterday to watch the Spinners play Williamsport. We got frightfully lost on the way there, but got in in time for the game and all.

( Minor League Report. Ish. )

After that we went to dinner at Bertucci's, where I haven't been since I had lunch with healwlove. And thus I no longer have a strange, plaintive feta craving, and I repel vampires at twenty paces.

And other miscellanea. Not in chronological order.

Went to the game tonight with rivka and curiousangel. And my brother, who was late due to congenital disorganisation, but showed up (we missed the first inning; I had to reconstruct the scorecard from the at-bat information later). The Orioles played well. My brother (an A's fan) heckled everyone. "Let's go, Red Sox" in the second managed to thoroughly drown out and quell the actual O's fans present for a while. There was an awfully cute baby next to us.

Me to rivka: You stole our seventh inning!
rivka: You really should lock your clubhouse.
teinedreugan: But they did it in the sixth.
Me again: Well, they had to, otherwise we'd have it.

Other thoughts and notices from trip: There's a field west of the park on 28 that's slated for them to build a church. (Episcopalian, I believe.) The field is empty, mowed down, and on the crest of a hill is a wooden cross, weathered, brown and grey, with a ribbon of green draped over it in the sort of 'M' shape one gets draping ribbons of cloth over crosses.

I think it's perfect.

And they're just going to ruin it putting a building there.

(This observation provoked teinedreugan into starting a conversation with me about the human-centric tendencies of modern Christianity, but that's a thought for another entry, if at all.)

Hung out Friday with Aga and my little brother Ben who is no relation to me and vectorvillain. Had pizza at my father's place. Were very fuzzed by a geriatric cat, who is shouting at me as I type this.

Much of today before the game was occupied with teinedreugan trying to make his parents' DSL work, poor fellow. We got a Windows 98 disc from sstaten by hanging out in his basement for a while while it took an hour to read and then failed to burn. (Ack.)

Failed to get to the Baltimore Book Thing. (rivka, do you know about this?) May try on the way home tomorrow.

It's very weird to have a lengthy conversation with someone, feel a profound need to talk it over with someone, and feel even more profoundly that it's too private to discuss. Will probably have Daily Rite when I get home so I can talk to someone who was there about it.


And that's the news from Darnestown bordering on North Potomac (where all the women are primped, all the men are accountants, and all the children are amazingly trendy). (Mutter mutter bike lanes.)

yehoshua puts words together like brooksmoses does. See? All of that increasingly whimsical hypotheticity. Double-take theatre.

Did some debugging on a scenelet with oneironaut, so I can pretend I'm some use for something.

My moods are improved massively, but I'm not sleeping. Can I get sleep without hypersomnia and its associated depression, please? I'd like to report a bug in this system patch, it's compromising features I was using.

I'm pretty sure I did something else today, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

Tek Tek Tek Tek Tek.

Sighing addendum: The Tek giveth, and the Tek striketh out.