Post #499

A Tuesday that feels like a Monday... how novel. This was a picture I quickly snapped walking through Prince's Island Park yesterday. The afternoon was actually quite nice as I took a walk into the core to sort myself out the hat from the Keith's bottle, which turned out to be a really nice Alexander Keith's hat, made by Roots. It actually is one of those nice-fitting caps, unlike the shallow sort of hats that Roots makes for themselves. They must have realized that most beer drinkers have really big heads... or have lots of hair.

All afternoon, Karli was trying to nap on our front couch. I'm thinking somewhere along the line I mis-understood Jen when she said Karli would be sleeping over a few nights for that she'll practically be living with us for a little while. Seemingly odd and sort of out of the blue... what had seemed to have happened is that Karli has now officially left her boyfriend of 3 years, for whom she moved to Calgary with, to be with another guy, who probably lives with his folks, definitely a younger fella, and now she needs a place to crash as she gets herself sorted out. Of course, I have had to figure this out for myself, which is probably the worst part of it all. So it turned out that I was tip-toeing around the house all afternoon, instead of relaxing in front of the TV, but I suppose that isn't the worst thing, since there wasn't anything like hockey on. It was just a Monday's worth of TV.

Soon enough though, it was rollin' around the time that I wanted to get out to the ballpark. There was a spot of rain that flew by the house early in the afternoon as I was sitting around and/or making a bite to eat, but the skies seemed to clear up quite well. I had decided, since there wasn't a great deal to do, I thought I would get to the park early, get a few rounds in the batting cages to warm up. I picked up a few beers on the way to the park, for afterwards, and then drove over to Shouldice.

I took about 80 pitches in the cage, taking me a while to try and find the groove that I should be in. I'm finding that when I'm at the plate, I'm going up there and taking way too big of a step forward, thus my eyes change position and I don't see the ball in the same place for when I try and swing, causing a huge swing & a miss. So, the exercise of the 80 pitches was to calm down and just get the bat on the ball, from both sides of the plate. Hindsight here is 20/20 as I really didn't get all my stretches in before taking the swings of the bat in the cage. Now, my left shoulder blade hurts like a bastard, which it continued to do through the game and when I went to bed, which made sleep pretty uncomfortable all night.




After the cages, I went over to the diamond and Rollie, the assistant coach of the team, was already standing behind the diamond that we were going to be playing at and this was before 7pm. Our game was at 8:45pm, which I was super-early for as well, but thought I would watch some of the games, just in case we were playing one of these teams in the late game. As it turned out, we were playing the backcatcher, number 21's team from Canmore in the late game, so it was a little bit of a scouting job before our game.

The game before us was pretty close. The Canmore team ended up beating the other team, CBA, 7-0 on a default decision. The first baseman for CBA got called out on a seemingly questionable play, where he thought he was so incredibly safe that he lost it. Fuckin' this and fuck that... givin' the ump a lot of shit, eh. Well, he got chucked from the game, no surprise, but he didn't leave the park as you're supposed to when you get chucked. So after an entire inning of hanging around the dugout, the ump called the game (without warning) giving Canmore the 7-0 win. Well... an eruption of sorts from CBA and blah, blah, blah... it just wasn't the most sporting of finishes to a game, that's for sure.

Since the game had ended, we were now free to take the field and start warming up for our game against Canmore. The shoulder was hurting, but not too much... just enough to slightly be a bother. The warm-ups sort of proved that I could play through the night, but the colder, wetter air that was coming across the sky, probably wasn't gonna help things too much. Yeah, it was thinking about the rain that was forecasted when we were warming up, so we were all pretty anxious to get the game started.

The game went fairly well for us. Not the greatest outing, but still not too bad. The umps were still sort of licking their wounds from getting shocked by the game before. Yes, we had the same umps, probably for pay reasons. The strikezone for Allan was pretty inconsistent and some of the calls were a tad bogus, but we prevailed in spite of them 7-5. Our first inning was finally worthy of mention, in the good fashion, as we almost hit around for 5 runs. Allan hit a 2-run homer and then Menzies hit a single bomb for back-to-back jacks. Very impressive and really got the team going. But Canmore kept themselves in it, for the most part. A responding homer to lead off the bottom half of the inning and then they just tried to claw back runs though the game. But we held on.

I didn't figure too prominently through the game. I had gone 0 for 4, striking out once. For some reason, I didn't get a bunt signal in the first after Munden had reached base, so I was swinging away, which kind of caught me off-guard a bit. No excuses though. And then in the field, I pretty much got nothing. I was really only a cheerleader for the most part on the field, but it seemed to help. Without Tom there last night (since he's away on business), I took a bit more of a leadership role and helped a few of the guys out through the game. It kind of fit for me and it'll probably help if I go with them to provincials and coach them there as well.

Since we won, we hung around the car after the game and had a beer. That was pretty good. Gets a good spirit of the team with a few of the guys. Alex, Aaron, Menzies and Munden all stayed around and we chatted for a bit. We finished up awfully late, getting away from the park after 11pm.

I got home to find Karli sleeping on the couch again, which again, I wanted to wind down with a little telly before I nodded off. Nope... wasn't gonna be. Dammit... so straight to bed with my mp3 player. And yeah, the shoulder was pretty uncomfortable overnight. It sure took me quite a while to fall asleep in what seemingly was the most comfortable position in bed.

This morning, it's still pretty sore. If I could have stayed in the shower a lot longer and possibly had an in-house masseuse, then I'd probably be okay. But I don't... so it's probably gonna be pretty sore all day today too.

On the personal front, I caved in again and called Barb up to see what she was doing yesterday. She was actually working the Monday, but had today, Wednesday and Thursday off, so I'm gonna give her a call tonight after work and see what she's up to. Hopefully get out and about. Kristy, on the other hand, wasn't able to do anything yesterday either, having lunch with clients and having to wait for her older brother to finish work, but she said she'd be free probably on Saturday afternoon, so I'll give her a call then and then we can finally catch up a bit.

Otherwise, it looks like today, I'm gonna get pretty badly beaten with a quite a few smaller filings that came in on my day off. I have much doubt that anyone even looked at them and I might get a tad swamped. It's a good thing I got to work early so I can write this post. So, I best be going now, then I can sort out all these little ones, work on the two big ones I have and then see where it goes from there. Ciao!