Hailed Out

To no real surprise, looking at that video will tell ya why I didn't make it out to play ball last night. The hail was pretty big and it lasted for quite a while as well. The clouds were coming over the core and creating a blue-gray-ish haze over top of the core. The thunder was echoing from quite the distance as I arrived at the house. I immediately went for the BBQ to cook a couple of burgers before the storm hit. I remember last time there was a big storm before an 8:45pm ball game... we still played.



But the hail came down in a big hurry. Not overly huge pieces of hail fell... the biggest was probably just less than an inch wide, nothing too extreme. The hail bouncing off the windows made a good ruckus inside the house though.



Man, I would have enjoyed being out at the Stampede Sneak-a-peek with Jen and her friends... not! During the rain part of the storm, Jen had called up looking for a phone number from her book... they had gotten absolutely soaked down there. They got caught at the gates underneath the gray skies.

Before the girls had walked in, however, Coach Tom had given me a ring and told me that both sets of games at the diamond were cancelled and that there would be a practice starting at the cages at 2pm. So, I took my uniform and stuff that I had on the kitchen counter back to my room and conceded to staying home for the evening.

Natasha was gonna swing by in the evening, possibly to watch Crash with me. It wouldn't necessarily be my first choice of movie to watch again, but it wouldn't have been too bad. She had all sorts of plans for after work, doing yoga and then coming over, as if she was sure that I wasn't gonna have ball last night... well, she was right, I suppose.

There was nothing on TV, as per usual, during the early hours of the evening and Natasha wasn't supposed to be around until 9:30pm (or so), so I thought that I would go downstairs and bug Chris a little bit. I called him up, told him I was gonna come down... okay, sounds good. I grabbed my keys, locked the front door (just in case Jen came back early... she'd probably freak if I wasn't in there and the front door was wide open) and went downstairs. Well, I peered through the window of the locked door to the basement... Chris unlocked the door to his space, but not the bottom door. Crap. Well, I wasn't gonna ring the bell, since he may have been in the middle of a hand or two of poker, so I went back around the side of the house and who was there already?? Yup, Natasha.

"I'm so pissed off at people," was her first declaration as I met her around the house. Ha ha... she was ranting and raving about her boss and her family, that they just get on her nerves, keep her from being on time or keep her from what she wants to do. I took her inside, called Chris and updated him on the situation and then Natasha and I sat and chatted on the couch for a while. We didn't end up watching anything for a couple hours, just sat... I mostly just listened to her go on and on about how tired & sweaty she was from jogging over to the house, how she looked like "ass" and all sorts of other stuff.

Then with the two of us, sitting together on the couch, sort of wrapped up in each other, we got onto the topic of liking each other. Natasha wanted to think that I had fancied her before she did me... which I denied quite adamantly, saying that she was giving off all kinds of signals that even Jen was picking up clearer than the local CBC channel. She has a hard time grasping the sub-conscious thoughts of what she says and/or does... but she said she knows that she makes pretty major mistakes, when it comes to relationships and stuff, but doesn't know how to stop herself. By her reputation as the promiscuous one of Jen's friends, that stands for she'll go off and meet up with another guy while seeing one at the same time. I've always known this and it was sort of a hang up for a while, but her saying for a while that she was wanting to quit that lifestyle was a little hard to grasp at first, but when she kept repeating it and then hitting on me, it was becoming more and more obvious (and somewhat flattering) what was goin' on in her head. I know Jen and I have had some conversations about that in the last few weeks and well, it was about this time now that I was gonna give in and see what it was all about.

It was quite strange the other signals in her speech she was giving off, that was really giving her away... she continued to randomly look at me and say, 'I don't want to hurt you.' I could just see in her eyes the personal barriers she had put up with masking tape were falling quite easily, but she wasn't going to admit it. And then there was the conversation of what kind of relationship it was gonna start out as... the non-exclusive or the just exclusive (and try not to be jealous about her friends) relationship. I think that was how I qualified it. Well, she had agreed to 'the non-exclusive, but we'll see how it works out' idea. I kinda thought at first that this was a highly unlikely partnership at any such time, so whatever it pans out to be won't really dip much into the patience reserve. And that's sorta where I'm gonna leave this description.

"Can I help you with something?"

She had taken off around 10pm... then I went downstairs and hung out with Chris with a can of Strongbow and that kinda capped off my evening. Jen still hadn't gotten home by the time I had gone to bed and I was out like a light last night. Not a bad evening though for being hailed out of ball.



This morning, I didn't want to get up... especially to the long line of traffic around the bridge on Memorial Drive. It turned out that the lights underneath the bridge were out and it had become a 4-way (actually 2-way) stop and traffic was getting bunged up in a big hurry.

The workload at the office didn't increase by much... and hasn't really all day today. I only received one filing this morning (expecting a big one late this afternoon for Monday) and only a few from last night. I was done everything I needed to by 10am... so it's been rather slow. I uploaded all my pics and my hailing video on YouTube and just wrote this, surfed on BlogMad and BlogExplosion all day. Thats all, folks.

And over the last couple days, Lee and I have had the pleasure of watching Forest Lawn's finest protectors hard at work. On top, a speeding ticket that needed two cops to write and a ruckus around Cash Converters across the street. Neither of us caught why the commotion started, but it was quite the overkill... there was at one point, 4 police vehicles parked across the street and it all finished up with a guy writing a statement on the back of a cruiser. It didn't look like much at all, but it was well worth our speculation and cynicism.