Entry 754: Three-Inning Save

Long weekend, this one. I got back last night from an overnight trip to New Jersey. My good friend JY's son IY plays college baseball, and his team is playing a series in New Jersey this weekend, so I met JY and our other friend DK and his daughter EK out there to watch IY pitch. He's a reliever, so it's unclear if or when or how much he will pitch on any given night. If you want to watch him play specifically, which is what we wanted, then it's a bit of a dice roll.

Luckily, our number came up. In fact, it couldn't have worked out better. Friday night, with us all in attendance, he came into the game in the 7th inning with his team up 3-0, and he threw three innings, giving up just one run, on one hit (a solo homer), striking out six, and walking zero (although he did bean a guy). It was a dominant performance, and it was really cool to watch. Here's a kid I used to play Wiffle Ball with when he was a three foot tall toddler, running around in nothing but a pull-up, and now he's a six foot six behemoth getting the save in a D1 college baseball game. Like I said, it's really cool.

I was worried it wasn't going to happen, because the starting pitcher had a no-hitter going into the sixth inning, but then he gave up a hit and walked a guy, and it looked like he was going to come out soon. (DK and I were half-jokingly imploring the manager to pull him from our seats in the stands -- C'mon, skip, he's looking a little tired; let's get a fresh arm in there -- which cracked up JY, even though he was shushing us, because he knows all the other parents, and didn't want anyone to think we were rooting against their kid.) IY had been warming up in the bullpen, which means he would almost certainly be the next pitcher in, but then it started to rain, kinda hard, and I was worried the umpire would call the game. But he didn't, the rain gradually abated, and we all got to see what we came for.

After the game, we all went out to eat, but it was on the late side (9:30 pm), and a lot of places were closing soon, so it was slim pickings. We went to this Cuban joint, but it was not the vibe we were looking for. The menu was way fancier/pricey than what anybody wanted, and the music was so loud it was giving me a headache. It's difficult to overstate how high the volume was in this place. It was like dining on a dance floor. So, we pulled a move I think I've only pulled one other time in my entire life, we just left after we had already been seated. We had even ordered drinks already, but just soft drinks, so they didn't even charge us (although JY said they seemed offended that we were leaving).

It turned out to be the right move. We went to a place that wasn't Smash Burger, but was just like Smash Burger, and it was much more suitable to us at that moment. I got a double stack, and it was really good. I hadn't eaten a burger like that in long time, and it really hit the spot. DK's car somehow got a flat tire, and he didn't have a spare,* so throughout our dinner adventure, he was dealing with AAA. Thankfully, a tire guy came out relatively quickly and fixed it, so it wasn't that big a setback. Hat's off to EK, by the way, she was a trooper throughout everything, including sitting in the gloom and rain for hours at a baseball game (I don't think she's a fan, being that at one point I overheard DK explaining to her what a walk is) and sitting outside a parking garage with her dads' friends waiting for a tire to get changed. I don't think those are a 14-year-old girl's idea of an ideal Friday night. 

*He did have one of those spray cans that inflate your tire and seal it, but he didn't realize it until after he got it changed. It's probably better to get it changed, anyway. He had to get up at the crack of dawn the next day and drive several hundred miles, and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable doing that on a jimmy-rigged tire.    

JY took the red-eye in from Seattle that morning, so he was quite tired, and he's always been an asleep-when-the-head-hits-the-pillow type of guy, anyway, so he zonked out as soon as we got back to the hotel and started snoring very loudly. Thankfully, I was prepared. I'm such a fussy sleeper that I always travel with earplugs, and between those and the white noise playlist on Spotify I was able to drown out the sound of logs being sawed and get a bit of shuteye. I didn't get a great night's sleep, mind you, but it was passable. It apparently wasn't as good as JY's, as he was raving about his Fitbit sleep metrics the next morning.

I decided to drive back Saturday afternoon. Originally, I was thinking of staying another night, but since I had already seen IY pitch (and there's no way he would throw two days in a row), I figured I should get back. It would have been fun to hang out with JY another night, for sure, but I knew S was struggling at home (for reasons that will be revealed in a minute), and I also didn't want to get another night of hotel sleep and then drive back in the morning and then coach Lil' S2's football game (which starts in an hour and a half) and take him to his baseball game after that. I knew I'd be anxious about it the entire night, which would make it even harder to sleep. It was the right move, as I was completely wiped by the time I got home last night. I was not in condition to do anything other than sit on the sofa.

S was even more tired than I was because she had to pick up Lil' S2 two from a field trip at 1:15 am. No, that's not a typo. He took a class trip to NYC, and they left at 6:30 am and got back at 1:15 am. S is a morning person who is usually in bed by 9:00 pm, and she was already feeling a little under-the-weather, so this was especially hard on her. She was being cool about me going to New Jersey, because she knows I don't get opportunities to see these friends that much, but I knew she could use some relief. Also, I'm already going to be out of town all of next weekend (my annual crossword puzzle tournament), and I really didn't want to stick her with all the parenting duties for two full weekends in a row. So, I made the call to bail early. There are no solutions in life, only tradeoffs.

Alright, that's all I got for today. Last thing I'll say, however, is that Lil' S1's solo trip to Florida to visit my in-laws worked out very well. I picked him up at the airport for his return flight and got a special gate pass and met him as soon as he stepped off the jetway. He had icing on his face from a doughnut he bought at the airport in Florida, and I'm sure he did nothing but stare at his screens the entire flight, but he made it there and back safely and soundly, and that's by far the most important piece of this whole endeavor.

Until next time...

Entry 753: Solo Flights

The big news this week at the G & G household is that Lil' S1 is taking his first solo flight. He is currently tens of thousands of feet in the air en route to Florida to visit his grandparents for spring break. Somewhat surprisingly, I'm not worried about it at all. I thought I might be, but now it's here, and I'm not. There are a few reasons for this. The main one is that Lil' S1 can handle it. He's good with this sort of thing. He's very much still a little kid in many ways, but when it comes to venturing out into the world on his own and not freaking out about it, he's pretty good. He's been doing errands on his own for years, and he takes the Metro to and from school several times every week. I'm sure it's safer by an order of magnitude to be in an airport and fly than to be in a DC Metro station and take the train. You don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket and go through security in the latter scenario.

Also, S and her mom are on it. S took him to the airport and escorted him all the way to the jetway, and her mom and her mom's niece and her husband will be waiting for him at the gate on the other end. Plus, he has his cell phone, so we can always track him or call him -- provided he remembers to take his phone off airplane mode, that is. That's actually one of my only worries. That is exactly the type of thing he would forget to do. We might be saved there, however, by the fact that he'll try to watch something on YouTube and will have to turn it off airplane mode to get it to work.

This is the first year the kids have different spring breaks, so it's a little different logistically. Lil' S1 is going to Florida by himself, and then in a few weeks, S and her sister will take Lil' S2 there. I don't get to go at all, which is fine. I'm going on enough trips this year, and we go down there so often, it's perfectly acceptable for me to miss a trip every now and again. It's actually a nice time right now in our kids lives. They aren't yet in brooding teenager, too cool for school mode, but they also are past the need-to-be-monitored-at-almost-all-times stage. S is a bit sad today because she caught a glimpse into what it will be like when our kids leave the house (Lil' S2 went to a friend's birthday party and will likely be gone the entire day), but I'm just enjoying the break. Plus, the way things are going in the world today, with the job market and the arrested development of our youth, our kids might not ever leave our house for good -- and I'm only half-kidding about this.

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Alright, lightning round and then let's call it a post.

 

• My injured finger is slowly getting better. It's still bruised and tender, but I have a bit more range of motion. I had to put my Krav Maga gym membership on medical freeze for a few weeks. I can't punch, grip a barbell, or do a pushup, which makes it pretty much impossible to take martial arts or fitness classes.
  
  
• I can still do the stationary bike, though, thankfully. I also might -- just might -- be able to start jogging again. I quit about a year ago due to inflammation in my right knee, but it's been feeling pretty good of late. Once the weather gets a bit nicer, I'll test it out. That would be huge if I could go running again.
  
  
• I've been hitting Queen Bee on NYT Spelling Bee a decent amount of time (about 10%, which might not sound that impressive, but keep in mind, it's not at all an easy thing to do). Here's my daily Spelling Bee routine: I play until I get to Genius level, and then I have to get one more word (it's a game within a game that only exists in my head), and then I'm allowed to look at the number of possible words and the highest possible score. I'm not allowed to look at the solution, mind you, just the highest possible totals. If I'm sufficiently close, I then try for Queen Bee. Yesterday, I finished the job when I remembered that CIVET is a word. I don't know what it is -- I'm thinking a type of bolt, but I know that's wrong, because that's a RIVET -- but I do know it's a word.
  
  
  
• As it turns out, a CIVET is "a slender nocturnal carnivorous mammal with a barred and spotted coat and well-developed anal scent glands, native to Africa and Asia." Huh, how about that? In my Scrabble days I found that words I didn't know almost always fell into one of the Four-F categories: flora, fauna, foreign letters, foreign money. Examples are the Scrabble staples QAT, AI, XI, XU -- a shrub chewed as a stimulant, a three-toed sloth, the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and a monetary unit of Vietnam, respectively.
• I found out I can watch all the non-CBS March Madness games on Max, which is huge. The March Madness app is one of the few cable streaming services my parents’ defunct cable credentials don’t work for (and it’s not that their specific credentials don’t work; the app doesn’t accept the provider at all), so I’d have no good way to watch them otherwise. And I love watching March Madness games—well, the last few minutes of them, anyway. Even I’m not enough of a sports sicko to watch a random college basketball game, in today’s watered down NCAA, from start to finish.
  
  
• Update: Lil' S1 arrived safely at his destination. See, no need to worry, at all.

 Until next time...

Entry 752: Back In Palm Springs

I didn't post anything last week because I was in Palm Springs, my home away from home, apparently. It was a mix of work and personal. I flew in a week ago, Saturday afternoon, and spent the weekend and Monday with my parents. Then I stuck around for a work conference while my parents continued a two-week tour through the Southwest. All in all it was a good time, but not without its calamities. I accidentally paid double for our lodging; I injured, perhaps broke, my right pinkie finger; and our refrigerator apparently stopped working while I was gone. Also, my parents texted that they had to change their travel plans because roads in Arizona are being closed due to... snow?!

But let's start with the positive: It was great to see my parents. The main event was a trip out to Joshua Tree National Park. The eponymous Joshua tree is an interesting bit of flora. It looks like a tree drawn by Dr. Seuss. It makes for good scenery, though, and the park is quite nice. It was a good place for us to go, because a lot of the hikes are elderly friendly, and you can drive through the park and see the pretty desert imagery.

 

We tried to do a few other nature-y things but got stymied each time. We set out to take an aerial tram up the side of the mountain -- I've done it before and it's pretty cool -- but tickets were sold out online, and there was a line of cars a quarter-mile long just to get into the parking lot to even attempt to buy walk-up tickets. When we saw that, we did a u-ey and left.  Then we went to the trailhead of a hike at Tahquitz Canyon, but it was $15-a-person to do the hike, and it looked more treacherous than my 80-year-old mother could handle. She's still pretty mobile and can walk several miles at a time, but not through rocky, uneven terrain. She is 80, after all. So, we just walked around downtown Palm Springs instead. It's pretty cool -- tons of good restaurants. We ate at a half-decent Mexican joint one night and a pretty good Tuscan place the next.

We also ate at my friends' place in La Quinta. When I said above that the trip to Joshua Tree was the highlight, I had momentarily forgotten about visiting E & M (the couple whose wedding we attended last October).  They had us over for dinner Monday night, and it was terrific. They have a bungalow with an excellent backyard for eating and entertaining outside. Everything was great -- the food, the ambience, and the conversation were all top-notch. Just a wonderful night overall.

My parents stayed one more night at the condo unit I booked us in Palm Spring, and then set out the next morning for the rest of their trip. I went to a hotel for my work conference. I accidentally double-paid for our condo unit, but thankful Expedia and the villa manager were cool about it, and I got it resolved fairly quickly. The hardest part was finding the correct phone number for Expedia. They don't advertise their number on their confirmation emails, or even at their website (at least not that I could find), so I Googled it, and ended up with a couple false leads at first.

I guess the double-booking error was my fault -- I reserved two units instead of one -- but that's because the website I went through is hella confusing. It calls a full condo unit with multiple bedrooms a "room." So, I booked two "rooms" thinking a "room" was actually a room and not a full unit. I mean, would anybody ever say "Yes, I'd like to book a room with two bedrooms, please"? Look at the confirmation notice I received below and tell me if you think it reads as one condo unit, two bedrooms total, or two condo units, four bedrooms total. It's the latter, but I don't blame anybody, including myself three months ago, for thinking it's the former.

Alright, I'm quickly running out of time writing this. So, I'll have to be brief in my description of the other calamities. I played dodgeball on a team with my colleagues at the work conference and badly messed up my finger. They always have a big corporate party thing at the end of the week that features a dodgeball tournament. Usually we don't participate, but this time we did, and it did not go well. Actually, we won our first match, but then we got destroyed in our next one. I was probably our best player, and I kinda suck, because I can't throw hard anymore due to the arthritis in my shoulder. After our second (and last) match, I noticed that my right pinkie finger really hurt and by the next morning it was purple and swollen and I could barely move it. Getting old is a bitch.

Also, our refrigerator seems to be broken. When I got home, I noticed the milk was sour and everything seemed to be warmer than it should be. I put in this little thermometer we have (great gadget, by the way) and left it overnight, and the refrigerator temperature didn't go below 55 degrees, even though it's set at 35. The freezer is okay, but not the fridge. We have another fridge downstairs, so it's not the end of the world. But moving all our food to the basement before it rots is not the activity I had planned for this morning. It did kinda force me to clean out all the old stuff, though, which was long overdo. I felt like the "aunt" from that stupid Geico commercial: expired, expired, expired...

Until next time...

Entry 751: Our Short National Nightmare

It must be said: Our country is a nightmare right now. I hope things are good for you locally, because they are a disaster at the national level. Thus far, Trump 2.0 has been worse than I was anticipating, and I was already anticipating things would be quite bad. I knew he would be terrible when it comes to things like upholding democratic norms, uniting the country, and maintaining strong international relations with our allies. (The Zelenskyy meeting was an utter embarrassment.) But he's fucking up even the things that he's supposed to be good at, like the stock market. It plummeted earlier this week and didn't rebound much. And even if you don't care about stocks,* you probably care about having a job, and Elon is gleefully, maniacally slashing government jobs and government funds that pay for a lot of NGO jobs. It's all being done in the name of efficiency, and it will be very efficient in leading us to the brink of recession. If Trump actually follows through on his plan to impose high tariffs on pretty much all imported goods, it might just push us over the edge. 

*I don't really care much about them, to be honest. Like most people with a retirement plan, I have some money in the stock market, but it's just a number on a screen until it's time to withdraw, which won't be for many years, and I'm sure conditions will be different by then. But it does matter to some people now and not necessarily just rich people. I'm sure even, like, retired teachers have investment accounts that rely somewhat on stocks.

And we're only in month two. We can't even call it "our long national nightmare" because it hasn't been very long yet. We've got another 3.8 years of this bullshit.... *Sigh*

Alright, enough about that. Let's focus on more positive things for the rest of the post.

White Lotus! I mentioned in my last post that I resubscribed to Max just to watch it, and I was lamenting the fact that I didn't wait until all the episodes were out, so that I could binge watch it and then quit my subscription after only a month. But now I'm actually very glad that I didn't do that. There's something to be said for watching only one episode a week like we used to. I like that feeling of watching something with everybody else around the country. I miss the shared TV experience. Of course, relatively few people are actually watching it with me, compared to the old days, so there's no one really to talk about it with. If I brought up the show to a colleague at lunch (assuming I'm eating lunch with a colleague and they have Max, neither of which is a guarantee) they would probably be like, Oh yeah, is that the one at the resort? Haven't seen it. Everybody is watching their own things on their own schedule.

But that's where podcasts come in. I've really gotten into the White Lotus coverage on The Ringer's The Prestige TV podcast. They point out little things I missed, give background on the actors and writers,* and toss out theories about what will happen next. It's not as good as having an actual conversation that you can participate in, but it's the next best thing. It's the technological solution to a problem technology created in the first place. It's not quite adequate, but given that it's impossible to unring the technology bell, it's better than nothing. 

*Or writer, rather, singular. I believe Mike White writes and directs every episode by himself.

Actually, it kinda reminds me of dating apps. They came along after I was already off the market (although I did very briefly do Match.com, back in the day), but from everything I hear, they're pretty much the only way people meet anymore. But the only reason we need them is because technology has so isolated us that young people, who never experienced the "before times," don't have the opportunities, nor the social skills, to pursue potential romantic partners IRL. Again, dating apps are a technological solution to a problem technology created in the first place. And also from everything I hear, they are not quite adequate. In fact, most people seem to hate the apps. I know a few married couples who met on the apps, but I know an equal number of people who have sworn them off completely. They would rather be alone than play the swipe game. I mean, dating was never easy (not for most of us, anyway). It was a top complaint among twentysomethings when I was a twentysomething, twenty-something years, but I think it's even worse now.

Anyway...

I've mentioned before that Lil' S2 is really good at math, and he's continuing to demonstrate it. Lil' S1 is pretty good too, but he's good in a more conventional way, where he will learn the methods and apply them appropriately and mostly get the problems correct. But Lil' S2 has this spark that I just don't see in many other kids. He's not necessarily a whiz at calculating things -- he's probably better than average for a kid his age, but he makes silly mistakes and messes up basic arithmetic sometimes, like most people -- but he has this uncanny knack for understanding and solving the broader problem. For example, the other day we were eating dinner and finding ways to entertain ourselves without using our phones (much to the kids' chagrin), so I started giving everybody math quizzes, and I posed the following problem: 

You are in a circle with a bunch of people and a bunch of chickens. It goes person, chicken, person, chicken, person, chicken, all the way around. When a bell rings, each chicken turns and randomly pecks the person to its left or its right. What is the probability you don't get pecked at all?

Lil' S2 immediately yelled out "25%", which is the correct answer. He got it before Lil' S1 and S. When I asked him how he got it, he couldn't explain it very well. It seemed like he just kinda intuited it. Thinking that maybe he just got lucky I asked him another question:

I roll a die over and over again. Every time it's 1 or 2, I'll pay you a dollar. Every time it's 3, 4, 5, or 6, you pay me 50 cents. Is this a game you would want to play?

He thought about it for a few seconds and then said, "I think I'd just about break even," which again is correct. I asked him to explain, and again he couldn't really do it -- he gave a 9-year-old-word-salad response (although he did correctly know that the probability of rolling a single number is about 16.7%) -- but somehow he figured it out. It was pretty cool. I hope he keeps it up. I've been trying to get him to take coding classes -- I know he could be a really good programmer -- but he doesn't want to. That's his biggest weakness. He doesn't like to come out of his comfort zone. Well, he's still just a little kid, so hopefully this is something he grows out of, because it's a mindset antithetical to success. As a wise person once said, "Half of life is just showing up."

Alright, that's all. Until next time...