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Bring On the Rain

Every once in a while, I like to remind people that I am not that smart.

About a month ago my mom said she was planning on going to a Washington Nationals game this week, and asked if I wanted to go. I checked the calendar, and for some reason got it in my head that the game was on a Monday.

Given that I don’t start work until 10 p.m., and work in the city, it was actually convenient timing to catch a game.

So I got home from work Monday morning planning on power-napping so I could get up in time for the game. All morning I had listened to weather reports saying we were getting tons of rain, and figured there was little chance they were actually going to play the game. I woke up a few times and checked the radar, each time becoming more and more convinced of a rain-out.

After sleeping a lot longer than I originally intended, I checked the radar one more time. Somehow all of the rain that seemed destined to fall on Washington somehow skirted the city.

I started rushing to leave the house so I could at least catch some of the game; I figured I could get there around the fifth or sixth inning. But in my haste, I left my ticket in the car. I knew where we were sitting, so on the train I figured I would just get a cheap ticket to get into the stadium and make my way down to the original seats.

I got to Nationals Park in the top of the sixth inning, and for some reason the guy at the box office gave me a free ticket. I would like to say it is because of my stellar personality, but given the stack of free tickets on the desk I doubt I was alone.

I didn’t see anyone in our row, so I called my mom to see if they had moved to a potentially drier location:

“Hello?”
“Hey, are you here?”
“Que?”
“Are you at the game?”
“The game is tomorrow.”

(Some portions of the conversation may have been re-created)

A dry view of the game

So there I was, at a baseball game on the wrong day. It’s actually quite fortunate I forgot my original ticket — imagine the confusion trying to use a ticket from the wrong day.

At least I got to see three free innings.

September 30, 2010 baseball not smart Uncategorized
Oh Baby Baby

Baby Hannas is almost here — my brother’s child, not mine — and to say that my mom has been waiting for her arrival for a long time would be an understatement.

Roughly six years ago my cousin had a son, and after going to one of his early birthday parties my mom told a carfull of my siblings something to the effect of, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”

Since then my older brother got married, and more recently my sister did as well. (First I wrote “my older brother and sister got married,” but clearly that doesn’t sound right). The prevailing theory among the rest of us was that once a grandchild existed, mom would have someone to play with and dote upon and all pressure would be off.

Well, it looks like that thesis is incorrect.

I was over at my parents’ house the other day to help out with a few things. One task was to move some furniture in the ongoing process of getting the upstairs more baby-toting visitor-friendly. Later I was doing some stuff on her computer when the One Year Plan came up.

It turns out the one grandchild plan was flawed from the start. Apparently relying on other members of the labor pool (pun not intended, but accepted) is not within the expectations of management. All are supposed to contribute to the system. Who knew?

I asked what sort of timetable existed, and as the name of the plan suggests, my child was slated to arrive in a year. Given the laws of nature, the current state of the stock market, global warming and the like, that didn’t leave much time to get the plan in gear.

I mean, that doesn’t give Natalie Portman a lot of notice to change her filming schedule to accommodate the plan. I was able to push the deadline back to two years, but I should probably let Natalie know pretty soon anyway.

Natalie is a little skeptical about the plan

I asked a few more questions to make sure the expectations were clear. There is no cap on grandkids — so if my sister were to announce tomorrow she was having twins, that would in no way affect my situation. The deadline is also important because the grandkids are supposed to have cousins who are near in age to play with. I argued that it would be good to have a range so that the older ones could be passing along wisdom. Suggestion rejected.

You may recall from an earlier post, that my mom and I have a running joke that I am going to be married with two kids before she even knows I am in a relationship. So while the first kid may arrive in two years, it’s not like she would even know about it until much later.

So, blog readers, we have some work to do.

P.S. Hi Mom!

September 26, 2010 kids life plans Uncategorized
Be the Ball

After a book that takes forever to get through, I always go to one I know I can easily read in just a few days.

After William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” the quick read this time was Carl Hiaasen’s “The Downhill Lie.” It’s about his journey as a self-described “hacker” to return to playing golf many years after quitting the sport.

As a fellow hacker, I found it interesting to get inside the mind of someone who plays at exactly the same level. My usual playing partners are both better than I am, so while we are always out there to just have fun there’s something to knowing you are the weakest link in any group.

I think Hiaasen would enjoy my general outlook on playing with those who consistently beat me — if they shoot an 88 and I rock a 95, we paid the same amount of money but I got to hit seven extra shots.

One thing I found troubling about Hiaasen is that he’s a University of Florida journalism graduate. When I worked in Florida, it seemed like three-quarters of my coworkers went to the UF J-school, and really, nothing good can come of that. (OK, they were pretty cool, but having to hear about Tim Tebow every day will wear on you).

But Hiaasen did redeem himself by introducing me to a new term I can use to describe my golf game. Actually, it’s one of Hiaasen’s friends who tells him about “Ray Ray golf.” In the hacker world, our rounds are marked by stretches of a few good holes that make us feel like we can actually play this game, and then holes so disastrous we wonder how our friends can stand to watch such a spectacle. In the words of Hiaasen’s friend, “One hole you play like Ray Floyd, and the next you play like Ray Charles.”

The thing about those good holes is that they are sustaining. It only takes a few good shots to keep you going. “That’s the secret of the sport’s infernal seduction,” Hiaasen says. “It surrenders just enough good shots to let you talk yourself out of quitting.”

He talks later about the effect of even one good shot, the way it feels to swing a club and have a little white ball go exactly where you want it to. “That’s the killer. A good shot is a total rush, possibly the second most pleasurable sensation in the human experience. It will mess with your head in wild and delusive ways.”

He’s right. There’s something about a perfect shot that makes you feel slightly superhuman. When you hit the ball right in the sweet spot of the club, it feels different. There’s an ease with which the ball flies off the club face and continues to an exact point off in the distance.

The setting helps enhance that feeling. You’re out on a narrow strip of grass, maybe nestled between the woods with nothing but the sound of birds around you. You pause for a second in that stillness, the club in your hand and your eyes on the ball in front of you. And then your actions — the way you pull back the club, rotate your body into a corkscrew and then unravel it all — cause this pinpoint flight as if you had just picked up the ball and set it down exactly where you wanted to hit the next shot.

It’s kind of like hitting a home run in baseball. To the observer, there’s the really violent action of a bat slamming into a ball that has been hurled in its direction. But crushing a baseball — hitting it in just the right part of the bat at the right angle — can feel smooth and effortless in a way that can seem totally opposed to the resulting flight of the ball.

You don’t have quite the same control over where the ball lands, but a few of those will definitely make you forget some of the strikeouts and feeble groundouts to second base.

September 19, 2010 baseball books golf Uncategorized
Dream a Little Dream

I just had one of those dreams you really want to document, and fortunately my laptop happened to be a few feet away. Clearly this one has great meaning and should be analyzed for insights into my life:

I’m in a car, or more like looking at the inside of a car. Skateboarder and MTV reality superstar Rob Dyrdek is there with former MTVer Christopher “Big Black” Boykin and one other guy. There’s a man at the door asking for IDs, so I assume we were at some sort of club.

I watch at Rob gets out of the car and calmly walks inside the building, which doesn’t look at all like a club. He turns to his right to a bank of elevators — more like a hallway of 50 or so elevators on the right side and then a few more straight ahead of us.

Rob puts his hand on the “up” button at the first elevator, gets a big grin on his face and then runs straight ahead, pressing the button on most of the elevators as he goes. An employee of whatever kind of establishment we were at starts yelling and chasing after Rob. Just as he gets to the end of the hallway, the last elevator opens up, and a group of girls walks out. Rob jumps in the elevator, the doors closing just as the angry employee gets there.

For some reason I am not actually on the elevator, not just watching Rob like he’s on TV. A family is in the back, hiding behind a curtain in the now oddly huge elevator. You could park a car in there. We get to the top and I get out. I realize we are in a really tall building, but decide the elevator is not the best option for getting down.

I pass up the escalator too, instead opting for the stairs, which look more like big plastic slides. It’s like Chutes and Ladders without the ladders. I sit down at the top and don’t budge. There’s some kind of traction-y stuff on the chute that won’t let me move. I get up, feeling like an idiot because people just saw me assume that thing was a slide. But then all of a sudden I am sliding down, and the chute becomes more like one of those giant wavy slides you see at a carnival.

I get to the bottom, and now the mystery building is a mall. And somehow it is clearly identified as being in Atlanta. I decide that stores in different parts of the country get different items, so I should buy some new shoes.

I go into Finish Line and turn to the shoe wall on the right. Another customer sees the polo shirt I’m wearing and asks me if I know the price of the shoe he’s holding. I do not. I look back at the wall, which doesn’t have very many shoes on it. Lots of empty little shelves there there are supposed to be shoes.

For some reason the shoe wall turns into a wall of video games. Most of them are used. I turn to walk out and start discussing the lack of cool games with a friend — who I guess just magically appeared at the Atlanta mall/club/elevatorium.

Wake up.

September 18, 2010 insanity sleep Uncategorized
And the Bass Keeps Running

I finished William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” last week, but due to a bout of sickness and the mind-exhausting nature of the book, I held off on making the usual post-book post.

This is the second of Faulkner’s books that I have read, after taking down “The Sound and The Fury” last year. After reading that book, I did some additional reading about the story and the author. I remember seeing somewhere that it was considered one of the most difficult books to read.

For some reason, I hadn’t considered that his other writings would be incredibly taxing to get through. While “The Sound and The Fury” had three different narrators — including one who was mentally handicapped and lacked a concept of time — and a male and female character with the same name, “Absalom, Absalom!” has multiple narrators who sometimes tell parts of each other’s lives.

It’s the kind of book where you read five pages and realize you haven’t the slightest clue what just happened. Fortunately, one of the narrators is just as confused while he is being told the story, and halfway through the book makes sure everyone is clear.

The most difficult part of Faulkner’s style is that he writes in a stream of consciousness that creates incredibly complex sentences. He’s probably the only writer I have ever seen use two colons in the same sentence.

I started typing out an example and realized the sentence literally took up an entire page. The punctuation sums it up pretty well: six dashes, 12 commas, two sets of parentheses and a semicolon. It also includes the phrase, “lurking in dim halls filled with that presbyterian effluvium of lugubrious and vindictive anticipation…”

There’s a reason it took me a month to read the book. That’s not to say, though, that I didn’t enjoy it. The story is solid, one that has one of those moments 200 pages in that makes you glad you slogged through everything that came before.

Plus, Faulkner used one of my favorite words — verisimilitude — and described a guy wearing an overcoat over a bathrobe as looking “huge and shapeless like a disheveled bear.” I defy you to picture a disheveled bear and not be entertained.

If the title of the post put that song in your head and you want to indulge, here it is. The group is notable for having a singer that once prompted a former roommate to ask if the phrase “belly tap” should be hyphenated. I think we decided it should, though I’m not sure we came up with a clear definition of the term.

Probably for the best.

September 17, 2010 books Uncategorized
Stand Clear, Doors Closing

For a long time, Metro stations played a message over the PA system that said something like, “If this is your first time riding with us, here are some things you need to know…Our doors are not like elevator doors — they will not re-open automatically…”

It seemed like they played the message all the time, and as a seasoned rider I found it kind of annoying. But clearly the folks at Metro should bring it back based on what I witnessed on my way home this morning.

I usually try to get on the last car on the train, both because it tends to be the least crowded and it puts me close to the escalator when I reach my destination. The things I see during the ride are completely by chance. The scenery depends on who gets on the same car, which direction I happen to be facing and a bevy of mystery factors.

Today those added up to me being eight feet from a guy who thought the train doors worked like elevator doors, and would open if he just stuck his arm in there. Oh, and the arm he stuck in the car happened to be holding a cup of coffee.

The result? This:

There was a moment of pure amazement on his face as he realized the door wasn’t going to open. He gave his arm (the right one) a slight yank, and it barely budged. His face turned to “oh crap” and he made a very poor decision in a moment of panic. The correct move would have been to use his other hand to help pry the doors open enough to get the coffee hand out — not too difficult, I have seen similar acts done before.

But in his moment of panic, he gave his right hand one big yank. That move left the lid and half the coffee on the inside of the train (as seen on the left), while the cup and the rest of the coffee stayed on the outside of the train (as seen on the right).

The icing on the proverbial cake was the guy standing next to Mr. Coffee, who found the situation just as funny as I did and didn’t hold back in his laughter.

Fortunately for Mr. Now-Coffee-Less, I’m sure the incident woke him up far better than that coffee ever could.

September 16, 2010 metro Uncategorized
Train to Providence

I know you are thinking to yourself, “Hey, guy, what are you reading these days? Are you even reading? Do you remember how to read?!”

Since you asked, I just finished William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom” and will shortly finish Carl Hiaasen’s “The Downhill Lie.”

You haven’t seen a post about the Faulkner book because the man’s writing style may be deliberately aimed at rendering your brain useless and in my sick state I do not have the capacity to fully tackle that post. Fortunately the Hiaasen book is as easy as it gets — a nice reprieve both on the mental front and in the sense that the other book took forever to get through.

Posts on both books will be up later this week.

To make this entry really worth your while, I’ll share a quick additional note.

On my phone’s “home” screen, there is a little section that tells you the weather for your current location. It updates my location automatically, but not instantly, which can lead to moments where I tell my phone that I am in fact no longer in Washington, D.C. no matter what it says.

But this morning it tried to take things an extra step.

I did in fact leave work in Washington, D.C., aboard a Metro train in the direction of Northern Virginia. Yet when I arrived home, the phone kindly informed me that I was, in fact, in Providence, R.I.

Fortunately it has since realized its error and figured out that my house is exactly where I left it last night.

September 14, 2010 books technology Uncategorized
King of Beards

Runners and cyclists along the W&OD Trail are either really into guys with beards, or somehow mesmerized by that amount of scruff flying by on a Saturday morning.

In a normal week, I would have shaved Wednesday before going in for my final shift of the week. But since I was sick and didn’t go to work, there was little reason to get out the razor. Add in a few off days since then, and I went out for a six mile run this morning having not shaved in a week.

It was a glorious September morning with cool temperatures and abundant sunshine, meaning everyone and their brother were out exercising. It may have just been in my head, but it seemed like more people than usual were breaking their straight ahead running looks to peek in my direction. I wasn’t wearing a funny hat or singing along to the songs in my head, so the only natural explanation is the beard.

Entering the last mile I had decided I would probably write this entry, and made a mental note to take a picture of the scruff. But somewhere between finishing the run and eating some yogurt I forgot. So as an example, here’s a picture from a few years ago:

If I had to guess, I would say that’s roughly three to four days of growth (for me, not the dog). It also appears that I may have been purposely rocking that look since the neck region is not taking part in the scruff party. Add a few days to that, with roughly 15 percent more of the lumberjack look, and you start to get an idea of what I had going on.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course.

When I was working in Jacksonville, shaving was quite low on my list of priorities for the overnight weekend shifts and I looked like that all the time. But then again, for a good chunk of those work days I was the only person in the building.

It’s not like the televisions, empty chairs or the police scanner cared that I was channeling my inner Paul Bunyan, and much of my interaction with the small group of coworkers was done either in a dark room or by talking to them through a headset.

People may be drawn to the facial hair, but I’m pretty sure they can’t hear it in my voice.

September 11, 2010 beard running Uncategorized
That’s Sick, Yo

Sick days were much cooler in elementary school.

Back then it was downright exciting to get to stay home and spend the day with your good friends the couch and cable television. It wasn’t every day that I got to catch up on my Gilligan’s Island, Andy Griffith Show or Wings.

Though judging by the list of shows I remember, it is clear that even in the era of the burgeoning cable universe there was not much for a 10-year-old to watch during the day. Fortunately, Mom must have understood that because multi-day sicknesses sometimes featured some sort of video rental to help us pass the time.

I remember being entertained on one sick day by the classic film “Hot Shots! Part Deux.” Thanks to the wonders of technology (mainly Netflix streaming) I was able to once again utilize such an amazing tale to get me through a less-than-healthy day.

It is odd what small details from your life you remember. I recall another sick day (maybe the same one, who knows) that involved drinking some Sprite. For some reason I had my “baseball books” on a table next to the couch as I recovered from some illness. The “books” were three-ring binders filled with my baseball card collection. Most were just plain-colored binders, but one had a snazzy baseball-specific design and a plastic cover on the outside.

There was some kind of stain or mark on the plastic, and being the genius I have always been, I decided to use some of the Sprite to get it off. Apparently getting up to get some sort of wet paper towel was out of the question for this operation. The result, of course, was a sticky film where the mark used to be and I had to get the paper towel anyway to get that off.

I had something else to add here, but can’t for the life of me remember. I blame/credit Nyquil, nectar of the cold-having gods. It also gets credit if none of the above made any sense.

September 9, 2010 home Netflix Uncategorized
Grilled, Gooey, Fantastic

As humans, sometimes we forget about things we really like.

There is that band you haven’t heard in a while that causes you to reach over and turn up the volume. A movie you haven’t seen in a few years comes on TV, and you throw out your afternoon plans to take it in.

And then there are those dishes you have neglected for far too long.

I recently rediscovered grilled cheese sandwiches, which given their ease of construction and low cost may be one of the greatest food items ever created. I mean, bread is good, butter is even better and cheese is amazing. How could the combination of all three not be incredible?

Look at this picture and tell me you don’t want one:

That’s what I thought. If you need to take a few minutes to indulge, feel free. I’ll still be here when you get back.

The rediscovery was sort of a chance happening. Before leaving a job last spring, I had to train my replacement. She brought her lunch the first few days, and because she was so new I didn’t want to leave her in the office alone for too long when I went to acquire food.

Fortunately, there was a small deli in the same office park. I had only eaten there once before because I thought it was massively overpriced for what it was, and there was a Taco Bell and a Wendy’s just down the street. But in the name of quickness I decided to give them another shot, and that’s when the grilled cheese caught me eye.

It only took one bite to bring back a flood of melty, gooey memories. In the final week of that job I think I had four grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch.

I posted on Facebook that the rediscovery was the highlight of 2010 for me, and got a surprising number of people extolling their deliciousness. The comments included one from my dad’s cousin, who like me and my brother (and I believe the rest of my family) enjoy pairing the grilled cheese with some ketchup. It adds the right sweetness and a bit of coolness to go with the hot sandwich.

College roommate Shawn L. (lover of dealies, foe of spiders) did not seem so enthusiastic about the combo. But then again he also likes Ohio State football, so clearly his tastes can’t be taken seriously.

This morning I saw this story about Fairfax County Public School eliminating chocolate milk in cafeterias. It’s a good thing I am no longer a student in one of their schools, or there would be some sort of massive sit-in protest. I can’t recall EVER voluntarily drinking any milk at school that was not of the chocolate variety. I mean, why would you settle for anything less than the best?

That would be like having a grilled cheese without ketchup.

September 7, 2010 food Taco Bell Uncategorized