Tag: softball

The President of the United States came to my softball game

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I had completely forgotten about this until this morning.  We play in the Senate Softball league.  About 3 years ago, we were playing against Illinois at a park in Capital Hill.  When the second inning started, I was playing shortstop and noticed a small crowd gather around a guy who’d gotten out of a dark car.  That guy was Barack Obama, then Senator from Illinois.  He came to watch two innings of our game.  During those two innings, the score stayed pretty close.  Later in the game, down by a few runs in the bottom of the 7th inning, one of the girls on our team hit a walk-off grand-slam and we won the game.

It was the first game we ever won!

And the President of the United States was there to see some of the action.  How cool is that!

Softball party

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Late start today, which I hope to remedy tomorrow. I think part of the problem is that there is no clock in view when I am sleeping, so I just keep sleeping as long as I possibly can. I am much more disciplined when I can see a clock.

Busy day at work. I spent two hours this morning on a report that will save someone a few seconds each day. I suppose that over the course of years it will be worth it, but it didn’t seem so this morning. I napped during lunch, and then Kelly called. I helped her figure out an interesting math problem involving M&M’s (yes, the candy) but which I am too tired to get into right now. I didn’t sleep well last night. Kelly says it’s because I did cardio not long before going to bed. In any event, I’m pretty exhausted right now.

When I got home from work, I did some workshop-related stuff. Got the critique of my story idea from our professor and was pleased with his assessment.

No mail of significance today. However, 45 days on “The Golden Watch” at Strange Horizons and still no word. Fingers are crossed.

After work we had our end of year softball party. For the last two years, I won MVP. This year, I was runner up for MVP, but that’s okay, the person who won was much more deserving than I. I had a few drinks, and shortly after 7 PM, I walked home. It was a gorgeous evening, almost cool (for the summer). I called he11o_sunshine and left a message. I called vickyandnorm and spoke to them for the first time since they had the twins. And I called strausmouse and spent 17 minutes or so catching up.

Kelly has gone to the gym, but the shot of Patron and the 22 ounce beer make the gym a no-no for me tonight. I’m going to crawl into bed and read for a little while. Hopefully, I’ll get a better night’s sleep tonight. Anything is better than last night.

The wedding shower weekend

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What with all of the guests and visitors and activities this weekend, there was simply no time to post in “real time”. This morning, I’ve posted 3 backdated posts that cover the entire weekend:

Friday
Saturday
Sunday

Up at 6:40 this morning. Took Kelly into work and then took my to the airport. Kelly heard from the service department. They want to do all kinds of repairs, and we were leaning toward just getting rid of the car (we really don’t need two), but if we pair down the repairs to those required to make the car last a few more months, then it’s not too bad and it looks like that’s what we are going to do.

There’s a softball game today, but I’m not playing. We’ve got the car situation to deal with, plus, it’s the first day of my writing workshop and there’s stuff to do for that.

It’s also the first day of me and Kelly’s final 8 weeks of better eating and exercise before the wedding. I’m aiming for 155 lbs. I’m 152.2 right now, but I’d like to move some mass around (mostly away from the gut) and tone up a bit. I’m not eating today until dinner, just drinking water in order to clean out my system. Then I’ll eat before I got to the gym tonight. I’m really trying to cut back on carbs at night, and sugars generally, so this might be a tough 8 weeks. We’ll have to see.

Softball

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We had a softball game last night. It was a little odd. The other team did not have enough girls (only 1) and so it was an automatic win for us. Nevertheless, we still played a game and they kicked our butts, something like 23-5 (of course, they had all guys in their lineup). I played in the outfield most of the game and didn’t see too much action. But I had a key assist toward the end of the game. The guys on the other team were being a bit cocky after a while, jogging slowly around the bases, hitting weak balls on purpose to try and thwart our outfield positioning. I was playing short field (4th outfielder, playing in behind shortstop). With a runner on second and two outs, I got a base hit grounder to me. As had been happening, the runner on second lolly-gagged his way to third. However, I charged the ball and threw to our third base woman from short left–and she tagged him out to end the inning.

That was infinitely satisfying.

Our record is not 4-3. Winning our last 2 games guarantees us a spot in the playoffs. But we play the one undefeated team in the division on Monday.

Got home, ate dinner, showered, and then got into bed. I started reading The Science of Science Fiction in preparation for the writing workshop that begins on Monday. I’ve already got my story idea. I need to write a short bio statement, but I was beat last night. Fell asleep before Kelly came to bed.

Wrap-up

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We get a “move day” at work and I used mine today. I headed to the old house this morning and arrived there at 9 AM to do the final cleanup. I was hoping to be done by 1 PM, but it took a little longer than I expected. I finished around 2 PM. I turned the keys over to the new tenants, and helped my landlord load some stuff onto his truck. I forgot to get the final meter reading for the water, but the new tenants are going to do that for me.

I hit traffic on the way home, and though I left at 2 PM, I didn’t get home until 4 PM. 2 hours to go 11 miles. Apparently, there was a fatal accident.

Once home, I did several things in rapid succession: (1) I wrote out a check to James Gunn for the writers workshop. I hadn’t had time to do it over the weekend what with all the moving. I put it in an envelop so that it goes out in the mail tomorrow. (2) I finally completed the wording for the info sheet that will go out in the wedding invitations. (3) I took all of the empty boxes (which had been broken down) out to the trash. It seemed to me like there were dozens of them.

Kelly got home shortly after that. She had gone to the cable place to swap out the boxes after work. We hooked up the new box and it works perfectly. So far.

I dashed up to work in order to meet the team for a softball game tonight. I missed the game last night, but I didn’t want to miss another one. Good thing, too, since we won both nights. Tonight we won 23-15, no thanks to my hitting. I went 0-4 with 1 RBI. I started in the outfield and moved to first base because I couldn’t throw; my elbow was bothering me too much.

After the game I came back home. Kelly had gotten our bedroom into near perfect order. It looks great! Things are finally starting to get settled. The cats are getting more and more used to one another, too.

I watched a portion of the Yankees/Orioles game in HD tonight. That’s pretty cool, too.

I haven’t had much of a chance to read these last few days. I’m 590 pages through The Count of Monte Cristo and I am also going to start reading The Science of Science-Fiction Writer in preparation for the workshop.

I’ve had several people ask me about pictures of the new place. Soon, I promise. I have been so busy, I just haven’t had a chance to take them.

For those of you reading this on your Friends page, I have finally gotten around to the backdated posts for the weekend and yesterday: Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

And now I’m all caught up.

Yesterday’s softball game (14-18 loss)

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This was a much closer game than the final score let on. First, we had a field on the Mall, now that the Folk Life festival had packed up and left. Second, I played much better this week than last week. I only had a handful of chances at shortstop, but I made no errors yesterday. I had a couple of ground balls, and two pop-ups, one easy one, and one that I had to dash into short left field for to make the catch.

Hitting I went 1-for-4, with a single, but I was swinging the bat great. Three long, deep hits to left center, two of which were nabbed on outstanding diving catches by the center fielder. I also popped one up to third base.

The score was close, and essentially tied going into the 6th inning, with a score of 6-6 (which is low for softball, and shows that both teams were playing good defense). After 6 innings the score was 9-11, we were down by two doing into the top of the 7th. In that inning, the other team let loose with a barrage of deep home runs and made the score 9-18. We were home team and came up to bat in the bottom of the 7th. I led off with a towering drive to deep left center that was caught on the run by the center fielder (I was rounding second base when he caught it). But the team rallied and we managed to get in 5 runs before hitting into the final out of the game. The final score was 14-18. With the exception of that 7th inning, it was the closest game we’ve played since our 5-3 extra-inning win last year.

It’s Tuesday, not Monday!

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It has felt like a Monday all day today. I was up at 6 AM and into the office just after 7. I spent the first three hours or so working on some bug fixes, and the rest of the day was spent on reports. I’m starting to get the hang of SRSS.

We had a softball game this evening. It was scheduled for a field that we’d played at before near Capitol South, but we had to move to another field, which ended up being far better. We won, too, despite everything I did to flummox our win. I played just awful today at shortstop. I made 4 errors that I counted and probably allowed 8 unearned runs because of them. I went 1 for 3 also. The final score was 14-11 and it was a relief to get off the field. The team did a great job, and had to play extra hard to workaround my ineptitude. Kelly was at the game and got a chance to see me at my worst. Fortunately, she still wants to go through with the wedding.

Speaking of weddings, we may have gotten someone to play violin at our ceremony. More on that soon.

I’m beat. My knees ache. I just want to go to sleep. It’s remarkable to think that one year ago tomorrow I headed off for three weeks in Europe.

Off to play my first softball game of the season

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I’m off to play my first softball game of the season, and the first game in a few years where I am not team captain. The current captains have me playing shortstop and batting 3rd in the lineup. For kicks, I’m keeping track of my personal stats this year, in particular, defense. Those interested can find out how I did tonight after the game.

The weather is pretty nice and the game is out on the National Mall at the corner of 4th and Jefferson, just in case anyone wanted to come around and watch. Look for the team in the purple shirts.

Lazy Wednesday evening

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We had a really lazy evening last night. Kelly got home from work and we sat on the couch for five hours doing very little. We watched TV, mostly switching between the Yankees game and the Travel Channel, where we were amused by a show, “Disney on a Dime”. After that, we watched an episode from the first season of House before we finally went to bed.

Heard from Rich, who made it safely to Balad. More on that in the next post.

We have our first softball game of the season this afternoon. If the weather cooperates.

Muddy!

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It rained this morning and so I was pretty certain that our lunchtime softball practice would be canceled. It stopped raining about an hour before practice and would you believe it, it wasn’t canceled. There were five of us that braved the muddy field to throw the ball around and take some batting practice. I was among them. I was also the only one to go down in the mud chasing after a ball. I hadn’t planned bringing my gym clothes home today, but I did. They needed some laundering.

Pretty productive day at work. I made some good progress on some data migration stuff. Otherwise, routine.

Lots of phone calls this evening. he11o_sunshine and stubiebrother are back from Paris and I spoke to them for a while. I also talked to strausmouse and vickyandnorm. No mail of worth today.

No captain, my captain

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This morning, I resigned as the co-captain of our softball team. It’s just one of those things I have to give up, when prioritizing everything else. I’m still going to play, but I can no longer afford the time it takes to prepare lineups, and wrangle players. I didn’t want to do it, but playing with time is a zero-sum game. If I’m going to get back to regular writing (and regular workouts) some other things must go.

Speaking of which, I’m not missing TV at all. When Kelly is over, we’ll watch something–usually something that’s been Tivo’d. But since new shows have come back, I haven’t watched one of them, not a new episode of House, not even a new episode of Smallville. I’m fine with it. My cable bill went up and I’d love to get rid of cable all together. The only reason I don’t is because Kelly likes to be able to watch TV sometimes. Since we usually watch old movies or something, maybe I can get rid of cable in the near future and re-up NetFlix. We’ll see. In any event, I’m not missing television at all.