Laconia Muskrats

A big thank you to my wife and parents who treated me to a pair of Laconia Muskrats season tickets for Father's day. A little early for Father's day, but with opening day on Friday they wanted me to have them in hand on time I'm sure. I cannot overemphasize how excited I am to have a high level of baseball being played in Laconia!

The Muskrats are a relocated franchise of the New England College Baseball League. The play a 42 game regular season followed by as many as three rounds of playoffs. The players are high-level (so I read) college players finishing their freshman, sophomore, and junior seasons. Current MLB players who played in the NECBL include Twins closer Joe Nathan and Tampa Bay Rays lefty Andy Sonnanstine. The Laconia Team will feature Pat Epps who finished fourth in the league in batting average last season and local favorite Derrick Sylvester from just down the road in Franklin, NH.

Remember, be nice to me, the boy gets in for free and my wife has to work most of the nights that there are games so for many games we'll have an extra ticket.

Check out the Muskrats here (and yes, it has been linked at right going back to the old blog).

A great write-up in the Laconia Citizen here.

and the NECBL home page here.

Friends for Life

So it should come as no surprise that my wife and I love the boy. I was stalling on a paper I don't really feel like writing and I got to fidgeting around with the Windows Movie Maker. After a few minutes I said to myself, you know if you pick a short enough song it wouldn't be all that tough to make a little home movie of favorite photos. Then of course one wants smooth transitions. And if you're going to put forth the effort you kind of want the pictures to seem like they line up with the song, you know like they were done by a professional. Once you have effectively written off a night of homework you might as well make some cutesy titles and credits to round out the little project. I have to admit it was fun, it reminds my of the teary scene in Christmas Vacation where Chevy Chase is locked in the attic watching the old eight millimeter films. Anyway three hours later...

The Things I do for Community Service

So on the planning board we occasionally have to go on a site walk. A site walk serves the purpose of letting us go out and actually see the location of a proposed development, get a better feel for the land etc. I had meetings yesterday in Belmont which ended early so at around 4:30 or so my wife, the boy, a friend, and I went to Ellacoya State Park for some pseudo-fishing and a picnic. Running a little late, when we got home I didn't bother to change from flip flops to sneakers for the site walk.

Unfortunately I have kind of a history of being clumsy, and naturally while walking in the woods I managed to step on two rusty nails which went all the way through my flip flops and into my right foot. Then I had the joy of sitting in triage at the emergency room for three hours. The trouble with triage is it stinks if you're only a little hurt, as they take the more serious injuries first. On the plus side I had my fancy new phone so I could email back and forth with my wife and check on sports scores, so it was more entertaining than any visit to the ER in the past. So the attending ER doctor scrubbed out the wound, put me on a prescription for antibiotics, and they administered the infamous tetanus shot. I'm fairly sure that I'll live but it hurts more than it did yesterday and I'm in for a long day at work.

Thank You Al Gore

So using my blog primarily as a homepage, I noticed that I haven't had an intelligent thought in like five days so I figured I would take this opportunity to thank Al Gore for inventing the internet. I really cannot say what I would do with my spare time before there were videos like this to watch. Commonly referred to as the "badger mushroom video," this effort is emblematic of the stupidity that is the internet. Any fool (such as myself) can set up shop on the corner and start cluttering up the cyber web. What's the point? Between internet porn and videos like this, computers should come with a public safety warning.

Granted people can also Google the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and learn something new but usually that isn't what's going on. My two year-old will love this, thankfully it's only 36 seconds.

Take Me Fishing

So the boy had mentioned a few times that he wanted to go fishing. God knows where he got the idea. Suffice to say my wife and I are definitely more gatherers than hunters. But when we went to get worms at the local bait shop for my wife's garden, we stopped to look at the water and the boy asked again. Now look at this face and imagine him asking, "Daddy, can you take me fishing?"

So I did what any couch potato would do, we turned around and marched back into the bait shop and bought a Spider-man fishing pole ($15) and picked up a guide so I could start studying. Yesterday we went back to buy a tackle box ($18), a license ($35), and a bag of cookies ($1, the boy wanted cookies). So know we are $69 into this venture, I have studied seasons, limits, maps, and weather reports for a week, and essentially I still know not a damned thing about how to fish.

This morning we were up and at 'em by 6:30 and we went to a local park/beach. It was windy, which probably should have been common sense to me if you look at the landscape behind the boy, and the temperature was cool. Surprisingly, the boy made it through two juice boxes, one lost lure and bobber, and an hour of fishing and had this smile on his face when we were done. We probably have no future as bass fishermen, but we had fun and no one was harmed but the rubber lures. I'm hooked.

LeBron and Options

Congratulations to the Boston Celtics. Even as the Bruins are on the verge of an epic collapse after jumping out to a 3-0 lead the Celtics show that there's hope yet for New England sports. The summer of LeBron James begins in earnest after Rondo, Garnett, and company eliminated LeBron and his Cleveland Cronies 4-2 from the eastern semis.

Basketball is interesting because every team is so close to a title, really three great players can put you over the top. One will barely get you to the playoffs. This summer with potential free agents like Chris Bosh, Duane Wade, and of course LeBron several teams have been arranging salaries to free up space for this exciting time. A few teams like the Miami Heat may be able to sign two stars at the right price. So LeBron, how do you feel about South Beach, a championship caliber coach, an all star teammate, and oh by the way no state income tax?

So Happy Mother's Day to all! Well at least to everyone who happens to be a mother. The boy and I got Mumma some gnomes and worms for a present. Why, you might ask, would I buy the love of my life worms for Mother's Day? Because that's what she asked for, of course...garden gnomes and worms. (Love You)

I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I know enough that when someone specifically asks for a present (even worms) you are better off getting them what they want rather than winging it.

As a completely unrelated aside you will find reposted via Madame Lamb my new favorite song in the entire universe. Why the significance? Again as I learned from Madame Lamb the song, by an Italian songwriter, is supposed to sound like English, without you know, actually being English.

Big Day for Boston Sports

So Boston may be the sports city of the last decade with six titles in the last ten years, and today is a little glimpse of the wave that Beantown has been riding. The Bruins are at Philly but they are one win away from the Eastern Conference finals (somewhere they haven't been in a while). The Celtics are down early in the third game of their series against Cleveland but they have thus far proven that they are for real. As if that isn't enough the Sox take on the Yankees in the never ending rivalry of the century.

Just a short blog tonight as I have a significant amount of homework to do...and of course three sporting events to watch.

Cell Phones

Apparently I was the last American not to have a cell phone. Congress sent me a letter saying that I was really holding the nation back technologically and economically and that I should get with the program. So yesterday I finally broke down and bought a Wal-Mart Trac phone with their unlimited plan. Seriously though, with my promotion I am going to be on the road a bit more and it will be good if my staff and family can get a hold of me as needed.

The nice thing about the Trac Phone is that Wal-Mart has some very respectable phones (I went with a Samsung model pictured at right,think of it as a mini faux-Blackberry) and no service contract is required. Additionally the unlimited plan is only $45 per month which is significantly cheaper than anything I could find in my area for an unlimited phone and web plan. With the speed at which technology changes the last time I had a cell phone was the technology equivalent of the Hoover administration, so considering that phone looked like this, it was probably time for an upgrade.

Today was my long day

Essentially today was a test of what my new schedule will be like at its worst. I will be the manager of a small banking center about a half hour north of my home. I was in at work at 7:40 am, I had an offsite meeting, a conference call, and I left right around five.

Getting home at around 5:40 I grabbed a quick bite to eat and turned around to head down to city hall. As the chairman of my local planning board I usually try to meet the staff about a half hour before our meeting starts. Thankfully, we had a relatively short meeting and I was home by ten.

Including my commute it works out to a 15 hour day and I got no school work done. Work was very productive and we had a better than average planning board meeting. As for the school work I am pretty good at time management so I will catch up later in the week. It goes more smoothly if a just acknowledge at 6 am I am not going to get any schoolwork today rather than being irritated and trying to squeeze it in somewhere. The nice part with the University of Phoenix is that classes are asynchronous, meaning that the assignments are due at the end of the week so one doesn't have to log in at any particular time. When I get up tomorrow at five-ish I can work on it.

I like listening to baseball to unwind. Joel Zumaya pitched well in relief to keep it close and Brennan Boesch just hit a nice home run to tie the game for the Tigers in the top of the ninth. I listen to radio broadcasts of baseball games on my computer. Sappy, but it reminds me a bit of summers in my childhood. Today I am listening to the Tigers at the Minnesota Twins. Relaxing after a long day.

Subversive Parenting

So naturally my wife and I want the boy to be happy. Sincerely, I could wish and hope and pray for him to enter any number of careers or avoid any number of choices but really all we want is for him to be happy. That being said, is it so wrong to try and maybe steer him towards the things that we enjoy? I mean really if he hates it fine, he can always watch the Little Einsteins until he's 30.

So anyway, my subversive plot is to have the boy enjoy baseball. After all my wife cooks with him all the time. We have taken him to a couple of his little buddy's baseball games and today my wife and I got him a little T and T-ball bat. He had fun with it for about five minutes, but really he doesn't spend much more than five minutes with most of his toys. and I didn't force it on him, he picked up the bat and swung it a few times, and I am wise enough that when he got bored we moved on. Later he had a great time with his cousin "Miggy." They should spend more time together they both seemed to have a great time. The only downside is it is closing in on 9:30 and the boy is still talking to himself in his room. Oh well.

The Run for the Roses

The Kentucky Derby is an event that is steeped in tradition. That sounds like a throw away line but when I say steeped in tradition I mean that today will mark the 136th running of the most famous race in America. To think that there is an event that has been held without interruption since the 1870'2 is amazing to me. The build-up, the pageantry, and the history all make for what is often called the most exciting two minutes in sports.

The thing about horse racing is that gambling is inherently designed to favor the house. If you made money ever time you gambled why would someone go into business to lose money?My wife and I won $12 on a horse named Dempsey earlier this week at Foxwood's Casino so now I am a horse racing expert. The fun thing for me is to go down and plan on losing a couple of bucks, pick a horse with whatever logic you prefer to use, and then watch the race with a vested interest. Its supposed to be fun, not rocket science. One thing I can tell you is that long shots are long shots for a reason, by that I mean 30-1 odds sound like a nice little payday but the horse has 30-1 odds because he isn't very likely to win. The rationale I prefer is to look at all the horses that have reasonable odds (say 6, 8, 10-1 somewhere in that neighborhood) and then pick the one with the most compelling name. Using that impeccable logic I will go on record as picking #11 Devil May Care which this website lists as very reasonable 10-1 odds. So if you bet $2 on Devil May Care and the horse wins you would take home $22 (your original 2 plus 10x2=$22).

Think of the whole thing as less of a sporting event and more as a social event or a mini-holiday more akin to the Super Bowl. Assuming you won't make it to Kentucky, ESPN will have a pre-race show starting at 11 am, the lesser races start at 2 pm, and finally at 4pm switch over to NBC for a two and a half hour build-up to the actual race. Of course, you could go about your daily activities and just tune in at 6:28 for the most exciting two minutes in sports. (Photo Credit: statesymbolsusa.org)