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.

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.