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.