No Busch Series

The team from Texas beat my beloved St. Louis Cardinals last night. In the past few seasons, I've been wondering if the Cards are becoming the Atlanta Braves of the 21st Century - winning hordes of games every season only to peter out in October - and I'm afraid that my suspicions may be correct. But hell, at this point, I'm still happy to see the Cards in the post-season in the first place.

Last night's loss hit a bit harder than usual. That's it. I watched the final game ever to be played at this Busch Stadium. This was the building where I saw my first baseball game. It was a roadtrip with just me and my dad. It was a summer game in 1982 versus the Reds. Not only did I see Ozzie Smith come out, doing backflips, and Bruce Sutter - who looked a lot like my old man - pitch an inning, but Johnny Bench was still with Cincinnati, too. The Cards won that game and eventually won the World Series that fall. Dad and I got lost going back to the hotel and somehow wound up at a junkyard.

I'm going to miss those little arches that ring the top of the stadium. The pedestrian ramps that criss-cross to form the exoskeleton of the place. I know that these multi-purpose arenas (Busch was also once home to the NFL St. Louis Cardinals) have fallen out of favor in the past decade, but these ugly behemoths are what I'm used to. I've let it go by now. It's not like I have any financial stake in the Cardinals organization or even live in Missouri. But for about five minutes, I was a damp little headcase.



The new Busch Stadium should be all right, I guess. You can definitely see the Arch better, for what it's worth. There's a larger-than-life Fenway design going on here. At least it's outdoors, and there's no freakin' swimming pool or waterslide built in there. Hopefully, the Cardinals can celebrate their inaugural season at the new ballpark with a World Series title.

Until then, go White Sox.

100620051416

I still don't know if Katharine realizes that I've been updating this.

Anyone know how to delete that spam in the comments down there?

Getting the Boot

I know that my air-conditioner is old. I've had a few specialists look at it, and they all date it back to the early-to-mid seventies. Aw, just like me.

I've had minor problems with it off and on since I bought the house. It leaking freon is the biggest irritant. The latest problem was that the unit wouldn't turn off. It would stop blowing cold air into the house according to the thermostat and all that, but the unit ran 24 hours a day.

Just imagining what my electricity bill was going to look like because of this was giving me fits. I figured that it was time to buy a new unit. A guy showed up from a local company yesterday to give me an estimate. Nice enough fella. Rode a nice motorcycle. Quoted me a price of $4000 for all the new stuff, plus another $500 to $1500 for new ducts and boots.

(That's a boot pictured above. The one in my kitchen floor rusted out a few years ago, and you can look at the dirt floor of the crawl space while boiling rice, if you like.)

I spent most of last night going ai-yi-yi, trying to put these expensive pieces of this puzzle together in my head. I've got the credit, but Kate and I are also planning a few other big items for the upcoming months. I went to sleep last night, and that damn unit was still humming away outside.

Today, another A/C fella arrived at the house to take a look-see. This man certainly didn't arrive on a motorcycle. He had that look like Tim Robbins has in the first part of "The Shawshank Redemption". Didn't say a whole lot and even seemed a bit scared of the dog.

However, he found that there was a part that was out-of-order inside the system. He said that he could go get the part and quoted me a price of $25. $25.

I asked him, but what about a new system? He said pretty much why get a new system when he can fix it today for twenty-five dollars? Yeah, the unit's old, but it's going to make it through September. Worry about it after I'm done worrying about those other things. He could still get me a new boot before winter if I wanted, but he'd have to charge me $75 on top of the $20 unit price unless I wanted to install it myself.

Dude fixed it up and I heard the unit turn off for the first time in a week. It was so quiet. I could hear children playing in the park. He didn't even take a check, said that he'd send a bill. I told him that I dug his company's service, specifically the woman who answered the phone who remembered me from two years ago. He said, yeah, that's Mama.

So this weekend, I'm getting underneath the house and see if I can take off the old boot. If I can, I'll save $75. If I can't, apparently I'm still somehow saving $1405 if I want to look at it that way. The whole thing still has me pondering. Was the first guy too high, or was the second guy too low? Hell if I know.

I do know this: I'm looking forward to autumn.

Celebrating Summer

It's getting hot again. We had some hard-core heat in the middle of July. Then, it cooled off to 89 degrees. Now, we are heading into the dog days of August, and the heat is on.

Kate can't sleep. I'm starting to wonder if my head's getting cooked. Our great dane used to run through the backyard at a million miles an hour, but now, she walks slowly toward the fence and stands underneath a bush for ten minutes. Even at night.

The cats have picked their places. I left the house over three hours ago, and yet, I know exactly where each cat is right now. The grey one is up on top of the dresser, having knocked off my travel bag and Arkansas quarter collection. The black sleek one has taken residence on the coffee table, enjoying its cool and smooth surface. And the big orange one is huddled next to the A/C vent in the bathroom. He was meowing and complaining last week when I picked him up off of the organ and placed him on the ceramic tile floor. He's been there ever since.

It's been one of those months where I think to myself, "If Kate should ever find a job that requires relocation to Washington state, I don't think that I'll mind that much." She asks me what life is like in Minnesota and my response is always "You - can't - even - imagine - how cold that freakin' state gets." However, since Aspen, anywhere Out West doesn't seem so bad.

Three months from now, it'll be my birthday, and it's never hot on my birthday. Three months ago, we were celebrating Kate's birthday, and that doesn't seem so long ago at all. For now, it's August. I still go outside wearing pants and long sleeves. I try to remember the feeling for winter when, for some strange reason, I might even miss this heat.

Back In The Ring

It's been awhile, but hey, at least it was less than a year. Needless to say, things got very busy for myself and Katharine after December. To sum it up: she got in, her family came in, we got married, we went skiing for our honeymoon, she's slowly getting all of her paperwork in from the government (including SS# and work authorization), and now it's summertime in Arkansas and we are both hot.

Oh, and Veruca joined our household. That's three cats, two people, and one dog - sharing the same roof. Hell, even Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell only had two cats in the yard, and all of our pets sleep inside the house!

We'll see how much Kate or I will update this thing. I will say that seeing Jermain Taylor become the first undisputed Middleweight boxing champion from the state of Arkansas inspired so much pride within me, that I just had to update my frickin' blog.

Nola, Nola, Nola

Katharine and I have this passive-agressive attitude in regards to Bullsting. "You update... No, you update it, I have nothing to say... But I don't want to write anything if you don't write anything..." etc. We each have our own rarely-updated blogs and collaborating on one together is, when you think about it, kinda funny. However, just because our Bullsting page hasn't been updated doesn't mean that our other collaborations are stagnant.

For example, since the last update, Katharine has recieved her visa to enter the U.S. legally. She arrives in just two weeks. Two weeks! We've got a place booked for the wedding, we've got a date set, and Katharine even has a full-on wedding dress that she designed herself. That's for starters.

It would have been a year ago today that we first met, face-to-face. Due to a schedule delay, we didn't meet until the eighth. But today was the original date and in Australia, it's already the December 8. So I thought that I would take this opportunity to wish ourselves a happy anniversary today.

And yes, we're still alive.

The Early Time

I had to be at work early today, filling in for someone who had rear-ended someone in a traffic accident yesterday. I didn't sleep very well last night. If I put my feet under the covers, they got too hot. If I stuck them outside of the covers, they got too cold. Finally, at 5:45 a.m., I said fuggit and got out of bed.

It was still dark outside, a sign that the autumn season is beginning today. I turned on the kitchen light and began boiling some water for oatmeal and tea. The cats, walking softly with bleary eyes, came out of whatever dark corners wherein they had been sleeping and looked to me for some breakfast. I got them and myself set up, and then I went into the office, booting the computer up so that I could check my fantasy baseball scores.

I am not a morning person. I don't mean that as in I'm gripey and unconscious if it's before 10 a.m., though that's not too far from the truth. It's just that it's rare that I am moving about in the six o'clock hour. If somehow a graph mapping out during what hours I've been awake the most was made, you would see that the five and six a.m. hours would be denoted with very small bars. I would say that three and four in the morning would even rank ahead, just because there's been plenty of times where I've stayed up that late. Since it's rare that I see this part of the day, it's always a novelty for me.

My eyelids weren't heavy, but they did feel thick. Every headline on Yahoo's front page was new. I could hear my neighbor's dog being let out for his morning pee. As the hour progressed, I could hear the steady hum of traffic getting louder and louder. I remembered how when I lived in the second-story apartment off of Kavanaugh years ago, it was always easy to tell that the day had started when the joggers showed up and the city buses drove by.

I'll tell you what's depressing about these early hours.

It's being in a dark hotel room, under that polyester blanket, hearing the water pipes in the wall whistling from the other guestrooms and the sound of the vaccuum cleaner being pushed down the hall. Like a slow-motion dopplar effect, the *knock, knock* Room Service? keeps getting louder and louder. Every breath taken is filled with freon and stale cigarette smoke.

Ugh. I hate those mornings. But today, the morning was quite nice. Here's looking forward to many more this fall.