Over a week ago now was supposed to be the best day of the year: Opening Day, the glorious beginning of the 2020 baseball season. But, like so many other things (everything), it has been postponed. Major League Baseball first delayed it by two weeks, then decided it should wait at least eight weeks, pushing the earliest potential Opening Day to May 21.
Continue reading “Some thoughts on baseball scheduling in 2020”
Happy Friday! (But really, what is time anymore?) I’ve been working on a much longer post lately, but I wanted to share this quickly.
Continue reading “Life is a simulation”
Well, the world has changed. My money wouldn’t have been on “global pandemic,” but it’s not totally surprising at this point.
Anyhow, now, like so many people in the country and around the world, we’re (loosely) confined to our homes, hoping to stave off mass infection. It’s pretty fitting, since staying home is something Americans have been working on for years, and now we need to do it to save ourselves (of course, Americans also love irony and not doing what the government asks them to do, but that’s a topic for another post).
So, my partner and I are working from home as best as we can; her office is downstairs, and mine is upstairs, so we have our privacy. It’s going pretty well so far, honestly. My commute has been cut down from a 10/15-minute drive to a 20-second walk if I hit the bathroom first. That’s an improvement in the range of 95-97%…can’t beat that at all.
From my office, I can look down into our side and backyards, where I have my bird feeders, which–I’m very surprised to say–have become a constant source of entertainment for me. It’s been a comfort to watch the birds come and go at different times of day, and I find that even when there are none to be seen, I’ll stop at the window while walking by and wait a few seconds before moving on.
It’s nice to watch creatures so undisturbed by the events of the world. I was afraid they’d never come; I put my first feeder out in January, a metal, red, 8-port feeder and got nothing. Birds were definitely around town, even though it was constantly snowy and cold, but none were visiting me. Then, on a trip to Lowe’s, I picked up a small feeder, clear and plastic, that was on sale for $2. I thought, maybe if I put a second feeder in the yard, perhaps that would get the birds to come. Also nope.
Then, before the world spiraled out of control, I picked up a suet feeder and received as a gift one that looks like a picnic table (I love it). I don’t have any evidence that these are what finally brought the birds to the yard, but now they’re here! That’s what I’ve been waiting for, and it makes me so happy.
Now, I’m at that point in the self-quarantine where I’m recognizing when certain birds get there. The grackles, at least three of them, come by in the morning, and they’re usually followed by the European starlings. (Both have such amazing markings that I can’t believe I’ve never noticed them before.) Throughout the morning, those guys fight with a black-capped chickadee or two and some sparrows of indeterminate type–are they chipping sparrows? American tree sparrows? song sparrows? I still can’t tell–and then disappear around lunch. Breakfast is usually very busy.
Then, in the afternoons and evenings, the grackles come back for dinner, usually accompanied by a single mourning dove, who I first got acquainted with when it sat on the picnic table feeder for at least ten minutes, just hanging out. The sparrows flit in and out around them, though in smaller numbers than in the mornings.
And once or twice so far, there have been guest stars. There’s been a downy woodpecker making appearances every now and then, and I saw a blue jay checking things out from a distance once. This morning, much to my excitement, we had a cardinal. And if I’m not mistaken, I think I’ve seen a dark-eyed junco as well, but I need to continue to consult my bird app (I’m the guy with the bird app–well, apps–now).
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve created an Instagram account (Social Distance State Park) to show my birds to friends in the city who might not be able to leave their homes for a while. I’ll do anything to help.
With any luck, that’s about as wild as things will get around here. We’re still looking at potentially a few more weeks of limiting our movements, so who knows what things we’ll get up to. All I know is that if I start naming the birds, then I’m in trouble.
The 2019 World Series has now ended (congratulations, Nationals!), which means it’s time to update my post from last year about night baseball and the World Series.
We got lucky this year; even though the Series went a full seven games, only two were over four hours (game two was 4:01, and game three was 4:03). But, despite that, only one ended up being under three and a half hours (game five was 3:19).
Altogether, the average length for a game this year was 3 hours, 44 minutes, and 43 seconds, which makes it fourth Series in the past five years to have a game-length average between 3:40 and 3:50.
However, if we ignore the extra inning games, this is actually the second-longest World Series game average length since the World Series became a night-based event in 1985. The longest averaged slightly longer in 2007 at 3 hours, 45 minutes, and 45 seconds. That was the Series in which Boston swept Colorado, and no game was faster than three and a half hours. Interesting!
And here’s one more fun fact for you: this Washington-Houston World Series is the first (definitely in the night ball era; possibly ever) in which there were multiple nine-inning games that spanned more than four hours.
Oh goodness. My soft 2019 goal of blogging at least once a week went off the rails rather quickly, but if I can salvage some credit for myself, I’m doing great on my soft goal: I’ve already finished six books and read more than 2,000 pages across multiple genres and authors. According to Goodreads, I’m two books ahead of the pace I need to keep in order to hit my reading goal (so many goals this year) of 20 by the time the calendar turns to 2020. This year is off to a good start!
I’ve also started a new job, which is great news. While it was a fun time just hanging out, exploring Syracuse, and being unsustainably unemployed, I always felt guilty that I didn’t have work. And so, as fortune would have it, I was able to find something similar to my old AV position, and now here we are.
But with that position came less time to write. More ideas, sure, but less time to write. I never realized how much easier it was to crawl into bed and read someone else’s ideas than it was to get mine out there. That’s why I need to make a concerted effort to do better as we roll into springtime.
Honestly, it’s surprising that spring is just around the corner based on the constant layer of snow on the ground outside. We peaked into the 60s on Thursday–it was amazing!–so it was understandably hard to face the (cold) reality as snow and ice returned this weekend. But it made me incredibly excited for a Syracuse spring and summer.
I have so many plans. First, I want to hit up as many small towns in the area as possible. There’s really nothing better than a good, small upstate town: a main street, some cool shops, possibly a diner, and then BAM farmland. If it’s a really good small upstate town, it’ll have plan #2: ice cream. I want to visit as many local soft serve stands as possible. Nothing says summer (or warm weather generally) to me more than a vanilla cone. Hell, maybe that’ll be my next online project, a big upstate ice cream map. I know I’d love to have one.
My third plan is, obviously, baseball.
And the rest of my plans are…to make more plans. Ice cream and small towns and baseball (and the combinations thereof!) are great, but I feel like there should be more. So that’s my self-imposed homework heading into the warm weather season. I think I’ve got some time until that gets here, but I can’t wait for it to start.
When last we met, I talked about my favorite books that I read last year, and now I’d like to turn to the books I’m excited to read this year.
Last year was a great year for me, and not least because I got back on the reading train in a big way. For the first few years out of grad school, I had a lot of other things on my mind. First, I had to find a new job. Then, I had to learn to navigate a city I’d never really been to while finding a place to live and learning a new job. And throughout all of that, I was honestly a bit burned out on reading.
Continue reading “My personal “Best Books of 2018” list, featuring books not from 2018″
Happy new year! I hope yours is off to as great a start as mine. Over the past few days, I ended my impromptu holiday blogging hiatus with an annual trip with friends to the Hudson Valley region. It was wonderful: great company, great food, great exploring, and a great time had by all.
And now comes the new year. It has begun exhaustingly, in a good way, and here’s hoping it continues as such.
I’ve never really been big on new year’s resolutions, but I figured I’d challenge myself this year. I’m going to post here at least once a week. On days I don’t post, I’ll do some writing in another form, whether that’s a blog draft, in a journal, as part of a larger project, or maybe (if I want to cheat) I’ll just tweet something. And if I don’t personally expand the general corpus of blogging like that, I’ll read at least 20 pages of whatever book I happen to be working through at the moment (currently, it’s Grant by Ron Chernow and Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson). Like I’ve heard said, “No input, no output,” after all.
So in lieu of resolutions, that’s my first major goal of 2019. I can tell it’s off to a good start because I already have this post done and ready to go. Here’s looking forward to 51 more!
Welcome to a new series of posts in which I begin the process of becoming a local by venturing to new places, eating new things, and trying secretly to mimic the central New York accent. And as my contribution to the genre of online reviews, I’ll write about them here.
Today, I’ll take a look at Mother’s Cupboard, a diner on James Street in Eastwood.
On Tuesday, I cast the 604th ballot of the day at my polling place, and I was happy to do so. It was incredibly easy to go into the church assigned to me, sign my name in the register (I had forgotten all about this part! It was very satisfying to sign in the Big Book of Democracy.), mark my ballot, and slide it into the scanner. Had I actually not been still debating my vote for the city council, it would’ve have taken less than 10 minutes.
