Friday, December 31, 2010

Nice weather to close out 2010

Extra special thanks to John, one of my co-workers, for going out with me for a while today to play catch.  The good news is that my arm still works. The bad news is that I do not know how I am going to be able to play for 6 days in a row.

Hopefully John and I can go out again tomorrow if the rain holds off, and then the temperatures unfortunately are going to go back to the bitterly cold marks that we have been having this winter.

22 days to go...

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Oh what a relief it is

Well, I am glad to say that I was able to get through the CAHL Wednesday C East hockey season without injury.  Brad from Applied Performance Technologies called me to ask me if I would fill in for their regular goaltender who was out with an injury, so I covered for him for a couple of months. Despite my declining skills, the team managed to win the league championship with a tight 4 to 3 victory over the Eagles.

The winning team got CAHL sweatshirts, which are actually the nicest CAHL championship gift I have yet received.

30 days to go...

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Yellow balls appear to move much faster when they are dirty

Just another day at the batting cage.  I spent the whole session in the fast cage, and made decent contact.  As the post title says, sometimes it is harder to pick up the dirtier balls coming out of the machine, but all in all a good time at the Big League Baseball School.

The only problem for the day was that I have to cross over railroad tracks on Worthington-Galena road heading to and from Big League Baseball School, and as luck would have it, I hit a train each time.  The first train had only 40 cars, but the return trip train had over 100 cars.

36 days to go...

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Fantasy Camp meeting

The 2011 Fantasy Camp get together was held today at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, and I drove over in the morning for the meeting. I should have known right away that the day would not go super smoothly, as there was some kind of race going on there at around the same time as I was arriving, so there was much traffic and pedestrians.

But at least the meeting and batting practice session went pretty well. Teke and Steve Blass were very amusing, and Joe was very friendly and informative. (I forgot to ask Steve if we could pre-pay our fines.) I guess that for some reason, we were only able to use two cages for the whole group instead of four, which meant that there were a lot of people waiting to use only two cages. As a result, I kind of fought my way to the front of the queue so that I could get in my cuts and take off, since I had a reasonably long drive to get back home.

And then, of course, when I was leaving there was a tremendous line in the line waiting to pay for their garage parking tickets. And then, after getting through that line, there was some kind of snafu with the two exits for the garage. And then, the road construction on I-79 is always messed up hugely.

43 days to go...

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Awesome day

Today was an awesome day for me.  For starters, in the morning I went over to Big League Baseball School here in Worthington and made some good contact, and my arm didn't even hurt after the session.

Then, I went over to the Columbus Veteran's Memorial for a sports card show in the afternoon and picked up some vintage Pirates baseball cards that I can hopefully get signed at the Fantasy Camp.

And for the hat  trick, the Penguins were playing at Nationwide Arena, and I was expecting to see a big rebound for the Jackets as they put away the Penguins.

Oops.  I guess my day came to a bit of a thud at the end.  49 days to go...