Default

Putting the F in FRS

After last year’s miserable showing of 24-36 and last place in the division during the COVID shortened season, the outlook for 2021 was just hoping for a mid-pack finish in the division. But something wonderous happened, the Red Sox were playing great baseball. At the All-Star break they had the third best record (55-36) in all of baseball and were leading the division by a game and a half over Tampa Bay. The Yankees and Blue Jays were 8 games back. They had 5 players make the All-Star team.

Something changed in the second half of the season, the All-Stars stopped playing like they were and the stellar pitching cooled way off. Since the break the FRS has reverted to playing like it was anticipated they would – mediocre. They are playing exactly .500 ball with 36 wins and 36 loses. Unfortunately every one else in the division started playing great. A month after the All-Star break Tampa was in first by 3 games. By the end of August the Rays were ahead of the Red Sox 9 games and the Yankees had past them too.

We are heading into the last three games of the 2021 baseball season. And the Sox are hanging on for dear life to the second Wild Card spot. The last three games are against the Washington Nationals who are the fifth worse team in baseball having won only 65 games and losing 94. But winning all three of these games is not assured as they just finished a 3 game set against the Baltimore Orioles who are 52-107 and the Sox lost 2 of those. The way they are playing they don’t deserve to be in the playoffs.

The F in FRS stands in for an expletive, but in this case, because I expect them to choke, I think it really stands for something our previous President reserved for the New York Times (among others) – Failing.

There’ll Be No Living With Them Now

In last Thursday’s newspaper there was an article announcing that the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are designating Sunday, September 26, as a day of fasting in regards to the current multi-year drought which is having a devastating impact on the Klamath Basin and nearby communities.

It promptly rained on and off all day Monday the 27th, some of the night and a little more on following morning.

What Could Go Wrong

Woolly mammoth set in a winter scene environment. Realistic 3d illustration.
Credit: Getty

This headline in my news feed caught my attention big time:
A New Company Wants To Resurrect The Woolly Mammoth

First, haven’t these people seen Jurassic Park? Hint, it ends very badly for a lot of people.

Secondly, this creature thrived in the Artic Tundra and by the time they work out all the issues with DNA editing, and more importantly, creating an external artificial uterus for gestating the embryos, will there be any artic tundra left with the current global warming situation?

At least they didn’t want to start with velociraptors…

Blacked Out

Back in Aiken the only team MLB.TV blacked me out from watching the Red Sox play was the Atlanta Braves which are 140 miles away. This was never a problem because our cable system carried TBS which broadcast the games. I could watch the Red Sox play their division rivals in Tampa and Baltimore, the next closest teams which are 200 miles away.

The Red Sox are currently playing a 3-game series against the Seattle Mariners and I am 370 miles (as the crow flies) from T-Mobile Park, but in spite of that distance, I am blacked out from viewing the game.

Out here I am blacked out from the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics games as well, both places being around 310 miles away. I can see either of the Los Angeles teams, Dodgers or Angels because they are about twice as far away as the Bay Area teams.

None of this is a real problem anyway because I subscribe to a VPN which lets me pretend to be where I’m not. Right now I’m virtually in Denver.

The only issue with this is I have to watch the game on the desktop PC or the cell phone. I can watch it on a TV, but I’d have to get the game up on the PC and then use an HDMI cable to the TV, which is usually not worth the effort.

I Miss Fish Tacos

Today is Friday and quite possibly is should have been Fish Taco Friday, but today we had chili. It could have been Fish Taco Friday because ever since we have lived in Klamath Falls every other Friday was a visit to a food truck that served them and this might have been the day.

Unfortunately that food truck has stopped serving them on Friday. Two out of the last three times we visited the truck on Friday she didn’t have them. On our next try, there were no fish tacos, so three strikes and you are out. I did ask why this last time and she replied that there wasn’t enough interest in them.

On the first no fish taco day we drove around looking for another place that we wanted to eat at. No joy, one of the other food trucks (not strictly Mexican) we’ve eaten at before and liked, but they weren’t in their spot.

The second no fish taco Friday, we tried a different Mexican food truck. They didn’t have any, so we tried some of their food and was not really good at all.

After the third no fish taco Friday we were just going to head home, but when we passed the spot where that other truck that we ate before was, it was there. We were going to get a burger, but she had a sign in the window that said “Fish Tacos”, I decided to get a couple, Donna opted for Fish & Chips.

Well, the fish was good, but the taco package was not nearly as good as our previous suppler. The tortillas were not heated and too chewy, there was lettuce instead of cabbage and the pico de gallo was just chopped tomatoes. The fish & chips was plentiful enough that we though maybe we could come back every other Friday and split the meal between the two of us, but that will probably not happen.

So, I miss fish tacos, but I’ve lived long enough now that I miss a lot of things, what’s one more…

Jigsaw Puzzle Madness

As I mentioned the other day, we have been doing a lot of jigsaw puzzles here during pandemic quarantine/avoidance and smoky summer days.

We have probably bought a couple of dozen brand new. We visit our local independent bookstore once a month on haircut day and Donna usually buys one, while I buy an actual book. We have also bought a few at Fred Meyer when we catch them on sale.

But most of the puzzles come from thrift stores, Goodwill sells them for $1.99 or $2.99 and one place in town has all of their puzzles priced at ninety-nine cents, otherwise we probably couldn’t afford our habit.

And what a habit it is too, for the last 10 months there has always been a jigsaw puzzle going on what used to be our dining room table. I have been posting photos of every puzzle we complete on Instagram and early on I was just using the hashtags #jigsaw and #jigsawpuzzle, but after completely a bunch of them I started to add #jigsawpuzzleanonymous, a play on Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, to them because it was looking like we were addicted.

As it turns out, so far, I am the only one using that hashtag, so when I want to know how many puzzles we have done so far all I have to do is look at the #jigsawpuzzleanonymous page and count the posts. There is one post with three small puzzles in it and for one panoramic puzzle of Portland, Oregon I created a triptych with 3 posts so the counts works out perfect. Right now we sit at 93 puzzles in 275 days or about one every 3 days.

Yesterday I had someone like a photo of a puzzle from a few days ago and I went to see his page, to see how he connected with me, and he posts time-lapse photos of his puzzle building. Five hundred piece puzzles in three hours…yikes, but it is fun to watch: For some reason, none of the puzzle builds are available on his YouTube anymore…

All Jumbled Up

We used to do the crossword puzzle, 7 Little Words and the Jumble out of the semi-daily local paper. We would do the crossword together and Donna would do the 7 Little Words & Jumble. If she got stumped, I would help out.

Then back in December last year we made a seemingly innocent purchase of a jigsaw puzzle. But we got addicted to doing jigsaws and the word pencil games no longer got done. Our noses have been stuck inside square cardboard boxes filled with cut pieces of cardboard with brightly colored images glued to one side of them since then. But Donna has still faithfully cut out the newspaper puzzles and we have amassed quite a pile of them. Every once and a while she’ll grab a month’s worth 7 Little Words and hand me the same sized pile of Jumbles so we can try and keep the backlog around six months worth. This morning I got a stack of Jumbles from March.

I get the Jumbles because they, for whatever reason, are in my wheelhouse. I also have a better grasp of the pun like answers involved in the cartoon. Most of the time I can get the top two 5-letter words without having to use paper to unscramble them. More often than not I do have to use some paper to figure out what the bottom two 6-letter words are. Sometimes just writing those six letters down in a different order will let me see the word and others I have to shuffle them around a dozen times before I get it. Every once and a while I’ll get totally stuck on a word and I will cheat by checking for the scrambled word answers at jumbleanswer.com. Also, every once in a while, I’ll get three of the four words and the cartoon answer, which allows me to solve that word.

The Sunday puzzle is more difficult than the other six days because instead of 4 jumbled words, it has 6 and all of them are 6-letters long. Plus the cartoon answer usually has well over a dozen letters in it. Today, I almost hung up my Jumble pencil for good because I did something that was pretty improbable. I got to the first Sunday Jumble of March and I aced it. I could figure out all six of the six letter words and filled in the cartoon answer without having to write anything down on paper to solve. I’m not ready to start doing them in pen just yet, but boy did that feel good.