Baseball All-Star Ballot

Ever since, like the end of the first two weeks of the season, whenever you visit the home page of your favorite Major League Baseball(R) team there has been a section dedicated for voting for the All Star Game. This is long before you know if anyone is going to have a good year or not, but anyway it might shake out, great, good, average or sucky, they want you to vote a straight ticket of hometown players.

About 2 weeks ago they added this little image to the background of the home page. So not only do they want you to vote for everyone on your favorite team, whether they suck or not, they now want you to vote for everyone on some other team in the other league no matter their worth too. And how did they determine the pairings? Red Sox & Giants? I checked about another half dozen teams homepages and no others have this banner aligning them with an opposite league team. Is this an experiment to see if has any appreciable difference in the voting for either team’s players?

Well, for the first time in recent memory, I decided to vote for the players to go to the All Star game. I did not vote the straight Red Sox ticket (although 3 FRS players did make the cut), nor did I vote the straight Giants ticket (I voted the No Giant ticket.)

Sunny Day

It was a sunny day here, but it is a rainy night in New York, so the baseball game is in a rain delay. I just checked the radar and it looks like it will clear up enough to play ball starting after 10:00 PM. That means the game should get over around 2:30 AM. Guess I’ll be reading about it in the morning.

Watching The Sawx

The FRS and the MFY are playing a three game series in the House That George Steinbrenner Built. Tonight’s middle game of the set is being shown on ESPN. Usually I like to watch with the game muted and listen to the hometown WEEI radio broadcast off the net, but tonight one half of the usual Red Sox announcing team, Dave O’Brien, is doing the play by play, so I’m keeping the TV sound on (even though I can’t stand the color guy, X-Sawx player, Nomar Garciaparra.)

Like last night, the FRS started out with 3 runs in the first inning and then built on it. Last night they won the game 6-3 and it was interesting to the end. Tonight they built a 7-0 lead, but then gave up 4 in the sixth. To quote an ex-Yankee, Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over”.

I wish I could quote a couple of stats that were mentioned earlier in the game by the announcers, but they went something like this: In the last 500 games these two teams have played the wins stand at Red Sox, 250; Yankees, 250. Total runs, Red Sox, 840; Yankees, 841. Another hallmark of this rivalry is the length of the game in time and I bet there is somebody in the ESPN TV that knows the figure, but tonight we have played 6 inning (2/3rds of the game) and it has been 2-1/2 hours since the first pitch.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1031

One Hundred Twenty One Thousand


Part of the land donated for the Phinizy Swamp was an old dairy farm, these silos are all that remain.

On the drive home from work today the Emperor notched past 121,000 miles. Up until that fateful day in late April when the Emperor got a new brother we had been racking up a thousand miles on him at the pretty regular rate of 1 a month, but this last one took seven weeks. Could there be some behind the scenes palace intrigue brewing? Does the new Prince have it’s eye on taking the throne as the most favored vehicle of the Kingdom of Bogardus? Stay tuned.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1029

Phinizy Swamp

We started out heading for the Augusta Canal Tow Path for a walk and to maybe find a cache or two, but a senior moment on the part of the driver led to ending up at Phinizy Swamp for a long walk and three geocache finds.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1027

South Carolina Post Offices Redux

No, we haven’t decided to drive to all the South Carolina Post Offices and take their picture with a Sonata in front…

On our way to work Friday morning we stopped off at DD for our breakfast and a free doughnut* on National Doughnut Day. We got up early to account for the time we would waste reading the Wall Street Journal, but for whatever reason there wasn’t a copy there, so we finished eating earlier than anticipated. The only thing to do was to take a the long way to work. We drove what used to be Loop 1 of the Aiken Bicycle Club’s 4 Loop Century backwards and when we passed by Vacluse’s tiny Post Office we noticed that across the street was a big parking area and a patch of woods, causing both of us to think, “That would be a neat place for a cache.”

So late yesterday evening that is just what we did.

Today, instead of an email notification that the cache was published, we got an email from the South Carolina reviewer, “Thank you for your cache page submission. The maps we use show a railroad track within about 120 feet of your cache location. Railroads typically have a right of way that extends 150 feet to either side, and trespassing onto the right of way is a federal offense. Please relocate your cache so that it is not within 150 feet of a railroad track.”

So late this evening that is just what we did.

*with drink purchase

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1026

Aiken Railroad Depot

This morning we did our monthly 1/8 Century Ride (12.5 miles) on the tandem around Aiken to pay our bills. It would be more like a Sixteenth Century if we did it in the shortest way possible, but we added a few miles by looping around to the east and coming into downtown on Park Avenue passing right by the Aiken Railroad Depot.