FRS

This Is Sad

At the MMC monthly meeting tonight everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Most of the time was spent on future event planning, where we hammered out the details for the next couple of month’s. Like what restaurant we would be holding the next 2 meetings at and where we would meet for the monthly breakfast. Then something odd happened, one member had the audacity to suggest a car related event…

When I got home from the meeting I turned on the ballgame and the FRS were beating the MFY 3 to 1 after 3-1/2 innings. The Yankees then scored 8 runs in the bottom of the 4th inning and it has been downhill every since. I wonder if it is too early to call in sick for tomorrow?

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 324

Lost Afternoon

Instead of listening to the FRS ballgame on the internet I spent an hour or so watching the videos from Comic-Con of the panel for TDTVS (only six months to go.) The producers answered questions from the audience (as cryptically as they could on some, more honestly on others), they had several of the shows actors join them and there were several videos shown, including a phony America’s Most Wanted segment on Kate Austen. But my favorite was this commercial for Mr. Kluck’s:

When I finally decided to see how the Sox were doing I went to their home page and there was a large photo of John Smoltz pitching and this bit of verbiage underneath: J.D. Drew singled, moved to third on Adam LaRoche’s single and scored on Jed Lowrie’s sac fly as the Red Sox broke through in the fifth. Reading that you might think things were going well for Boston, but in fact it was just the opposite, they were losing six to nothing when the run scored and Smoltz had already pitched his last pitch in the game. With this loss the FRS will have won 2 out of three games in this series and usually when you are winning 2 of 3 you are playing good ball, but they can’t catch the Yankees playing like that because right now the MFY are 9-1 in their last ten games.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302

What the Heck Happened?

Ugly WallThe FRS started the “second half” of the season with a three game lead over the MFY in the AL East. Both teams have played four games since then, and after last night they are in a first place tie. Tonight the Sox are losing to the Texas Rangers and the Yankees are beating Baltimore, if everything stays as it is they will find themselves looking up in the standings to the Yanks.

We attempted a nifty puzzle cache that took us to the Aiken County Veterans Memorial Park the other night. We had a list of names to look for in the brinks in the walkway surrounding a fountain, they were a mixture of individual donors, companies and tributes to the fallen. To facilitate finding individual bricks they were arranged in a grid with letters for columns and numbers for rows. We quickly realized we needed the numbers to arrange them into the next set of coordinates. Didn’t have time right then, so we finished the juggling at home with the intentions of going back.

Yesterday we headed back over there with our new GZ to look for the cache. The GPSr led us right to a big crape myrtle surrounded by lots of low bushes and seemed tailor made for hiding a cache. It must have been hidden real good because we didn’t find it after 10 minutes of crawling around there. When we got home I emailed the cache owner and asked for confirmation of our coordinates.

This morning the reply came to the effect that there were no bushes anywhere near the cache. Dang we have the wrong coordinates. Rechecking all the possibilities it turns out we missed one and it was only 137 feet due west from where we were looking yesterday. After dinner tonight we went back to this set of coords and there were no bushes and there was a cache.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Untitled

Stage 8 of the TDF resulted in zero change at the top of the leader board. Old Man Lance is still in third place 8 seconds out. We are in the Pyrenees Mountains, but today and tomorrow’s stages are the kind that probably won’t determine who will win the Tour, but can decide who will lose it. While there are two or more big ass climbs on the stage, they don’t end at the tops, there are 30 to 40 miles of downhill & flats before the finish line allowing any of the contenders who is dropped on the climb to catch back up.

Appears that some of the blog’s theme CSS conflicts with the theme stuff that is produced by the stats generator and I’m not smart enough to know if there is an easy fix and don’t want to spend the time, so I took the easy way out. Just click on this link – Geocaching Statistics

I guess it is OK to blog about this because the FRS apparently don’t need me to jinx tonight’s victory over the supposedly lousy Kansas City Royals because right now their relief pitching is busily snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When John Smoltz left the game after pitching 5 solid innings they had a 9 to 1 lead. KC scored 5 runs in the sixth. Now after a solo homer in the 7th they have a men on first and second with nobody out, so now the current batter represents the go ahead run!

At the pool party with the MMC this morning it was pointed out to me that I had misspelled retirement in my countdown widget in the right sidebar. What happened here, either all of my readers are as bad as I am when it comes to spelling or you all enjoyed watching me humiliate myself with the Internet equivalent of toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292

Transformers – Revenge of the Red Sox

Papel-BotBuddy Mark was going to the local Drive-In tonight to see the new Transformer movie. To get a good parking spot I told him to leave early because for popular first-run movies there the place really fills up fast.

If he followed my advice he left before the end of the Braves – Red Sox game today. And if he did, he missed the FRS’s very own Transformer smash the hopes of the Atlanta team by pitching the bottom of the ninth inning in typical Papel-Bot fashion.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 269

That’s Even Weirder

A few years back when I started listening to the FRS baseball games on the internet I complained that it was weird when between innings there was silence instead of the usual radio commercials. That was only the first year, ever since then I have been getting the Boston radio station’s local commercials. Normal.

Tonight the Sox are playing the Braves and the game is on something called the Peachtree TV. My local cable company doesn’t normally carry Peachtree, but because of the big Braves fan base they do show the baseball games on an open channel. I don’t know if it is contractual or what, but during inning breaks we don’t get commercials We get silence and sometimes a black screen, but mostly the video is of the infield and the silent tableau of players trotting to their position, which an occasional vertigo inducing zoom in to a close-up of the second base bag.

On radio it was weird, but on TV it is even weirder.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 267

Awry

John Smoltz pitched his first big league game in over a year and he relearned mowing ’em down in the minors doesn’t always transfer well to the majors. He gave up 5 runs in the first three innings and was pulled after five. Hopefully it was just stage fright on opening night and he can do better next time.

Last night I could only listen to the baseball game through my right ear. No, it is not another flu symptom, the left computer speaker wasn’t working. I reseated every connection with out any success, but I did discover that it you pushed on the volume knob just right while turning it the left side would start to work. Tonight that trick sort of worked as now it seems like the game announcers are coming from somewhere right of center. I guess this weekend it will be back to Staples for a set of computer speakers.

The way things are going, it might be a good idea to do a data back up…

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 265