Rants

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…

…the tough go shopping.

The FRS were on TV tonight because they were playing the Braves and if you live in the south every Braves game is on TV. The Red Sox had their 13 Trillion Yen Man (Daisuke Matsuzaka) pitching and there was much excitement in the Land of the Rising Sun because he was facing off against the Brave’s Japanese starter Kenshin Kawakami. Both guys have had rough starts to the season, but tonight’s rough start award went to Boston’s Dice-K as his first pitch of the game was belted into the bullpen for a home run. Then it went downhill from there. By the end of the 5th inning the Sox were down 6-0, so we went out to do our weekly grocery shopping.

For the second time in seven days we have left a store leaving our selected purchases behind.

I got in a checkout line behind what I thought was a woman who was nearly finished as she had a full cart and about a dozen items left on the belt. After unloading 2/3rds of the cart onto the nearly empty belt I realized it hadn’t moved and there were now two cashiers fiddling around at the scanner. I think they were trying to take an item off the woman’s order, they’d swipe something and the machine would boop and they’d both look up at the screen in unison, shake the heads, repeat. After the forth time I think it worked because one cashier left and the remaining one scanned another item and then immediately starting asking for the first cashier to come back. It was now becoming clear that she didn’t know what she was doing. And it also became clear that the shopper was separating the final 10 items into 2 separate orders and she had a paycheck to cash or maybe a substance check and that we were going to standing here awhile. There was one other check out line open, but there was no way that I was off loading the belt to put it in my cart to move over two slots. We looked at each other, shrugged and headed for the door.

We drove a mile down the street to another store, probably spent $25 more dollars than we would have at the first store, but we were in and out and on the way home like we should have been at Store #1.

The game was mercifully over by the time we got back, both teams each scored 2 uneventful runs, so they FRS lost by a score of 8-2. They play each other twice more over the weekend, so it is not too late to save face.