What would happen if.... (5/30 edition)

...if someone were to try to market dairy products made from human milk? Forget goat cheese, Nichole! I think I'd be interested in at least seeing in a store, a line of blueberry yogurt or some sour cream.

When I was a kid, I used to eat American cheese with ketchup sandwiches. Really, it's not much different from a hamburger without the beef, is it? Anyways, that's a trip back to the 70's.....it's left my menu, the same way as the full combination of peanut butter / jelly / AND Fluff. At least with those, it was just too hard to apply the 3rd ingredient to either of the other 2.

If terrorists drove a small plane into the green monster at Fenway, would the Red Sox try to re-build it? Or would they petition the city to put a regular left field out there? And could they, with the space limitations?

What's a better episode of WKRP? The one with the turkeys being thrown from the plane at Thanksgiving? Or the one where Les reads the emergency procedures manual....replacing "communists" at every spot with "tornadoes"? The godless tornadoes!!!

If a town (like, say, Wilton, CT) doesn't want an interstate-esque highway to disrupt its rural character, can't the state legally close the state roads by erecting jersey barriers outside the city limits? You think Route 7 as a highway's bad? Try having NO route into town, ya upscale snots! Believe me, nobody's going to be getting off in Wilton, anyways....you ignore us, we'll ignore you on our way to Danbury or Norwalk, thank you very much.

I once found out the hard way that if you want to carve your daughter's name into a pumpkin at Halloween, names with full circles in them (like d) are a bit tough. An s is actually easier, despite all the twistiness.

What the heck are all the yellow flowers that took over the empty lot next door? It's freaky....you can't even see the green weeds anymore.

I wonder if amusement parks could install EZ-Pass type stuff onto their better rides....like you get what you pay for...6 trips on the roller coaster costs more than 2, and they give you a bill at the end of the day, based on a bracelet you wear all day with a sensor.

Is there anything better than a brewery tour that has a restaurant with it for when the tour's over? Like this place in Pennsylvania. Factor in that we had a cab ride all set up for heading back, and that's pretty darn good!

The good thing about the written section of the national spelling bee is that at least then, everyone's spelling the same words. I'm reminded of the old Far Side cartoon where someone gets "cat" and the next caveman's dreading getting stuck with "Australopithecus".

What would it take to start a new music television channel, to show videos and concerts 24 hours a day?

When I was like 10 or 11, ESPN came in over the air in my bedroom one afternoon. I had a small black and white TV, and there was the snowy feed of an auto race on channel 11. Now, 11 was the number on the cable for ESPN, but I definitely didn't have cable in my room. I grew up close enough to Bristol to pick it up over the air, but that doesn't make any sense, either.

Greg Oden, future #1 NBA pick, recently said he wanted to be a dentist when he was a kid. Combine that with his obvious misfittedness at being 7'1".....and I think we've found Hermey the Elf in his new life.

Being King for a Day should get you the best HMO in the kingdom

Now we're talking....

4 for 4, 3 runs scored....including sprinting home from 3rd on a sac fly to win, 8-7. All singles to right, except for the one in the ninth, which was an infield hit up the middle to beat the throw from second base. (A guy named Frank I know from pick-up hoops....I'd forgotten his name, called him Larry earlier in the game....realized it later, apologized and he said "I'm Italian, do I *look* like a Larry?" good-naturedly.)

So the slide into home, along with an earlier slide in the game, gave me 2 big strawberries on my shin and back upper thigh (okay, butt). Erika had bought for me for Christmas (stocking stuffer) some antiseptic wash and spray-on bandage. (Apparently it's aerosol krazy glue, practically.) Well, on my Thursday night game, she lent it to a guy on my co-ed team who scraped up his knee. That's all well and good, but she didn't put it back where she found it. She had dug through my sporting-goods store of a car trunk to find them, and decided to put them back in the car's first aid kit. A place I've never ventured. So it took until the next morning to really get them tended to, although I did fill the entire shower floor with dirt cleaning those wounds off later that night.

Saturday was my family's annual cookout/campout at my uncle's house. We were the only ones to camp out, most everyone else went home. We had hot dogs (with crunchy peanut butter on Erika's and mine -- her secret topping of choice) and we also went to a nearby petting zoo in the back forest of Chaplin, CT. There were 4 of us in a small tent, because I didn't realize the box with the other tent did not contain that other tent. Combine that with a slow leak in the air mattress....ahhhh. I did get to try my new phone in the morning to check on how the Red Sox did, though. That was cool. My uncle made us pancakes the next morning. Here's a link to my aunt's studio:

As for the rest of the weekend....lots of spring cleaning.

a game-losing homer....

This is a fun story. My co-ed league plays some of its games on the high school's fast-pitch softball field. With very short fences (225 feet maybe?)....so the rule is, each team is allowed 2 homers per gender per game. They went up 4-0 on two two-run shots. We clawed back, got it even, and then exploded for 5 in the 5th (including a 3-run shot) and 1 more in the 6th on a solo shot. (We of course lambasted the kid for "wasting" our last homer on a solo shot, but it was 10-4 so we weren't THAT mad.) I of course with the big lead, and getting tired of squinting into the setting sun, literally wasted my last time up trying to hit a low pitch as a flare to left, but instead got a pop-up to third. So I ended up 2 for 4 with a run scored.

So anyways, that wasted at bat. Sure enough, the other team put together a rally in the top of the 7th. Second baseman dropped a pop-up...lots of gap singles....next thing we know it's 10-9, two outs, 1st and 2nd. I'm kinda hoping for a single up the middle so I can throw out the tying run. But this was where it got funny. The last batter of the game hit a bomb out to right field. Over the fence by 50 feet. So instead of a game-winning homer....it's an out because it's the 3rd guy to hit a homer in the game for them.



Okay, next story. I apparently have been tagged by Chele76. This was at first amusing because I noticed that Dan Mega was tagged first, and he didn't try tagging me. I felt a little passed over, but that was explained when I noticed that Chele had tagged me and Dan at the same time, and I'd only read his first.

Here are the rules:
Each player starts with 7 random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write on their own blog about their seven things, as well as these rules. At the end of your blog, you need to choose 7 people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them that they have been tagged and to read your blog!

1. I'm left-handed but play the guitar righty.
2. I lost spelling bees in the 4th and 6th grades on "persuade" and "cypress", the latter of which I spelled like the island, rather than the tree as dictated in our spelling book. Even showing the teacher on a globe was to no avail.
3. I threw up lobster after finally agreeing to try it as a twelve-year-old, as my parents bribed me with three packs of baseball cards. It wouldn't go down, no matter how hard I tried to swallow (an allergy, maybe?) and they relented and rewarded my efforts with the cards.
4. I prefer Missile Command to Asteroids, any day of the week.
5. I have no trouble spending $80 on something at Christmas time for a relative that I wouldn't spend $60 on for myself if I liked the same thing.
6. I once tried to make homemade butter rum ice cream by adding real melted butter to the mix, which then froze into chunks of butter throughout the mixture.
7. I can still solve a Rubik's cube, 25 years since I last read the book with the sequences for the various stages.

Who to tag....let's go with some of the folks from my fantasy baseball league: Big D, Guy in the Corner, Fost, Andy, Dr. Doom, Jays64, and Rafael.

What would happen if...(5/23 edition)

...I yelled out to the trucks sweeping my street with "Someday...you'll dance with the reaper!!!"

Not much look worse than dead vines among live trees.

I like to read the label in supermarkets of Chicken Pot Pie, or Pot Stickers, and comment, "hmm...contains no actual pot." Made a hippie-looking guy laugh once.

Saw the 24 finale....I think they realize they need to scale back *just a bit* next year. The seasons are usually, what 18 months apart? So Chloe will have already had her kid....I found it amusing that Jack knew his way around CTU as though they'd never reconfigure areas, plus he knew the old abandoned motel was still there to meet Chang.

Jordin's 17...I wonder if she has her driver's license yet, and if not, what good is the assumed Ford sponsorship?

I was surprised that the recycling collection people took empty Corona bottles with the dead limes in them. I certainly wasn't taking them back for nickels. (Not mine!)

Does everyone play croquet with the "poison" concept? It seems like it's never mentioned in the rules that come with the game? It makes it way more fun, though, especially on uneven terrain.

Sprint converted my old T-Mobile number onto my wife's account, and when I called her, the caller ID had her name with my number. Apparently that takes 72 hours to fix? Huh?

On a lint roller, are the perforations lined up with the same spot on the roll? If the sheets you tear off were all the same size, they wouldn't work becaue the circumference around the roller shrinks as you use up sheets.

If a major league baseball team files for bankrupcy, where in the line of creditors do the players' salaries rank?

I've been "banned" from eating raisins by my wife and daughters. Perhaps you can guess why, if anyone has the same "affliction".

If Indianapolis had won Super Bowl 45, would we have gotten any corny scenes with a 75-year-old Schneider and Ms. Romano during the pregame?

Is there a list somewhere of every show/city combination? Heck, even Hartford got Judging Amy to compete with Providence! If Springfield, Mass. gets a show, look out!

Jimmy Page played guitar with a bow. I'm waiting to see someone try it on a banjo.

dutch apple cheesecake

Yes, my wife has invented the world's greatest dessert, it seems....and by breakfast, I mean "next-day breakfast" to finish off the masterpiece that we'd served the night before.

Played some Oh Hell, Hearts, Setback, and 9-5 Setback. I woulda won hearts except I got f-bombed....Ever play, know you can shoot the moon, if only a last early trick goes by so you can get rid of your crappy loser cards early? And then your wife decides on the 3rd time, as the last of your losers goes by, to give someone else the first heart of the hand? And then you've got a recipe for 25 big points left in your hand and no way out??!

We had to buy a replacement croquet set for my daughter's. Grownups tend to pound the mallets into woodchips. The new set has slightly larger balls, but monstrously solid mallets, so that the balls roll all over the lawn better.

Game 1

First at bat, bottom of the first....batting cleanup. They had a huge shift on me, so I decided to try to go to left. The problem with that is I don't hit liners to left, I hit slicing tailing flares. That's what I hit, and the woman in left field ran way over, stuck out her glove about mid-thigh high, and dropped it. So I ended up at 2nd base, where I was stranded.

Second at bat, 2nd inning....bases loaded. This time I pulled it, but got under it just a bit. The right fielder went way back, and sorta had trouble planting his feet. The ball popped out of his glove just over his head. He should have caught it....but I went all the way around the bases....so like a grand slam, but technically it's a sacrifice fly and E-9. I'm debating whether or not to call it a 2-RBI sacrifice fly....it was deep enough for the guy on 2nd to score. But definitely not 4 rbi.

Third at bat, 4th inning. two on. Swung at a slightly high pitch, and hit a little dribbler back to the pitcher's left. He had trouble picking it up, but I think an infield single would have happened anyway. Lord knows, I'm NOT going to say I got on 3 times in a row all on errors! I was then stranded.

Last at bat, leading off the 5th. The pitcher said the new right fielder was asking me to hit it to him. I did, but it was a sinking liner that short-hopped him. He then had it fly out of his glove in right, so I decided to try for 3rd, not just 2nd. The relay throw might have gotten me, but it hit me flush in the back as I was starting my slide. (So maybe I would have been safe...) The ball rolled away into the bench, so I was given home.

I'd have to say I went 2 for 3, with two singles and a sacrifice fly. One RBI, and 2 runs scored.

We won on the mercy rule, 19 or 20 to 7 after five innings.

No tests of my sore arm....you'd think a left-center fielder would be more busy other than picking up one rolling single.

What would happen if....

CBS decided to break out their 1976 prime time lineup for a week? Would the ratings be better or worse?

I can't even imagine that CBS used to show Scooby-Doo when it first came out. It always seems so ABC in my mind.

If the island on Lost has such great healing powers, does that mean Locke will be okay after getting shot?

Could ventriloquist dummies fight? Would the performers be able to keep up the voice work while engaged in hand-to-hand combat?

Does lawn fertilizer with anti-weed ingredients only work prophylactically? Will it kill existing weeds already sprouted?

How many people with pet woodchucks actually name them Chuck?

Did anyone wonder if my use of the term "prophylactically" had anything to do with birth control?

Why isn't birch beer more popular?

Isn't it amusing when there's a welcome sign for someone in your office with the same name as a guy you knew in college? I secretly wonder if it's the guy who joined the gay/lesbian student association....just to see how he's turned out as an adult.

I throw about as deadly a wiffle ball pitch as there is. Unfortunately, because I'm lefty, it only really works half as well against righties. Combo left-to-right break with off-the-table drop.

Can regular people hit knuckleballs better than trained baseball players?

I hate it when I punch a spindle-hole through the numbers on a page.

Can alcohol actually be administered intravenously, if diluted enough? Have medical residents tried this?

Ever hate it when one band you like covers a song by another band you like? Aerosmith's "I'm Down" is way better than their version of "Come Together".

Does cooking bacon in the oven really make it catch on fire?

What's the minimum height for a highway overpass, so that it does NOT need one of those warning signs indicating its height? 13 feet 8 inches? 14-9?

Can they invent a piano with strings as easy to tune as a guitar's? I could save a hundred bucks a year.

What else, besides excess consumption, may cause a laxative effect?

I used to always call the tan M&M's "brown" and the ones more commonly known as brown as the black ones.

Macaroni and cheese with pepperoni is an awesome use for post-party platter leftovers.

Riemann sums....anyone?

Pitching in shirt sleeves

This is a phrase that Joe Castiglione uses on Red Sox radio when the weather starts getting warmer. It drives me crazy. He means to say the guy's pitching in short sleeves. The only shirts that don't have sleeves are tank tops, and long sleeves count as shirt sleeves, too!

My arm is killing me! It was healing nice, until I got my arm stuck in a rebound battle last night.

Got some Bang Tango playing on iTunes here at work. Anyone remember them?

sweet bridge

So yesterday was Mothers' Day. We made two meals. First, eggs benedict over homemade toast for my mom (and dad). I skipped the hollandaise sauce and just had fried eggs. The kids didn't even have eggs, just toast with bacon. They love Erika's new favorite food....which is peanut butter with white chocolate in it made by the Peanut Butter Company.

For Erika's mom, we went to her house in Montebello NY. Usually we've gone over the Tappan Zee Bridge because she's in western Rockland County. But yesterday we tried something different, going over the Bear Mountain Bridge in Peekskill. First of all, the toll is only one dollar, coming west to east on the way home. That beats anything on the interstates. The bridge is beautiful, too....nestled among hills and stuff. You can tell they had to blast out the side of the mountain to get a road through there. The nycroads.com website probably has more on the history. I may check it out later today.

Anyways, it was like Iron Chef, with almonds as the secret ingredient. Erika made a salad with broccoli slaw, ramen noodles, and almonds. I passed, but did have 2 helpings of green bean amandine with slivered almonds. My contribution to the meal was chicken breasts baked with a coating of paprika and chopped almonds (instead of bread crumbs). That always turns out great!

And then of course we got home and I found out the Red Sox scored 6 in the ninth to win. sweet!

timber!

So my big task of the day was to chop down a dead tree between our front yard and the road. It took a couple of hours to disconnect the tree from the oriental bittersweet (which killed it) and the poison ivy (which has climbed up the trees where Erika killed the bittersweet!).

I'll know in a few days how much poison ivy I got. Dad doesn't get it, but Mom sure does. Guess which gene I got. Actually, mine's never as bad as Erika's. She takes prednisone for a couple of weeks when she gets it. A few years ago my tattooed ankle got it. The blue and green turned orange with poison ivy goo....but eventually healed itself just fine.

Red Sox won today! Schilling couldn't handle the long breaks between Steve "human rain delay 2?" Trachsel's laboring on the mound....kept giving back the leads the offense worked for. Finally the bullpen shut down the O's, and the Sox got lots of runs late.

The coolest part of chopping down the tree HAD to be swinging an ax. One day I'll venture to try Erika's mom's chainsaw in our garage.

I had a really cool idea to mention in my blog today, but I forgot what it is. Crap!

oh, the pain....

So, the ex-Scrubs (still without a name) had our first scrimmage last night. Not everyone could make it, but it was good to start running around out on a field again.

a. My arm feels like it's detaching at the shoulder. That's not cool, especially for an outfielder. It doesn't hurt to throw. But it hurts to simulate a throwing motion. Weird. I've already mentioned to my other coach that perhaps I should play second base and throw right-handed. (If I throw like a girl, would that fill a roster spot as such?)

b. I was backpedaling back out to left-center after backing up second base, and fell over on my butt. People look at me, what happened, am I ok, etc. Turns out there was a hole in the outfield that I'd stepped in. About eight inches round, and 6 inches deep. Someone from the other team came out the next inning and filled it with a spare shoe so that we'd be aware of it.

c. Scored 2 runs after 2 infield hits. But infield hits suck....all it proves is that an all-grass infield is slow. Data-Ease tonight should be doing batting practice, so I can get some more lift on the ball. Still haven't heard which field, though, that we're supposed to be on at 6 tonight.

On another topic, Rival, the Crock-Pot company, makes an indoor BBQ pit, and the ribs I had going all day yesterday came out awesome! I made a quick sauce with ketchup, honey, and lime-pepper spice mixture from the cabinet. They went for about 11 hours, and I couldn't even pull the 4 half-racks out of the thing, because the meat was falling off and sticking to the racks. I had to invert the thing over a plate!

But ugh, I fear tonight I must clean the thing now.

Are we Scrubs?

We'll find out soon enough. A scrimmage at 6 pm. Last year, as the non-aligned people who needed a team to be on, we were called Scrubs. I got #14, a nice testament to Jim Rice. Still, we should have been given character names on our shirts, I feel. Of course, I'd have wanted Turk, although Dr. Cox is probably a good athlete too (or was, back in the day).

Now the team seems dominated by co-workers of one guy who's taken over the organizing -- contact with the league president, sending out the emails, etc. I can't remember which guy it was from last year, though! Since last year's team was an embarrassment, I can only hope it was someone who was equally shamed and didn't come to many games as a form of protest. Or, I just didn't put the face to the name.

Softball's so easy. The ball is ridiculously slow. Most of the players are, too. Our team last year lacked "baseball instincts". That drives me more crazy than anything -- even pitchers who can't throw strikes (check), batters who miss (check), or showing up with only 8 or 9 guys for a game (check and double-check!). I played shortstop one game, and got a grounder, went to toss it to second to get the force, and the second baseman's nowhere to be found. Yeah, I got the error because I threw the ball over his head by the time he realized he was supposed to cover. My arm had already completed the swinging motion for the flip, and I still had to try to hold on to the ball and wait. Not exactly Alex Gonzalez or Alex Cora.

Well, we'll see how it goes.

p.s. the homemade beer is quite good! and no more foam incidents, although one bottle over the weekend was a "dud" with no carbonation. Not sure how that happens.

Clemens got a no-decision

Okay, that title comes from one of the songs I used to bang out on my old four-track tape recorder in the early 90's. I was watching the Red Sox against Detroit back in the early 90's, and they took him out of a game while losing, but the Red Sox tied it up against the bullpen or something, I think. I always hated either singing or writing lyrics, so I'd come up with crap like "Clemens got a no-decision, you shouldn't..." as though to encourage the listener to not sit around, and make a choice when given the opportunity.

The Christmas after Clemens signed with Toronto, my ex-mother-in-law got me a JC Penney closeout special of a Red Sox Clemens shirt. Like I'd ever wear that again. I always would take it out of the attic for the next three years, but never put it on, and then would put it back in the crate every fall. Finally I donated it to charity.....thought about it a year or so ago as possibly being worth having, but obviously not after this latest job choice.

I went to Fenway maybe 8-10 times in the Clemens era, never saw him pitch....including when my friend had 4 games' worth against his White Sox, and they were the four games in-between his starts, I think. (I only saw Pedro once at Fenway, and he was pulled with an injury after 4 innings. Great luck, huh? And of course, I missed Dice-K because of the rainout last month.)

The only ex-teammate of Clemens still in Boston is Wakefield, who of course IMMEDIATELY became staff ace upon his arrival back in '95, while Clemens labored behind Erik Hansen in the rotation!

Who's a dumbbell?

Maybe me. The shoulder pain is from trying to invent exercises in the fitness room at the Marriott Saturday morning. All they had were dumbbells and one machine with pulleys, like for doing lat pulldowns. Funny how I couldn't remember that for a while, but I clearly did something not normal with the dumbells. I guess it's healing. Possible 2 practices this week for my co-ed team and my men's team. Hopefully the new composition of the men's team will not be the "Scrubs" we were named for last year. Unbearably bad. Although I do hope not to have to pay extra for a different team shirt. In that case, Scrubs is okay with me.

I wonder if scientists can do brain-wave analysis when Red Sox fans see that interlocking NY for the Yankees. I just saw one on TV at a Dodgers game, and I got a frown on my face, for NO FREAKIN' REASON! :)

It's my cousin's birthday. Happy Birthday Kate

The buffalo wing pretzel bits from Snyder's of Hanover are fantastically addicting.

ho hum....

So, I haven't watched 24 yet this week. I'll watch it just before the new Lost tomorrow night. I'm not too thrilled with this "epilogue" involving the otherwise cute Audrey Raines. We figured they shoulda stopped the season after Fayed was killed and the nukes found. They could have called it 17 this year, nobody would have minded. Especially if they're planning to play up this romance with VP Daniels and his little chickie friend.

My left arm is killing me suddenly when I try to make a throwing motion. NOT a good sign with softball season pending. Maybe I slept on it funny or something? Maybe I tore my rotator cuff, though, huh? I was trying to loosen it last night, not paying attention as I was walking down the hall, and I knocked off one of the glass sections of the hall light, shattering it on the floor. Ooops!

Tonight is haircut night. Even though the fine folks at Camden Yards were nice enough to card me, cutting my hair short keeps me looking like a kid! (okay, it hides the 7-10 gray hairs that are apparent more when the hair is longer on the sides) I have been going with a #7 top, #2 sides/back the last few times. I will go at least 2 months between haircuts that way, too. Erika says she likes it fluffy, but I've liked short hair since my first buzz cut in college. Of course, Nabeel from Pakistan across the hall mocked it by claiming I was neo-Nazi. Luckily short hair became popular back in 1989 so I didn't stick out.