#67 - The apocolypse approaches. Tom saw a baseball game and enjoyed it. - Aug 8, 2012

Today was planned as a no-house work day for me. I slept until I woke up, got some things moving around the house (the pool circulating, the fabric of the old box waterbed stuffed into the garbage can, that kind of thing) and headed in to work. The big monthly meeting with the customer went very well, as expected. Anticlimactic, really. We’ve been patting ourselves on the back for a week as the data took shape and we knew what we had. So when the customer did it, it felt nice but it was predictable.


I spent the afternoon at work summarizing the meeting for our team and clearing up some miscellaneous things that have been clogging my inbox.

The evening was unique in my experience at a company I have worked at. The office cleared out around 5, I stopped by a store to get some shock for the pool, and then we all met at the baseball stadium. The company had purchased tickets for us all to go to a Hudson Valley Renegades game. It’s the local minor league team. They play in a stadium near the Hudson River, about 30 minutes drive from the house.

The company had also hired somebody to grill burgers and dogs for us, with chips, beer, soda, water, condiments, coleslaw, and macaroni salad. It was a good time. Not many people showed up (25 maybe out of the 70 who work in our area), but it was still nice. We stood and chatted in the parking lot, eating and floating around until 7:30. The game had started at 7:05. We wandered over, found that the company had bought the cheapest seats in the place, and that there weren’t actually seats in the general admission area for us anyway. So we found a bench near the top of the bleachers that was unoccupied and sat there. It worked out fine., It was a nice, peaceful night. Beautiful – 80 degrees, a little breeze. Our seats were along the 3rd base line. We had a great view of the field, and to the left, past the home run wall, there is a forest of mature hardwoods. Gorgeous. Straight across the field, you can see cars cruising East on I-84.

The game went faster than I expected, and was actually fun to watch. So now I get why people like baseball. The game also felt like a not-wuite-so-rowdy version of a high school football game in Canby. It was a few thousand people gathered in one place, and some guys happened to be down on a field playing baseball. The game was a sideshow.

It helped, of course, that the home team won (an epic win over the Vermont Lake Monsters, 2-0). The game finished up at 9:30 or so, and I headed home.

Katrina had completed 90% of the kitchen re-org while I was gone, and it looks nice. Usable and practical and not too crowded. It helps that we’ve been cooking for 6 people for a while now, and know what we use and how often. I did a tick check on Christian (I do it almost nightly for him, at his request. He had a tick on his arm a few weeks ago, and so he’s quite diligent).

Katrina had had a scare with the van today, smelling like burning plastic. It was dark by the time I got home, but it was on my must-do list for the morning.