The rain and cold have settled in around here, meaning that it’s unlikely that we’ll play ball tonight. It’s too bad, because my bat has finally started to wake up. I think next year I need to take a day near the start of the season and just hit some balls at the cages. My average is up about 100 points this year, despite a poor-ish start to the year, but the hits I’ve been getting lately have been of a different variety than early in the year. To start the season, I was hitting hard grounders and beating out infield hits by forcing the infielders to rush their throws - it works, but speed isn’t exactly my strength any more. The last few games, I’ve been spraying the ball into holes in the outfield - well hit balls, some with a little too much air under them, but for the most part nothing that the fielders have an easy play on. My off field hitting has improved quite a bit, which is funny because at the start of the season I was trying to take everything off field and wound up not getting good contact. My typical progression has been to pull the ball for the first couple of at bats, then once the defence thinks they have me pegged as a pull hitter, punch one into the virtually vacant right field. After that, they tend to play me more straight up, so I can pull the ball with some more power.

Meanwhile, it’s freezing in here, cause it’s supposed to still be summer, but it’s only 12 ??C outside.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Conserve your precious hatred for the game!” - Apu

Erin and her dad went to Rona and got some lumber over the weekend, with the explicit goal of building a sandbox for William. John and I put the box together, and have it in place, but it’s lacking sand at this point. Maybe this weekend we’ll be able to get out and pick up some sand, and some material for a cover. While we were out there building it, I picked an apple out of the apple tree for William to eat. He liked the sour crabs, so that’s good. We’ll have to make sure to pick them this year so we’re not raking them out of the lawn again next year.

John took William to the park last night, so Erin and I thought we’d fire up the projector and watch “Battlestar Galactica.” Something I did crashed the MythTV frontend, and when I started it up again, I had no sound. Apparently when I recompiled it with firewire support (to see if it could be done) I didn’t notice that they’d slipped a new use flag into the ebuild. A quick recompile and all was well again, but William and John were back from the park, so we never did watch the show. (In fairness, they were back within minutes of us going downstairs ;))

I preparation for the potential switch to Shaw, I’ve been doing some research, and had a couple of questions. I thought I’d ask the user communities around the various pieces (both MythTV and Shaw’s HD receivers) to see if anyone knew the answers. Interestingly enough, I got snarky responses to reasonable queries at both places. It’s really too bad that some people feel the need to be snarky in online forums/mailing lists. The forum response was “search the forum” - which I had already done. I dunno, I just would rather people don’t bother if they’re going to be snarky. I have to restrain myself from responding in kind, but I find that if I respond to snark with reasonableness, usually I come out smelling like a rose, and the snark-dealers drop off the radar. It is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the depersonalization of the internet though - it’s easy to forget that you’re dealing with another human being on the other end (something that I always try to keep in mind.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “You should listen to your heart, and not the voices in your head.” - Marge

We took William to the Ex on the weekend, and he didn’t quite enjoy the rides. He liked the idea of them, but he didn’t exactly enjoy the reality of them. I think I should have taken him on some rides that allowed adult accompaniment. Oh well. I think he enjoyed the rest of the Ex though. He loved the petting zoo, and he liked some of the free stage entertainment (In particular, he really liked watching the Latin dancer, and was disappointed when she didn’t dance to every song.)

He also liked his “hot dog on a stick.”

So, last week, the cable sales force stopped by the house, and gave us an offer that we might not be able to refuse - trade in the satellite receiver and dish straight up for two cable receivers. We should be able to get high definition too, though the channels that I really want HD for, they don’t have. It’s phase two of my nefarious MythTV plot - we’re now completely free of any ties to a television provider. As long as I can hook it up to my Myth box, and it gets the shows we want, I don’t care what the receiver can do, how long the guide data is, etc. Price becomes much more important, since I can switch providers with little disruption. That’s gotta be a bad dream to the cable/satellite people (especially now that I have three options with SaskTel MAX being out there too.)

Simpson’s quote of the day: “(wham!) Stupid TV…BE MORE FUNNY!!!” - Homer

That’s William’s description of most football plays. For him, touchdowns and incompletions are the least exciting plays in football, because nobody falls down (or is knocked down.) By that token, he quite enjoyed the Rider game last night. At halftime, he convinced me that we should play football (by which he meant, running and then falling down.)

Being a curious little boy, he is always asking me questions about the game while we watch it. Mostly of the following variety - “Who is that guy?” “What does [player name] do?” “Why?”

So, in our halftime game of “football” William turned to me and said “I’ll be Damon Allen, you be Nealon Greene, and knock Damon Allen down.” You see, the QB is the most prominently featured player on the field most of the time, so those are the names he remembers. He was quite confused by Nealon Greene for a while, because he’s not really green. Fortunately he plays for the Riders so at least he wears green.

It was a lot of fun running around with him, then falling down, which caused him to laugh uproariously.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “We studied traffic patterns and found that drivers move the fastest through yellow lights, so now we just have the red and yellow lights, mm-haiai.” - Professor Frink

Ball was slightly disastrous last night. We only managed 6 runs total in the two games, which is a total we can easily put up in an inning. We ran into a good fielding team, and couldn’t hit the holes. Personally, I went 4/5 (and my fifth was a nice hit that the centre fielder had to make a good play on to make the final out of the evening) and pitched two scoreless innings to wash the poor outfield plays I made out of my mouth. It was pretty strange not seeing lots of base runners every inning.

On the one hand, it felt good to be hitting the ball well again, but on the other hand, it wasn’t very exciting watching them make great plays on hard hit balls three times an inning.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “I can be a jerk and no one can stop me!” - Homer

I’ve been watching the Poker Superstars tournament on Sportsnet over the past few months, and it’s been pretty good. The preliminary rounds were televised on Fox Sports Net in the US (I think.) and were interesting at times, though the blinds seem too big near the end, which reduces the skill level of the players quite a bit.

Anyway, so last night I watched the finale, which was originally aired on NBC, and I realized that I’d seen it before. There was a big difference though - when I saw it before, it was two hours. What I saw last night was only an hour. To start the broadcast, Howard Lederer was in second position, but despite that, three or four commercial breaks in he hadn’t been shown playing a hand yet. Remarkably, he was eliminated (along with Chip Resse) during the break. !?! At one point, Johnny Chan was forced to go all in for his last $20K with KJ, and he sucked out against Barry Greenstein’s AK - putting him at slightly over $40K - the next time I noticed his stack was > $800K and he was in second position. Not a single Johnny Chan hand was shown in between. It was the worst editing job that I’ve ever seen in my life. I say hyperbolic things like that a lot, but this time I don’t think I’m exaggerating. It’s as if I were watching a Riders game, and they were up 12 points in the first quarter - they cut to a profile on Nate Davis’ clothing tastes, and when they come back, they’re losing by 30 and the backup QB is in the game - with no explanations.

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Homer: “If you don’t start making more sense, we’re going to have to put you in a home.”
Grampa: “You already put me in a home.”
Homer: “Then we’ll put you in the crooked home we saw on Sixty Minutes!”

Erin’s dad (Grandpa John) is coming into town today. I mentioned to William that Grandpa was coming to visit soon, and he wanted to know which Grandpa. Somehow Grandpa Joe got tossed into the mix, and then he started talking about Charlie Bucket and his Golden Ticket. So, anyway, yesterday he said he wanted to watch Charlie Bucket. We fired it up downstairs, and he sat through almost the whole movie, only losing interest a couple of times. Not bad.

I still maintain that Gene Wilder put in a masterful performance as Willy Wonka - The mischevious twinkle in his eye at times makes you believe in Oompah Loompas.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Oh, just thinking about that sweet, sweet candy…” - Homer