It appears I will be in San Francisco next week. I don’t remember, other than A, who does or does not live there these days, so if you do, ping me. I am not sure what I would want to do there, other than maybe go to Alcatraz, and I am not sure you still can. It will be interesting to see the city again. I was in the area in 2006, and before that in 1996. Maybe I should get a map this time.

I just bought a ticket to the A’s-Phillies game next week. I was going to go to a Giants game, but they’re on the road. I really don’t care about the Giants, but I would like to see their new park. I don’t know much about the A’s, and I’ve never seen their stadium, so that crosses two things off my list. And maybe I can catch a park tour at AT&T and see it that way.

I got a fairly okay seat for the game - a couple sections over from the plate, 15 rows up, in an MVP box. $50, plus fees and delivery on a ticket I pick up and convenience charges, so $672.87. I have this other pet peeve about all MLB-related sites - when you fill out their giant form and there is a flashing thing saying “FINISH THIS IN 90 SECONDS YOU DUMBASS” and you finish it and submit, and it bounces back with “ERROR - THE DIGITS IN YOUR PHONE NUMBER MUST BE SPELLED OUT IN LETTERS,” so you hurry to finish it. But meanwhile, all of the checkboxes you cleared for “Put your name on a mailing list and get 50 piece of spam an hour for the rest of your life?” are all RE-CHECKED! And if you don’t catch it, they sign you up for some promotional crap forever. I think they do this on purpose. Just like how the MLB media player page has “save your login” checkboxes, but forces you to log out and log back in every time you listen to something. Fuck!

I went to Home Depot yesterday to get the torx screwdriver. There’s an entire village of dudes camped out exactly 100 feet from the entrance, waiting for day labor work. It’s pretty disconcerting - I wonder if any of them get work, or if this is some kind of Grapes of Wrath thing. There is a McDonald’s in the Home Depot, which is also weird. And a quick check showed no Nibco PVC fittings, but plenty of ABS and copper. I don’t know if that ABS is made in Goshen where me and my dad worked. I know the copper isn’t made in Elkhart where I worked, because that plant is long gone. The box labels only have the Elkhart corporate address. It’s always funny, because if you look at enough boxes, you will always find a crudely-sketched map of an entire plumbing system freehanded on the back of a box, from a plumber mapping out what he needed to buy.

I’ve got to get moving. I still want to get those widgets going, but they are all insanely stupid looking. I ditched the Amazon one, which seemed to be causing the most problems, though.

I went to a minor-league game last night, the Portland Beavers versus the Las Vegas 51s. Here’s my bulleted list synopsis.

• The 51s play at Cashman Field, a 9300-seat park built in 1983. It’s located in North Las Vegas, just a few minutes north of downtown.
• I thought the park was way north of town, so I ended up getting there too early, and was probably the first person there.
• It’s a nice little park, very well-kept and modern looking, and resembles a college field in size and general feel.
• I got my ticket and waited at the gate, as a group of hyperactive t-ball kids quickly drove me insane.
• The 51s are a Dodgers farm team, the Beavers a Padres team. So wearing a Rockies jersey, and even more, a Torrealba jersey, was a big mistake on my part.
• Inside the park - there’s no upper deck, other than the radio booths. There’s also no seats other than those on the first and third base line. Past the outfield wall is nothing but desert. There are no bullpens; teams warm up pitchers in a widened area where a warning track would normally be. The whole thing gives an illusion that it’s a very small park, but the field is as big as a regular MLB field.
• My seat was about four rows up, directly behind the plate. They were $12. Also, they were real seats, and the ushers brought you to your seat.
• Wandering around, I stopped at this table pimping the new Mike Myers movie, and the woman working there talked to me about the Rockies. It turned out she lived there before, and I should have been able to tell, because she had that leathery tan that made me unable to age her at 20 or 40.
• The gift store was decent, although they had a lot of Dodgers stuff and not enough 51s stuff. I picked up a t-shirt after arguing whether it would be worth it or not to get a windbreaker or warm-up jacket. Also, the store was air conditioned.
• The heat - it was a high of 108, which is a temp so hot, that even when the wind picks up, it’s more like standing in front of a blowdryer. The seats under the press box had those water-misting coolers set up, but I did not sit under there. After a while, it slowly cooled off, or maybe I just got used to it. It went from unbearable to pretty bad over the course of the evening.
• There were only a couple of places for food, so I got two hotdogs.
• The game began, and I realized I did not know or care about either team, which changes things considerably.
• I was close enough to clearly hear the umpire’s calls, and hear the ball hit the glove on each pitch, which was cool.
• Kerwin Danley, the umpire we saw get hit in the throat with a pitch in a Rockies-Dodgers game I was at, was first-base umpire, on a rehab assignment.
• I can’t even remember the play-by-play much, since I didn’t know anyone. There were some spectacular errors - if you popped it back close to the wall, in a place that any MLB player would catch it, you’d most likely drop it for a base hit, because nobody could field well. Both pitchers were also pitching an incredible number of balls, although there was some speed there.
• One player - Chip Ambres - managed to hit a home run over the left wall in his first two at-bats. Then someone in our section started yelling “COME ON CHIP! LAY A BUNT DOWN! BE A TEAM PLAYER!” What was weird to me is that this wasn’t a giant stadium, and we were like 30 feet from him, so you know he heard everything people were yelling.
• Our row won tickets to the aforementioned Mike Myers movie in a random drawing. Actually, the row in front of us won, but nobody was sitting there.
• The guy sitting next to me was an umpire for high school and junior college baseball. He knew a lot of the other umpires, and it was also interesting to hear his commentary on “that’s a tough one to call” sorts of things.
• The mascot came out, “Cosmo”, who looked like a large Jar-Jar Binks in a uniform. When he was in our section, he gave me shit about my Rockies shirt.
• In the 6th inning, a rally started when a pitcher walked something like ten people in a row, and then they started driving in the people on base. That ultimately meant 13 runs in the inning for Las Vegas, which entitled everyone to a free shrimp cocktail at some shithole casino downtown.
• The game went downhill from there. Things started so slow, and then got fast at the end. The big thing in AAA is that teams are so mismatched, and that means uneven games.
• They put me on the “jumbotron” because of my Rockies shirt. I put that in quotes because you can buy a bigger screen than their scoreboard at your local Best Buy.
• They sold about 2000 tickets, but I think 2/3 of those people left by the 6th. By the 9th, it was absolutely quiet between pitches. At the end of the game, maybe a couple hundred people remained.
• Final score: 14-8. Playing time was a bit shy of four hours.

OK, I need to find a swimming pool.

I think most of the kinks are out of the new journal improvements. They should be largely invisible, but the backend of the system is much simpler, and most of it is now written in PHP. I still have not gone back through the old entries, but I will get there. Another change is that individual entries will no longer have a time on them, just a date. I used to do it this way back in the 90s, mostly so I could write at work without getting busted.

And yes, all of you in the “blogosphere” who are celebrating your one year “blogoversary” - my first entry here was ELEVEN YEARS AGO last month. I think most bloggers were still playing with their Blues Clues toys eleven years ago. (To be fair, I am sure some of them still are.)

We went to another game on Saturday - Cardinals at Dodgers. Sarah and I went with Julie, and here’s the bulleted list:

• We got to the park with a few minutes to spare, and did a million different things to mentally denote where the car was. “Under the 10 globe, next to the biggest tree, across from the US Bank building on the horizon” and so on.
• The parking lot “sorters” were completely useless. We wanted to ask where we could park to be close to our section, but anyone we asked either told us to ask someone else, or just screamed “GO GO GO GO GO!” while waving around a flashlight wand.
• We were at 154 Loge, which is a deck back and slightly back from first base, about 3/4 up. They were OK seats, but these are $50 seats, and would be $30 seats at almost any other park except Fenway or Yankees Stadium.
• Julie went the night before, and the game was half-rainy and cold all night, then started to pour rain in the last inning. Dodger Stadium is a no-umbrella stadium, and we forgot our other raingear. It was cool and dreary when we got there, so we expected the worst.
• There were a lot more people in Cardinals gear than I expected. The people sitting next to us were from St. Louis.
• Brad “I almost killed an umpire” Penny was pitching. He immediately started fucking up, and in the third inning, gave up four runs.
• I did not listen to the game, because Vin Sculley has gone completely sideways, and not in the fun, drunk grandfather way like Harry Caray. (example. And while we’re at it, go check out http://helloagaineverybody.com/)
• I brought a bunch of popcorn, and then ordered a pita plate, which was not as good as the one in San Diego, but I avoided Carl’s Jr. and Dodger Dogs, so I did good.
• Some douche in the deck above us was dumping food and drink from the balcony, which was hitting about ten rows in front of us, causing some guy to get up and scream at the people. Eventually, one of them was so stupid that they dropped their phone, and the guy grabbed it and started screaming “COME DOWN HERE AND GET IT, YOU FUCK!”. Eventually the cops caught the guy, and the whole section cheered.
• The Dodgers always do this “match up” video thing where they have one outstanding fact about each team, and they’re getting stupid. Like “Cardinals Fact: Albert Pujols killed a pitcher the other night with a 674 MPH line drive. Dodgers Fact: Dodger Dogs no longer contain trans fats.”
• After the game was 4-0 for a few innings, it got fairly boring, and most people were more concerned with playing with the beach balls going around the stands.
• The torture cells in Guantanamo have better bathrooms than Dodger Stadium. Seriously, just have some dignity and piss your pants. Or wear Depends.
• It got really cold, and we hoped they would not call the game. But it eventually petered out with the Dodgers not scoring, and the Cards not tacking on any more, so 4-0. The Cardinals got a game closer to the Cubs, and the Dodgers dropped a game, which always helps those of us with favorite teams struggling at the bottom of the NL West.
• We actually found the car and got out of the stadium in record time, which was the real victory.

There’s another ship on Mars, which is pretty freaky. I forget the URL, but there are pictures. It’s on the North Pole, so they are either looking for water or the Martian Santa Claus.

Gotta go celebrate Memorial Day now…

Last night I went to a Cardinals game in San Diego, my first time down there for a game. I have been to San Diego before; I went to a conference for a week in 2000. But aside from the Denny’s by my hotel, all I did there was read books (I guess I did find a Border’s) and I made one trip up to LA for an evening. On this trip, I went with my NY friend and former AITPL contributor Julie, who drove. We also picked up a college friend of hers in Carlsbad for the game. Anyway, here is the beloved bulleted list:

• We had no traffic problems whatsoever getting there, and made the trip in about two hours, thanks to HOV lanes.
• The area around the stadium is all entirely new, and exactly resembles the townhouse apartments and condos that have magically appeared around Coors Field in the last few years. It seriously looked like they ordered the same buildings from the same catalog, with the same colors and even some of the same names.
• I was looking at one apartment building thinking “damn, that looks exactly like our place in Denver”, and then I realized it was on the corner of Market and Park. Our old place was on the corner of Market and Park. And our place overlooked a parking lot used on game day, and so did this.
• PETCO Park was built in 2004 by HOK Sport, who has designed many of MLB’s parks, including Coors Field. It’s one of those throwback-yet-super-modern designs that are all the big deal in baseball.
• Things I liked:
  • The park is very integrated into the surrounding area. There’s an Omni hotel that is connected directly to the concourse, and it has its own box for guests. There’s a city park that’s connected to the back part of the concourse. It slopes above the furthest part of the outfield, and for $5, you can sit out there during a game. Also, they saved a hundred-year-old building that was supposed to be demolished (the Western Metal Supply Co.) and restored it to use as offices and a store.
  • There’s a lot of food, and a lot of weird food, like a fresh seafood place.
  • There was “Fielder’s Choice”, a restaurant of just healthy food.
  • The bathrooms were excellent, with honest-to-god full urinals. F the Dodgers and your stupid waterless trough urinals!
  • Good (but not great) scoreboards and signs.
  • The fans were fairly civil (but I didn’t wear Rockies gear.)
  • Parts of the stadium are these weird angular buildings that look like something from Total Recall.
• Things I really didn’t like:
  • Not a big fan of the Padres.
  • We were in fairly good seats at the top of the field level, and a bit behind third. But our seats partially blocked the scoreboard.
  • I still think Coors Field has the best dimensions and position of stands around the field of any park out there. PETCO is smaller, but it appears splayed out more, and I think that’s because of the illusion of the outfield not being perfectly symmetrical, and dodging around the existing structures and park in center field. It just seems like the close seats are further out from the field; Dodger Stadium is like that, too.
  • There was a really close Giants-Rockies game at the same time, and I spent the entire game glued to the other games scoreboard, which gives you no info but the score and the inning, and it was like watching a clock with only an hour hand. The Rockies lost by one point.
  • I brought my AM radio, but the announcers were fairly horrible. They were both mumblers, and emotionless mumblers at that.
  • They didn’t really have a lot of walk-up music, or at least it wasn’t that loud.
  • The one exception was when Trevor Hoffmann, the closer, came out, they played the start of Hell’s Bells really, really, really loud. I’ve seen him fuck up enough that they shouldn’t make a big deal out of him. It’s like if you tried to film a Beatlemania-type movie about Dick Cheney.
  • There’s a lot of strange Catholic imagery (Padre => Father => Friar.) Their mascot is this weird friar guy, which is even more odd when you see him playing air guitar on the sidelines or whatever other weird shit mascots tend to do. Everything goes along with the friar theme, like Friar Dogs, Friar Fries, etc.
  • Getting from point A to B on the concourse was more involved than it should have been; it wasn’t all on the same level, and there were a ton of zigzag ramps.
• Not good or bad, just different:
  • There was a lot of nautical themed stuff, like scoreboard graphics of sailboats and piers and fishermen. I think baseball teams should do a lot more of this to make each park bring out the unique aspects of each region, instead of just looking like yet another HOK-designed park.
  • The Padres are HUGE about the military. There were a lot of Navy and Marines folks at the game, although not in uniform. (Sometimes, entire sections are in uniform.) There were a lot of Navy propaganda stations on the concourse, including a big scale model of the aircraft carrier Midway.
  • Traffic was a little clogged getting out of the immediate area, but once we got to I-5, it was open throttle the rest of the way home.
  • They had the camo jerseys, which I wanted to buy, except I don’t like any of the Padres, I don’t want a Padres jersey, I don’t want to spend money, and someone else doesn’t want me to get a camo jersey. Fair enough. I’m saving for that Nolan Ryan throwback jersey anyway.
  • I managed to stay with my diet for the most part, save two regular Cokes at the game. I figured I would go 4000 calories over, but I think it was about 450 over. I’ll go for a long walk today.
  • Cardinals lost. I was indifferent about this one, but Julie is a huge Cards fan and I don’t like the Padres, so I was rooting for them. It’s also good to see Pujols play, unless it’s against the Rockies.

Anyway, I’m going to Cards @ Dodgers on Saturday. Should be fun!

Other news, I have been filling up my iPod with free music, and maybe I will review some of it, or at least provide links. Until then, I need to get some writing done.

I’ve had many horrible dental procedures over the years. I’ve had crowns, titanium posts screwed into my jaw, root canals, redone root canals, a lasered root canal with no anesthesia, impacted wisdom teeth extracted with only a local, a wisdom tooth that broke and the roots got stuck, necessitating the incompetent dentist (that looked exactly like Craig Kilbourn) to pack my mouth in cotton and send me across town to the hospital to wait for hours on a surgeon, a crown that came off during a cleaning, and some filling drilling with no anesthesia. (And yes, everyone that hears this says “WELL WHY DONT YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH”, and it’s more complicated than that. A lifetime of Cokes is a problem, but so is 18 years of well water with no fluoride, and a medication that really puts the zap on your teeth.)

Last week, one of my fillings came out, while flossing. It was a slice on the back of one of my front teeth, which makes things complicated. The new dentist said I’d need that crowned, and that’s what I would have guessed, so there goes $1200. (Plus another for $1200, minus 50% insurance, so $1200.) But if he puts a shiny white new crown next to my other not-so-white teeth in the front, I would look stupid. (I could have opted for a gold crown and became a pimp, but it’s hard to be a pimp in a Toyota Yaris.) So the newest torture is that I have to bleach all of my teeth to a pearly white to match the new stuff. And I’m not against having movie star white teeth, but there’s more to the story.

The way this works is, he made imprints of my teeth with a weird rubber junk. Then they made ceramic positives from them. (I got to keep them, and they are weird. here are pictures.) Then they made little clear trays from those, and gave me a syringe of a high-powered bleaching gel. This differs from the stuff you find in the drug store in the toothpaste aisle because the tray is form-fitting, and the gel is ten times stronger. So I fill that up and put it in for a half-hour a shot, twice a day, and in a few days, my teeth will be bright white. And my existing dental work won’t be, which will require some resurfacing on a few teeth at a later date. And there’s one crown that is already white, and two more on the way.

This issue is this: the bleach opens up these “pores” in your teeth and infiltrates them, zapping out all of the dark stuff in the enamel. And if you eat any staining stuff during the regimen, or for the same length after the treatment (i.e. four days of bleaching + four days of recovery = eight days) the staining stuff will get in and make it worse. So, no soda, coffee, tea, tomato sauce, and anything else that would stain a white shirt. And as you know, I drink several servings of beverages in that category. Furthermore, any citrus food or drink will basically feel like you’ve put battery acid in your mouth. And I am trying not to drink any sugar because of my diet. So what does that leave? Water. And milk, but I hate drinking milk. I guess there are various soy milk things, but let’s get back out of the milk category here. I think there are a couple of clear energy drinks with no sugar and a million milligrams of caffeine. At any rate, yesterday was a pretty crashed-out day for me. But the teeth are getting whiter.

And yes I saw the Manny high-five catch. For those wondering, a player can get ejected for any interaction with a fan, which includes high-fiving them; it’s in the rules. It’s the same as if a fan hit a player from the stands - they would be in the parking lot in seconds. Anyway, if you’re at all interested in seeing Brewers announcer and sports legend Bob Uecker in a swimsuit (and I mean 2008 Uecker, not 1854 Uecker), check out page 51 of the latest Sports Illustrated, the one with Danica on the cover. Anyway, I always love those behind-the-scenes articles, and there’s a good one following the Brewers on a brutal 10-game trip. I don’t usually read SI because you can get the gist of the whole thing by reading their web page, but they gave me a free subscription when I got the MLB audio season pass. And that has been fairly worthless, other than the chance to hear the Rockies get beat for the tenth time in a row. Colorado is now last in the NL West, and I don’t think they will do much more than third or fourth this year. Arizona is definitely first, and I am sure they will go to the World Series. Oh well, at least they aren’t last in their division with the biggest payroll in baseball.

Two games next week - Cardinals at San Diego on Tuesday, driving down with my friend Julie to see Petco Field for the first time. (I don’t know if it’s where the pets go.) Then on Saturday, it’s Cardinals at Dodgers. Not really looking forward to Dodger Stadium after last time, but at least it’s not the Rockies, and the Cardinals are doing better this year. Still, I can’t wear a Rockies jersey there. I really want to get a vintage Astros jersey, maybe Nolan Ryan, when they were all psychadelic dayglo orange. But those jerseys were pullovers, not front button, and any jersey costs a hundred bucks, so I’ll stick with a t-shirt.

It’s beautiful outside. I should go out there.