So now I get to go over excuses of why I wasn't able to write anything at all last week! I take it for granted that very few people enjoy listening to random excuses that may or may not be true (think back to 5th grade and all the creative homework excuses that we had to come up with), but I'm going to attempt to turn these into half-way decent stories... and everyone likes stories!!! If you don't, why are you reading blogs in the first place???
Excuse #1: Family Wedding.
<HUGE PARENTHESIS> (coding would be so much cooler if you could do this...)
My sister woke up roughly 3 hours after we stopped because of exhaustion and the fact that we couldn't keep our eyes open to drive. 3 hours... That's insane. I feel I must qualify this. My sister works with horses for a living and tends to wake up fairly early. By no means is my schedule simple either... some days I have to wake up at 3:30am and others I have no obligations at all until 4:00pm and then I'll be up until 2:00am that night. Regardless of my schedule, I still feel horrible if I don't get at LEAST 6 hours of sleep. Apparently my sister is a zombie. Either that, or she is programmed to awaken at the crack of dawn no matter what. Perhaps there is a chemical reaction in my sister's brain that occurs when she receives Vitamin D...
</HUGE PARENTHESIS>
...drove the remaining 45 minutes to Raleigh. We arrived at the hotel that the wedding was in and the staff graciously let us check-in to our room super early and we promptly collapsed and slept until the early afternoon.
The wedding itself was that evening and wasn't anything super special. The only relevant story from the whole escapade was regarding the bar. Immediately following the ceremony, there were pictures taken and then there was a roughly hour long (wouldn't ya know!) cocktail hour. During this hour, there was an open bar that was serving beer and wine. I've been to weddings with both open bars, money bars (or whatever they're called), and ones with no bars at all. This wedding was something unique. The open bar here lasted ONLY for the cocktail hour. The bar existed afterwards, but after the hour, all the drinks were no longer free. On the surface, this doesn't seem like a horrible idea. It's probably much cheaper for those paying for the wedding and theoretically, the main problem of having an open bar (lots of drunk people running around), shouldn't be as much of an issue. Both of these things did seem to hold true. What was interesting, however, was the mad rush of some people trying to get their hands on lots of alcohol before the bar closed. Towards the end of the hour, I saw someone go up to the bar and actually order and carry away 12 beers... granted, he eventually gave most of them to others, but it didn't stop the hilarity of the situation.
My sister and I left Raleigh Saturday morning and got back here that night because I had to wake up at 3:30am yesterday to head into work!
Excuse #2: Work
This one is far more boring... I simply have had lots of work recently between my many jobs. My main job at ESPN has had slightly changed hours because of the advent of baseball season. I also have recently applied for a promotion and have had to dedicate some time into making sure that ESPN thinks I'm the best candidate! Wish me luck!
Excuse #3: Meetup.com
I have mentioned before that baseball cards aren't my only passion. In fact, I would say that baseball cards definitely come in third to my two other passions in my short life. God and my family would be first and second would be my love for games and strategy. Even in baseball, the behind-the-scenes strategy of baserunning, lineups, and substitutions have always been more fun to me than the one-on-one aspect of pitcher vs. hitter.
In any case, board games usually are my go-to games as they tend to have the most strategy in them. Consequently, I own quite a few of them and played many heavily throughout college. Recently, there have been only a handful of people I can play with, and most are 2 hours away living in Boston. My games have been gathering lots of dust.
A friend of mine from college told me about a website called meetup.com where people of similar interests meet in designated places. I was very suspect of the site because I'm not big on social media and this conversation closely followed one about online dating (something she was trying to get me to try). It took me four months to look at the site and search it for board game groups. Obviously I found one... It helped that last Sunday the 12th was designated National Table Top Day and it made me more comfortable showing up randomly to some board game day with random strangers.
In any case, I have since been hanging out and playing games with about a dozen of these people since then which I have enjoyed immensely.
Excuse #4: BASEBALL!
The baseball season has obviously started and this brings about many changes for me!!
I umpire baseball at the high school level and despite the extreme cold New England had been experiencing throughout March, the weather seemed to cooperate for opening week of the High School season. I've already umpired 3 games and most of the teams have clearly had very little practice leading up these first games. Two out of the 3 games have been complete blowouts with the losing teams having pitchers that couldn't reach the plate (let alone throw a strike).
My other game was a very good 6-5 game but had other drama of its own. I was umpiring the bases with a 71 year-old gentleman behind the plate that I had done games with before. He called an extremely good game but, following the game, as we were walking to our cars, he physically collapsed no less than 4 times. We had to call the ambulance for him as no one knew what was wrong with him and he was completely fine mentally. Eventually we found out that this man had a problem with his muscles ever since he was young. Apparently, the fact that he hadn't been very active over the winter and then suddenly umpiring for 3 hours triggered some kind of reaction. In any case, he seems to be doing just fine at this point!
Baseball also brings fantasy baseball (not such a hot start...) and the start of the Atlanta Braves season! As of my writing this, the Bravos are sitting at 8-4 having recently taken 2 out of 3 from Toronto in Toronto. We start a series tomorrow at Citi Field which I believe could define how we play out the rest of the year. If we are able to win yet another series away against one of the hottest teams in baseball, I believe that we move back to serious contender status in the NL East and move quickly from sellers to buyers (we certainly have the cap room now that Mr. Melvin is gone!).
The last thing that this new baseball season has done for me is increase my itch to pull out the cards and do something with them. I've recently been organizing a bit and going through a whole bunch of want lists from other random bloggers trying to find people who need Ginter things. My most recent trade has been with Greg over at Plaschke, Thy Sweater Is Argyle, but it hasn't quite been completed yet and so I'm unable to write much about it yet. A post shall come soon!
In the mean time, I hope whichever team you're a fan of is having a fabulous start to the year (unless you're a National or Phillies fan)! Enjoy this baseball season and the wonderful spring-time weather it brings with it!!!
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