A Dog Day at the Park

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”  ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti, Commissioner of Major League Baseball, April 1^st 1989 – September 1^st 1989. 

It’s been a season nobody saw coming. Like that line shot foul ball into the stands that finds your skull when you turn away for just an instant, we glanced away for a moment in June and looked up just in time to be struck by 2013.  After a 2012 World Series Championship the Giants have found themselves in last place in their division, playing baseball that is often sloppy, passionless and sometimes downright unwatchable.

11 strikeouts in the better days of 2012

The First Night is the Worst (And other camp stories)

I found that as wonderful as bacon is, it is even better, if bacon can actually be improved, when cooked and eaten at a campsite.

That first night sleeping on a camping trip is always the worst.  Sealed in a mummy bag, you can’t sprawl, rolling over is a chore and at some point the zipper invariably jams when you're too hot or too cold forcing you to turn on the flashlight fix the zipper and entertain the other campers with your cursing.  When you're finally settled you lay awake dreading the notion that you’ll have to get up at 2 in the morning to pee.  A pee in the wee hours is always made more daunting by the possibility of a midnight rendezvous with a marauding bear. And then there’s the better than even odds that your made in China air mattress will be deflated by the time you get up to take that pee which begs the question, why oh why God do we do business with a nation that pumps out worthless junk?  (Never mind, I know the answer to that question and that's for another post.).  When this happens the only alternatives left are gut it out on the hard ground or collect as many coats and articles of clothing as possible and fashion a sleeping pad of sorts.

Roughing It (With apologies to Mark Twain)

The Family Camping Chronicles: Part III

"On the seventeenth day we passed the highest mountain peak that we had yet seen, and although the day was very warm the night that followed upon its heels was wintry cold and blankets were next to useless."  From Roughing It  by Mark Twain

“It would be distressing to a feeling person to See our Situation at this time all wet and cold and with our bedding &c also wet, in a cove scarcely large enough to contain us…canoes at the mercy of the waves and driftwood…robes and leather clothes are rotten.”   William Clark describing being stranded at Point Ellice, Washington (1808).  (For those who slept through the day they taught about the Lewis and Clark expedition in history class, Clark was Meriwether Lewis’ expedition partner)

“We’re really roughing it,” Dad would say as he loaded our camping gear into the station wagon.  The words were served with sides of arched eyebrow, a wry smile and a large helping of sarcasm.  Dad was alluding to Roughing It, Mark Twain’s chronicle of his adventures in the Wild West of the 1860’s.  Looking back it seems like a magic trick that dad was able to get a big canvas tent, two bulky cots, lantern, fishing gear, stove, clothes, some pre-cooked meals that mom packed for us and an assorted pile of “possibles” into that wagon.