Happy Opening Day, I Guess

Today is opening day for Major League Baseball (excluding two teams that played a game overseas somewhere? Do I have that info correct?).

Today should really be a national holiday in the United States, even though Boston Red Sox fans, like me, get royally screwed.

Game one for the Red Sox is in Seattle. The local start time in Seattle is 7:00pm. That’s fine for them, but Boston is on the opposite coast and there is a three hour time difference. Start time for us here in New England is 10:00pm. There is zero chance of me staying up to watch even one pitch of tonight’s game.

Thanks for nothing, MLB schedule makers. We don’t get a game at a watchable start time until Sunday. That’s game four for the season. Sunday is an afternoon game in Seattle, starting at 1:00pm Pacific time, which is 4:00pm Eastern time. That would be nice except that it’s also easter Sunday and we’re having dinner with my father at 4:30… so I won’t be watching that game either. What a pain in the ass?

So MLB, how about a rule that says all opening day series must be played in both teams’ local time zones. You know, so the fans can actually watch the friggin’ games. Not that MLB gives the faintest shit about the fans. Just look at the start times for playoff games. They all start too late for normal people to watch the whole game, and heaven forbid a kid should want to watch a playoff game. No way.

Thanks for nothing, assholes.

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

Daily writing prompt
When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?
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My mother used to tell this story a lot. I have a vague memory of it happening, but it might be partly due to her telling me about it rather than a genuine memory, you know? I’m not sure how old I was when this happened, but let’s just say I was five and go with it.

I had my eyes checked at an eye doctor’s office. I don’t remember why. It was years before I would need reading glasses. I was really impressed with all of the equipment. It led to me being a little fascinated with eye doctors. I was also a little kid so I was fascinated with the usual little kid stuff. For whatever reason I blurted out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Was I asked about it? Did I just come out with it on my own? No idea. Whatever it was, I told my mother that I wanted to be an eye doctor during the week, but then drive a garbage truck on the weekends for extra money.

You know, like you do.

At other times I wanted to be an astronaut, a fireman, a policeman, a long haul trucker, a Jedi Knight. You know, the usual stuff. No plan was better than an eye doctor and a garbage truck driver on the side though. That plan was aces.

Happy Dishwasher Day

We had a new dishwasher installed today. I am in the office so I have only seen pictures so far. I want to take it for a spin when I get home. I’ll dirty up some dishes if I need to.

I was in the office yesterday. I’ll be in the office tomorrow. Then I am at home on Friday, which is good because a plumber is coming on Friday. It never ends, kids. It never ends. Totally worth it though.

Change of subject: I watched 3 Body Problem on Netflix. I enjoyed it. I was warned that episode five was a mind blower and sure enough it was. I wonder if people who read the original books enjoyed it too. It read somewhere that it was considered to be an un-adaptable book and the fear was that people who read the book would hate the show. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder how moving much of the focus away from China would affect people’s opinions. I don’t know that I am curious enough to try and read the book, but maybe. I feel the same way about Foundation on AppleTV+. I enjoyed the show, but did I enjoy it enough to give the Azimov books a go? I don’t know.

Change of subject: This coming Sunday is Easter. Easter doesn’t have any real meaning for me anymore. Sorry, not sorry. We’ll have dinner with my father. The rest of my focus this weekend will hopefully be music. I have two songs for the March edition of Record Every Month to finish and there is a lot left to do on both of them. Here’s hoping I’ll get everything done. I won’t be distracted by the start of the Red Sox season though. Some moron decided to have Boston start the season on the West coast with all of the games being night games. That means the first handful of games this season won’t start until 10pm for Red Sox fans. Screw that.

Okay, here’s today’s bad photo a day challenge picture. No reason, just cause.

209/365
209/365

I’ll be in the office tomorrow too so expect number 210 of 365 to be another thoughtless picture of whatever I happen to see in the cellar while doing my daily exercise at 5:00am.

They Don’t Get It

Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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Something that no one understands… besides Three dimensional Calculus? Physics? Astronomy? Stuff like that?

About half of the people in the United States don’t seem to understand that fascism is both a thing (a bad thing at that) and un-American. I don’t understand how people don’t seem to get that, but they don’t. Fascism is idiotic and yet trump won the presidency in 2016 and got about half of the votes in 2020 and got the nomination for the nazi, umm I mean republican party just this month. What the ever loving fuck?

People don’t understand that weaving between lanes on the highway makes the traffic jams worse. Yeah, I just got to work after an hour and 40 minutes in gridlock. Morons changing lane for no benefit or no reason just make the stupid situation worse.

What else can I put here… I’m sure I can come up with something… I don’t know. I guess the anti-nazi one is enough for today.

Just remember folks, fascism is bad. Really bad.

We Need a Plan – Follow Up

On Sunday I wrote a post about trying to form a plan for moving forward with my band. I wrote out what I thought we might do to find a new singer and hold auditions and all of that fun stuff. I said I was going to send it to the other two guys in the band and that I would probably do it some time on Monday… then I immediately sent them what I had written. It wasn’t the next day, it was the next minute.

Both Mike the Bass Player and Kevin the Drummer agreed with all of it. The first of our singer-audition-preparation-practice will be a week from Sunday. One week after Easter. Over the intervening week and a half I’ll get the conversation started regarding which songs we should work on. I want at least five and at most 10. Enough to give potential new singers something to work with, but not enough to overwhelm us as we try to shake the rust off. We should try and be diverse in singing styles but I am thinking we should stay away from Bon Scott. Something about Greg the Former Singer allowed him to handle Bon Scott era AC/DC while most normal humans probably couldn’t deal with that high pitched screechiness. Greg didn’t sound like Bon Scott at all, yet somehow he could do it. Let’s not ask any potential new singers to go there. Okay… maybe we brush up one song just in case someone is feeling ambitious.

We also need to figure out the P.A. situation. We had a little one that was barely powerful enough to get a voice loud enough to be heard over the drums. That little dinky P.A. thing was replaced by something Greg bought. We don’t have that anymore because… ya know… it is Greg’s, not ours. Hopefully the little dinky thing still works.

So the ball will start rolling again in 12 days. I’ll likely share every single thought the three of us have as we work toward the next step. You know how it is for oversharing nerds like me.