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Play Ball!

I went down to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs vs. Red Sox game today. The Cubs had won the first two games of the series handily, but today the Red Sox were pitching their ace, Garrett Crochet, who I had drafted for my fantasy team this year, so I had a certain amount of conflicted interest in this game. (I also have conflicted interests hoping that the Cardinals might overtake the Cubs, but the Cardinals are failing so dismally in this task that I can pretty much stop worrying about it.)

Crochet did not have his best stuff today, but pitched around a lot of trouble and was trailing 1-0 after six innings and 100 pitches, as the Cubs starter only allowed two hits to the Red Sox in what was an absolutely miserable performance on their part. And then Craig Counsell took the Cubs starter out and brought in a reliever when the tying run was on third in the top of the sixth after some excellent baserunning by Duran. This successfully squelched the threat.

It was in the top of the seventh that I went into "bad home team announcer mode" as I was commenting on the game to my friend Allan. The new reliever, Ryan "Do I Have Any Stuff Today?" Pressly entered and walked the leadoff man. I said to Allan, "The Red Sox have yet to get a hit with a man on base today." This prompted the then-current Red Sox hitter, Abreu, to launch a two-run homer into the right field stands giving the Red Sox the lead.

In the eighth inning, Counsell decided to try a usually better reliever, Drew Pomeranz. Pomeranz has pitched quite well this season and came into the game with an ERA below 1. But he gave up a walk and a single, followed by a force at third base, giving runners on first and second with only one out and Alex Bregman coming off the bench on his scheduled day off to pinch hit. At this point, I turned to Allan and said "Pomeranz has a spectacular ERA, but if Bregman gets a hit here, it is going to be going above 1."

Bregman then hit a three-run homer into the left-field stands, roughly doubling the still-impressive ERA. At this point, Counsell apparently said to hell with it all, pulled Pomeranz and brought in a reliever with a distinctly *unimpressive* ERA, Ethan Roberts. I forget what I said when Abreu came to the plate with two outs, but it must have been good, because he then hit his *second* home run of the game.

Clearly, I should shut up for the Cubs' own good...

The Cubs lost 6-1, but did win the series against the Red Sox. The Brewers beat the Dodgers today to sweep that series, take their winning streak to 10 games, and move into a first place tie with the Cubs.

Yoicks.

The trade deadline is approaching. As nearly as I can tell, the Cubs wish list should include some relief pitching (frequently cheap), a starting pitcher (not cheap), and an actively good third baseman (definitely not cheap at all). It's going to be interesting to see what they actually get, but this is clearly the best Cubs team in a long time and -- with no guarantee that Tucker is going to resign with the team -- maybe the time to push some chips into the middle of the table.

The Cardinals meanwhile are showing every sign of being a team that needs to be a seller. The question there is going to be can they get enough back for what they've got to sell to make selling now worthwhile, or should they wait until the off-season? But at least three of their relievers who might be trade targets are free agents at the end of the season, so -- for them at least -- waiting is not an option.

There are a lot of *very* good questions out there.

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Step by Step

I felt a little under the weather for one reason or another today, so I got less done in the studio than I might have hoped. Tomorrow, I'm off to the Cubs vs. Red Sox game in the early afternoon, so I am hoping I'm feeling *much* better then. :)

In the meantime, I got one song updated and did three loads of laundry. I also spent some time playing around with a number of plugins on Jen's bass guitar parts to see if there was anything that I liked better than some of the plugins I've been using. I have a *lot* of plugins...

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Concom Meeting

Another Windycon meeting tonight and good progress was made.

Now, I just have to do some more work, but that's good, because being in a position to do work is a fine thing. :)

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Shelving Hell

We have an older shelf in the garage that somehow got one of the shelves badly bent. This caused me to worry about the stability of the unit, so I ordered a new shelf from Amazon that would fit the relatively small space. Since today is garbage day, I figured I could quickly assemble the new shelf, swap it into place, and dispose of the old shelf.

I was *so* wrong.

The shelf is one of the kinds with the removable boards across the shelf and four panels that need to be pegged together into the uprights to make the layer for the board to rest on. I had assembled a similar shelf from Home Depot many years ago and it was easy.

Except that this shelf had a pegging system that was extraordinarily finicky. Two thin metal tabs had to be inserted into narrow slots in the uprights and then hammered into place. The tolerances weren't. You might have to bend one of the tabs to get it to go in, but if you bent it too far, then it wouldn't seat properly all the way through the hole and would miss the second matching hole. It quickly became apparent that this wasn't a one person job.

So I called up K (who had returned home about half an hour earlier with her dinner) and begged for help. She wasn't thrilled, but came down to help me put this incredible mess together. I could not have done it without her.

When we got done, the shelf was metastable. The top section is held to the bottom by tabs that are extremely loose, so that you cannot pick up the shelf unit by the top half without causing it to come apart. It also seemed to be slightly off-square in an uncorrectable way. Oh, and the center brace on each shelf can be easily knocked out when you try to put something on the shelf below, because the tabs there aren't at all tight either.

I don't know. Maybe the instructions omitted the step involving a set of pliers. Or epoxy. Or something.

Anyway, K left and I went to work emptying the old shelf. Then I tried to move it out of position and the stack of 2x4s next to it fell on me.

Stop laughing.

I finally concluded that they were going to fall somewhere and weren't going to hit anything, so I let them go. Then I wrestled the shelf into position, put a few items on it to hold it down, because only gravity was going to help at this point, and put all the 2x4s back in the gap between the new shelf and the one to the left. By the time I finally got everything loaded back onto the new shelf, I was two and a half hours into this half-hour project and I was completely out of steam.

With the old shelf still to be dismantled and disposed of.

I called up K and begged for some more help. K had worked her full shift as a camp counselor earlier in the day and was not thrilled by this request, but she came down and did it with a bit of help from Julie.

So the old shelf is gone, the new shelf is in place. It will, I hope, remain standing.

Meanwhile, if you are shopping on Amazon, do not buy any of the shelf units with a tabbed design for the shelves, because whatever you pay for them is too much.

Gack.

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Bass Notes

Picked up the bass tracks that Jen recorded today and started uploading them into Cubase. The first one I listened to sounds fine, so all's good there. Yay!

In other news, I discovered -- after I managed to unprogram every remote for the garage door opener -- that I had installed the new battery upside down, which explains why nothing I tried was working. Once I fixed that, it worked much better. *Then* I reprogrammed Gretchen's remote so that it still worked, because *not* fixing that would have been a distinctly unfriendly act. :)

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Chaos and Confusion

I spent most of the day dispatching various bits and pieces at work and trying to get some traction on my current (new) project at work, where progress is being made. All of this was combined with getting my second shingles shot in the morning, so I'm now in good shape on that.

So far, I don't feel wretched, which is encouraging. :)

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Back, Back, Back

It was back to work today, where I made some decent progress.

And then it was off to watch the Home Run Derby, which was an impressive display of power with yet another new set of rules. This year's rules worked reasonably well, I think. :)

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RenFaire Sunday

We headed up to the Bristol Renaissance Faire on Sunday. We got there a bit later than we might have hoped, mostly (I think) due to my own lateness getting out of bed and functional, but we got a nutritious breakfast into everyone before going, so I will count that as a plus.

The kids had a great time running around looking in stores, buying a few things, and enjoying various shows along with us. I didn't spend much time in the stores as Gretchen and I own a great many things and there were a variety of attractive benches available, as the crowd seemed a bit thin. I don't know if this was because the weather so far this summer has been miserably hot, but today the weather was quite nice and didn't get much above 80 degrees.

We came home, fed takeout Chinese to the kids and got the Midkiffs on the road home once again later than we might have hoped, but fed. :)

Overall, I will count this as a successful weekend.

And now I am going to go take a cold shower and cool off. :)

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One More Step

Jen finished recording the bass parts for the six songs that we'd targeted for this weekend, so we'll call that a complete success. :)

Dinner tonight was a lovely brisket, mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls.

Tomorrow, off to the RenFaire. (And then back to Indianapolis for the Midkiffs...)

The kids are still having fun downstairs, which is all good.

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Midkiffs!

Jen and the kids arrived a bit later than they hoped, but earlier than they might have. While the kids were out with Finn collecting free Slurpees from 7-11, we went down to the basement and got a couple of takes of Jen on the bass for "Inconstant Moon" so we could get an idea of what was working. It all sounded good and we will do the minor editing tomorrow before we go on to the rest of the tracks on the schedule.

But so far, so good!

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Shopping Trip

I am getting one of my blood pressure meds at Jewel/Osco, because when I initially started getting it, the cheapest way for me to obtain it was from their pharmacy via GoodRx. This is no longer true, as the med is now on my formulary for my health insurance, but it's convenient to have a good reason to go to Jewel once a month and buy the things that I can't find elsewhere easily. And the automatic text when it was time for a refill worked splendidly.

Except then they started calling *and* texting, with multiple phone calls for the same prescription, all of which was entirely too much of a good thing. So I set out to cancel the phone calls. Apparently, I canceled everything, which I finally realized when I was staring at one pill remaining and no sign of a refill anywhere. Oops.

I have managed to turn text messaging back on and got my prescription refilled today, so I have my pill for tomorrow. Yay, me! And as long as I was at Jewel, I picked up most of the things that I will need for the weekend. The remaining items can be picked up at Sam's Club tomorrow and possibly at Mariano's depending on how things work out.

And then the refrigerator will be *very* full of brisket...

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Mattress Installation

I wanted to haul Julie's new mattress and the bunkie board upstairs tonight so we could install them in the morning. We did that and this caused the instructions to surface. They said that -- although the mattress will continue to decompress for the next three days -- Julie could go ahead and sleep on it tonight.

So the old mattress is hauled away to the first floor for disposal with the next trash pickup, while the new mattress is happily on the bed and covered with a sheet. My conclusion after trying to find the right sheets to do this with is that it is time to buy more twin-sized sheet sets, because there's a distinct shortage of the fitted ones.

But done is done.

And it turns out that the mattress that died the big death was a Serta which I apparently bought at Sam's Club. I thought that it was a mattress that I'd bought on Amazon, but that must be some other mattress. In any case, I've never seen a mattress die in quite that fashion with a big crater in the middle of the bed.

I am unimpressed. (Well, actually, I *am* impressed, but not in any good way.)

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Tired

I had to get up early today for a meeting which would have been fine. The two phone calls apparently looking for a fax machine that arrived before my alarm was scheduled were *not* fine.

But the meeting went well and broke up early enough that I was able to grab a haircut before the rush, then lunch, and then a trip to Sam's Club to pick up some staples. And I even got work done.

So it was all good.

It will be better when I get some sleep. :)

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Progress Report

I have managed to replace all of the scratch guitar tracks with guitar tracks that are at least candidates for the released version of "Crosstime Bus", as well as recording new scratch vocals that aren't contaminated with the scratch guitar tracks. All of this is good preparation for the recording session this weekend when Jen comes up.

In the meantime, I'd like to share some work-in-progress with you. "Wings" is one of my favorite songs that I've written and I do not sing it nearly as often as I probably should. The fact that it's 19 years old now probably has something to do with that. It was the last-written song that is going on this album, as I wrote it while we were traveling to the Worldcon back in 2006, which was our last Worldcon before our first child was born -- an event that put an end to our long-distance Worldcon travel.

So here's the current state of the song:

Wings.