October 2004 Archives

Yay Red Sox! I can't think of a better ending to the baseball season.

But now what do we do?

Henry is four years old! How did that happen so fast? Brad and I watched some video today of Henry at 4 or 5 months old; that seems like it was yesterday and yet somehow also ages ago. How does time get stretched and compressed simultaneously? He has changed so much, yet you can still see that baby in the Henry of today. They have some of the same expressions and mannerisms: the serious gaze, the infectious giggle when being tickled, the concentration when trying to do something new.

We had a low key birthday celebration because Henry was sick, with a fever and cough. He still was able to enjoy some ice cream and cake (carrot cake - his choice!). The cake acts as a sort of garnish for the ice cream, which is his true love. One bite of cake for every two scoops of ice cream. At least he enjoyed helping to make the cake! He blew out all of his birthday candles by himself for the first time! He received many wonderful gifts, the most coveted being the Boulder Mountain set, a Thomas the Tank Engine toy.

He is a good kid, but we've all been having our struggles lately. Maybe it's this natural disequilibrium that sometimes happens with parents and kids. We (Brad and I) seem to have less patience just when Henry seems to need us to be more patient. He wants so much to be independent but sometimes he really needs us; we go from helping out too much to not helping out enough. I feel like an inept parent much of the time, but at least that's a feeling I'm used to! We'll all adjust, eventually. And then, when we think we're back in balance again, things will change.

Once the Mariners are out of contention, the baseball cheering hierarchy of this household demands that we: root against the Yankees, root for the Mets in the National League, and root for the Red Sox in all other cases. So, the upcoming Red Sox v. Yankees series for the American League Championship is doubly satisfying as we'll be meeting two of the criteria. It's so wonderfully efficient!

For a peek inside the head of a true Red Sox fan, read this post at Cursed and First.

Well, Brad summed up the end of the season pretty well with his recent comments. The firing of Bob Melvin and most of the coaching staff has been followed by several other "retirements" in the organization, with more likely to come. As usual, the folks at USS Mariner have a good description of what has happened. I don't know enough about the baseball community to have an opinion on whether the team is doing the right thing or to speculate on what things will look like for the Mariners after the dust settles, but at least changes are being made. Sometimes a stupid decision that gets you going is better than a decision to do nothing. (And sometimes not... so, we'll see.)

The last game of the season was a bit of a let down after the excitement of Friday night when Ichiro broke the season hits record. More of a let down than the game was the Safeco Field experience. Vendors were out of stuff and I saw people waiting in long lines for nachos and such only to find out none were available when they reached the front of the line. After having waited for ten minutes! Couldn't the vendors put up a sign or something? Having volunteer organizations staff many of the food joints in Safeco is a bad idea. Do they get training in food safety? Do they know when a hot dog is cooked? (Some do not, judging by the burned black ones I was given at this game.) The Compass Club/Knothole Gang "Rewards Center" was staffed by a sullen young adult and out of Henry's much coveted t-shirt. No alternative "reward" was offered until I asked (very nicely and timidly, as anyone who knows me would assume) about it.

Now, I do feel a bit uneasy griping about all these things. We are lucky that we get attend so many ballgames and that our stadium is so nice looking and wonderful for baseball. I'm not asking for gourmet food and fawning customer service here, though. There's a basic minimum that should be met: food should be prepared properly and safely; customers should be notified in a timely and obvious way when things are no longer available so they don't have to wait pointlessly; employees who deal with the public should leave their sullen teen act at home. So, next year, we really will bring our own peanuts and buy hot dogs outside the park. (I'll probably cave and let Henry have his beloved Dippin' Dots.) I think once I total up how much we spent on food and drink inside the park, I'll have another reason to change...

Okay, end of the griping for now.

So, did you hear? Ichiro broke the single season hit record, finishing the year with 262 hits. We saw hits 257, 258, and 259 on Friday and hits 261 and 262 on Sunday. It was fantastic, with wildly cheering crowds, flash bulbs sparkling all over the stadium, fireworks, Ichiro signs everywhere in English and Japanese. We got hoarse from cheering so much and sore from holding Henry up so he could see over the crowd. Henry clearly sensed the excitement and enjoyed the whole experience. He's been reenacting Ichiro's record-breaking hit in true Henry fashion, announcing the play as he acts it out, cheering, pretending to shoot off the fireworks: he is Ichiro, the announcer, the crowd, and the pyrotechnics crew.

ESPN is reporting that the Mariner's have fired manager Bob Melvin. It's not his fault that the team was so awful this year, but he certainly didn't make the most of the situation. My totally unscientific seat-of-the-pants estimate is that he cost the team a good 5 or 10 games this season. A quick tip for his successor: if you're playing a double-header, don't use every single pitcher in the bullpen during the first game. And remember: only play for one one run if one run will win you the game.

If only Bavasi and Lincoln would follow him out the door, then we'd really be getting somewhere.

So the season is over. The Ms lost their final game, but Ichiro! managed to get two more hits, for a total of 162. No huge celebrations for Ichiro! or Edgar, just lots of applause and a nice day of baseball under a gorgeous blue October sky.

This year was a frustrating one to be a Mariners fan. It's not just the losses. I've seen plenty of exciting games that the Ms went on to lose. But this year, there were an awful lot of just plain bad games. Neither entertaining nor well played, these games seemed to make up the bulk of the season. Even some of their wins were real snoozers. We ended up going to about 25 games this year and despite the frustration, I'd do it all again.

Ichiro's run for the record and Edgar's final season get all the attention, but there was more to it than that. Watching Bucky Jacobsen homer, Hiram Bocachica make a great catch at the wall, or Mickey Lopez get his first major league hit (in the final game of the season!) were all small victories. Madritsch's pitching was just amazing, as was Nageotte's superhuman ability to sweat under pressure. In the off-season, I'll miss the action on the field. I'll also miss our fellow season ticket holders who we saw at nearly every game. I'll miss going to the play area with Henry and getting Dippin' Dots, too. I'll even miss the annoyances: seeing the same bloopers video again, overhearing woefully uninformed fans pontificate on this batter or that pitcher, Captain Plastic. The Mariners could do a lot better job with the whole game experience, but I'll still take an Ms game over a Seahawks or Sonics game any day.

So now we wait. I have little confidence that the management will do what they need to do this off season to create a winning team, but I can hope. Six months 'til spring training... See you in Peoria!

A great night at the ballpark!

At long last, I have put our family history information back online. I took our old information down several years ago because I had no easy way to limit the amount of information shown for living individuals. I've since switched to much more capable genealogy publishing system called The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding, or just TNG.

Not only can TNG automatically hide the personal details of living people, it also allows me to selectively reveal the hidden information to people with accounts on the system. It can generate great looking pedigree charts, descendancy reports, timelines and a lot more. The whole site is dynamic, too, so you can easily find, for example, all the people in the database born in Chicago around 1900. You can even change the language of the interface!

I still have some work to do to tweak the look of the site to my liking, but it's perfectly usable now. So, without further ago, I give you:

Brad & Kathy's Genealogy!

Enjoy. If you're a family member and want an account, let me know.

During the drought of posts to this weblog during the summer, there was some Big News for Henry. Oh, sure, he had a great summer, attended two weeks of soccer camp, started preschool again, etc. But the really big news? He stepped up from a tricycle to a Big Bike.

We wanted to wait a bit, but his trike was just too small for him. Besides, his best friend from down the street had just gotten a Big Bike. What else could we do? Our hands were tied.