Cable?!

After a day at work I came home in the hope of wasting an hour or two in front of the TV before I went out to swim. Something happened to change all of that however, as I slouched deep into our couch and began channel surfing. For all my life our family has gotten a basic cable package that does not have the two tv essentials: ESPN and Fox Sports Midwest. I could sorta get ESPN if I didn't mind squinting at the fuzzy black and white display without any sound. As I approached the elusive channel 42 everything appeared normal--Cash Cab on the Discovery Channel, celebrity trash on E, reruns of some not-so-funny sitcom on TBS, and Sportcenter on ESPN in color. SPORTCENTER IN COLOR WITH SOUND?!?!?!?! I did a double take. And a triple take. Somehow we now had the full cable package. I ran around the coffee table a few times, made a couple celebratory howls, and began my quest of making up for nineteen years of lost time.

Heat Advisory

These last couple of weeks at work can only be described as HOT. Work aside, my crew has been working in weather with heat indexes consistently above 100. The work has been rewarding and safe so far, and I cannot thank my employer enough for giving me a job this Summer. Today I got to use a jackhammer and a pickax for the first time. Hopefully it will have cooled off enough to go swimming later tonight.

Part of my job also involves driving the crew around in our rental minivan. I was excited to find out that the minivan came with satellite radio--something I have never listened to before. The first few days of driving to work were spent flipping through the many available stations. After a couple weeks however, I found myself returning to good ol' National Public Radio.

Softball

A couple days ago I played in a softball game for the "Saint Mary's Rubber Ducks". I believe we're the only co-ed team in the church league which consists of several hardcore softballer teams. The double header we played in on Friday was against one of the most serious teams in the league. They had on wrist bands, arm bands, head bands, knee bands, high socks, belts, sliding pants, and jerseys from when they played high school baseball. Since I was cut from my high school team I showed up in a tee shirt, shorts, and worn out sneakers. They fielded nine professional looking men while we had a ragtag group of five guys and five girls (one of which was still in grade school). Now that I have created this scenario where we appear as the lesser team it would make perfect literary sense to do a complete 360 and surprise the reader by informing them that in fact we were the superior team--and that is what I shall do. We won by the ten run rule 15-5 in the first game and 17-12 in the second game. However, the humbling of our hardcore opponents did not go without conflict. Midway through our second walloping of the Lynwood Baptist Church, their coach announced that he was going to protest both games because we used an illegal bat. In addition, our head coach and the last player to use the bat should be ejected. Fortunately for us, the head coach and last player happened to be the same person. Our "illegal" bat (which also happened to be about fifteen years old and sounded dead on contact) was thrown away and we had to get an acceptable bat from the opposing team. Oh church league...........