Life of Wry

Bearings: Central Park community garden to the immediate left, UCD a block to the right, Occupy Davis a block behind, and downtown around the corner and to the left.

In the fall.

Remember the other day when I said I loved baseball games whatever the weather?  Yeah, well, almost, but not quite.

Crush’s tournament is in Vacaville this weekend, at the base of gorgeous, California-esque, rolling, oak-covered hills. After a wonderful 8:00am game in which the boys continued their winning and playing-fantastically-well streak, (and, incidentally, it was bone-chilling, but the sun did come out) we returned home for the world’s longest-ever break between tournament games.  Weird to be home in the middle of a tournament day, but we got lots done, went out to lunch, some of us (not me) took naps, etc.

Then we drove back to Vacaville for a 5:00pm and 7:00pm pair of games.. but instead, this happened:

Rain.  Here’s Jim waiting it out in the car, texting to pass the time.  Finally, tournament organizers decided to start the game anyway.

I took a seat in the dugout (under cover!), which was way worth the price of admission… being that immersed in teen boy team culture is eye opening, to say the least.

We’d gotten this far into the top of the first inning..

..Dustin got a single (a flare to left), Gavin and Ben walked: bases loaded, no outs!  (In fairness to the Hard 90 pitcher, the ball was so wet he had a hard time gripping it, making it very difficult to places his pitches.. thus the walks.) Then Pierce was up. The count was one ball and two strikes.  He took a practice swing, as you do, and, shockingly, he lost his grip on the wet bat and it went flying out of his hands and over the visitors’ dugout… causing all manner of confusion and surprise.  It was startling, unsettling and lead people to think hm, maybe it IS a little too wet out here.  

So, this happened..

.. a coaches and umpires powwow on the mound.

These are never easy decisions.  A little rain never hurts, in fact 13 and 14 year old boys think it’s pretty awesome (we in the uncovered stands think otherwise). And you never really know when the rain might let up. Probably the greatest factor in the choice to continue playing in the rain: tournament organizers hate to have to refund money.. so postponing or canceling a game just makes these guys sweat baseballs.

But… safety first.. flying bats=not a good thing, not to mention a serious liability for the organizers, so they called the game and we went home. We’re supposed to return at 8:00am tomorrow (yeah, another 8:00am start, which means arriving at 7, which means leaving Davis at 6:15 in order to fit in a stop at Starbucks, which means getting up at 5:30, and did I mention it will be a Sunday morning?) and if we win and keep winning, we’ll play 753 games tomorrow between the make-ups and the regular pool play and the championship rounds, and whatnot.

Not a fair-weather fan (right? I love it anytime anyway anywhere), but, I guess I have a slight preference for last weekend’s conditions–warm, dry, sunny, in-town…

Not that it wasn’t gorgeous out there tonight in a stormy sort of way. If you can make this out, you’ll see rain pouring down in the glow of a field light..eerie-ish.

And even if you can’t make that out, it’s still a pretty evening.

Just to finish this story off…

Recall I found a tiny troll last week.  I stashed him away, forgot about him, found him, cleaned him up a little and he’s been sitting on my desk ever since.  Longer version here.

Well, this whole troll thing got me a little nostalgic, having gone through a major troll phase as a kid. I did a little research and learned that these trolls had come on the market in 1963 and completely swept the nation, becoming the must-have doll for baby boomer kiddos like me. The craze lasted only a couple of years, but it hit me at the peak of my own doll mania; I was 7 at the time and pretty much went apeshit over trolls.  I had lots (and lots) of them, like everyone else I knew, and built entire shoe box compounds for them to live and play in.  High times, for sure.

So, I decided I needed to buy a real one for old times sakes, and began a search.  Turns out, they aren’t that hard to find.  You can get big ones on Amazon (like the 6″ ones) but I wanted one of the 3-4″ ones, since that’s the kind I played with. On Ebay you can find just about everything imaginable which I found too overwhelming.

Eventually, I turned one up on Etsy (“the world’s handmade marketplace”). It had the color hair I wanted (royal blue) and seemed less adorned than most (she, I think she’s a she, was wearing a simple red felt cave woman dress). I had to join Etsy to place my order, which I did and now I’m a member of that community.

Bonus!

I placed the order and a little while later got an Etsy Conversation from the woman who was selling this troll.  Obviously she didn’t make the troll, but I guess she must have made the dress.  Here’s what she said:

Hi Kari,

First of all, I am proud to provide
your first purchase on ETSY.
Welcome to this great community,
I am sure this will be the first of
many great purchases here!

Thank you for visiting my store,
and I am happy you found your
troll. She/he/it is SO excited to be
relocating to sunny Davis. [After the
snowstorm here on Saturday, she
just jumped into the package and
is ready to go. She only needs her
red felt tunic, very low maintenance…..

She will be winging to your home
via first class [mail] with insurance
for her value. Her estimated date
of arrival is just in time to join you
for your Saturday evening plans,
more or less.

Thank you, and

Best wishes,
Barbara

This was the start of a number of back and forth communications, equal parts silliness and professionalism.  And, three days after placing my order, the package arrived today, from New York. The outside of the package had flower stickers on it.  Inside was a gift wrapped box. I tore off the wrapping paper and found the troll packed in a beautiful, sturdy homemade box with a button on top (very cool and I’m sure will come in handy for something). Inside that was my new troll plus two bags of peppermint tea (nice touch).  Barbara and I exchanged another round of Etsy Conversation and that was that.

So now I have two trolls (and a neato box and some tea).  And they’re a pleasure to look at (yes they are!).

I’ll forgo the shoebox compound this time around.

Down by the creek.

Yesterday’s pic-of-the-day was a shot of Putah Creek–the north fork that runs through campus.

Far less groomed is this fork of the mighty Putah… which may be a tributary of the south fork, but I’m not sure. LL and I took a late afternoon walk here. I used to run along this trail in runnier days when I lived in South Davis, gasp, 19 years ago.

Curious about which fork was which, I did a bit of research at the Davis Wiki site.  The most interesting thing I learned was that the Credence Clearwater Revival song Green River is about the summers the band members spent on Putah Creek.

How ’bout that.

Well hell.  I have thirty minutes to come up with a picture-of-the-day and something to write about, and I’m way, waywaywaywayway too tired to pull it off. I have topics, I do, but I just took this long, very hot bath (achy back, you know), drank a glass of wine, and there’s this set of soft flannel sheets just howling my name.

I’m coming, Your Toastiness.

So.. I’m going with a pic from the archives. This is from a walk I take several times a week.. through the arboretum, along the creek, around Lake Spafford.. on an early Fall day, pre-leaf-turning, about five weeks ago.

Apologies to you new subscribers; this doesn’t happen very often.

It was a slow news day around here.  So.. what you get is troll zombie.

Found this grubby little thing lying in the middle of the street one day last week. Looked like he’d suffered extensive vehicular abuse. Not sure why, but once I’d picked him up, didn’t feel like I could just put him right back down again, so stashed him in my phone pouch and forgot all about it.

Rediscovered him last night at our baseball tournament.  I’d bought some M&Ms as nervous candy when Peter was pitching in the final game.  I’d emptied the whole pack into my phone pouch, which seemed like a handy and convenient dispensing vessel.  I was nom-nom-noming away mindlessly–as you do when you’re scorekeeping a game your son is playing in–when I came upon something startlingly out of place among the M&Ms.  It was this grungy thing.  No telling what germs I picked up as my M&Ms co-mingled with Mr. Disgusting at the bottom of the pouch. Ew.

Anyway, I didn’t manage to throw him away last night either, so this morning, I gave him a bath and shampooed his matted blue hair (with Jim’s Prell, of course). Think I have too much time on my hands? Yeah, well..   You can’t imagine the dirt that ran off this guy and the crud that was caked in his micro dreadlocks.  The sink water turned the color of filth, disease and abandonment.

For now, that’s the end of the story.  Somebody last night suggested perhaps my creepy little blue-haired troll had brought the Crush a bit of luck (they did win the championship) and that I ought to bring him to future tournaments to keep our streak alive. Hmm.. I’m not so sure about that.

But it couldn’t hurt.

I’d love it if it were a loss in an 8:00am consolation round game, on a lumpy field in a piece of crap park in an uninteresting town far, far away, freezing our asses off  in a wet and windy hail storm.

But it wasn’t.

It was the loveliest of warm weekends, on a gorgeously groomed field in beautiful fall light, just 2 miles from home, at the end of a long but incredibly enjoyable and exciting day when our sons played extraordinarily well, had fun and, zounds, were the last team standing and…won the championship.

The folks who are occupying Central Park have moved their camp from the spot beneath the oak tree to the large open area on the park’s north end.   I think this is a good move.  It’s a lot more visible, especially to cars and people passing through one of Davis’ busiest downtown intersections.  It’s also closer to bathrooms, more spacious (and thus will accommodate far more people as the movement grows), and is not quite so underfoot during Farmer’s Market.  Plus, it’s on grass, rather than a redwood deck.   Gotta be a lot more comfortable.

So I’m glad they moved.

Nice setting, huh?  Their Facebook page says they’ve just passed the twenty tent mark and invite more. They also said today they plan to be there through the winter.

Here is some of their current signage.

Baseball season ended tonight.  The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Texas Rangers in game 7 to become the World Series champs.

I supported the Cardinals in the World Series largely because they were Peter’s favorite team about five years ago. I got to know them at that time and grew to sort of like them, mostly because of this guy, Albert Pujols:

The Cardinals, as it turned out, were the right dogs to pick in this fight. The Rangers had a lot of talented players who were super fun to watch, and I was really impressed by their coach. But I certainly wasn’t going to root for any team from Texas. Too Tea Party-y. Happily, they came up short. Hahahahahahaha, take that, Texas. I’m shallow that way.

So, it was a great series; I watched all seven games, which brought my game watching total for the season to… seven.   Before this series, I hadn’t seen a single major league baseball game all year. Missed the entire television season for technical reasons: could never quite figure out how to watch something (anything) with our TV set up. I wrote about that in this post of a few days ago.  Pathetic, given how much I love baseball.

More unusual still, we didn’t manage to get to a single Giants, Oakland, or even River Cats game.  So, I really knew nothing about the season.

[Oh wait, I did go with Peter to a Dodgers-Tigers game at Dodger stadium in June for his birthday… so I take it back, there was one game.]

Being completely out of touch didn’t stop me from becoming a ten-day Cardinal fanatic, however. Whatever the hell that is about humans–we’re so quick to take sides, and suddenly we’re pulling for a team as though our very lives depend on it.

How odd that is. It gets unattractive pretty quickly, too.  Remembering an obnoxious fan at the above-mentioned Dodger game who was hoarse from yelling non-stop for two hours and slurry from drinking, and turned belligerent when forcefully escorted out of the park after about 7 innings. And really, I can hardly think of anything uglier than a rowdy horde of rabid, war-painted sports fans. Always so hilarious to see them pumping their fists in the air after a win like they had anything at all to do with any part of the victory.

But that’s not me.  I’m more amused by my fanism. I fall into it easily but it fades as soon as the game’s over.  My fanism is thin, but it does the trick: keeps me interested, gives me a cause to rally behind, invests me in the outcome, makes me care about the players and their dramas.. but then it’s gone.  I guarantee you, by the time the season starts again next spring, I’ll have forgotten everything about the series–who played, who won, those drama prone players..

Anyway, I’m already looking forward to next year.  I expect by then we’ll have the TV set up figured out and I’ll be able to find a team to root for and settle in for a long season.