A Self-Proclaimed Existence

Hey

It's been over a week and we haven't had any snow. Finally. Now all we need is a good tornado to make it more like spring.

posted by Rusty @ 9:33 PM Comments: 0

How do you....?

Hit yourself out of a softball tournament?
Softball is a game for hitters since the pitcher lobs the ball back to home plate. But I know you're thinking how do you "hit yourself out?" Oh it's not hard with us Logjammers.
To recap, we played in our first softball tourney of 2007 today. Currently, i'm doing my very best raccoon imitation. I didn't know that UV rays bounce off of red dirt and into my face. The sunglasses were attached to my face the entire day. Now I've got some killer tan lines. What can I say, I'm a sexy beast? Of course I mean that sexy like a hunchback who went bobbing for apples in battery acid.
Now, in the rules in this tournament, we're not allowed to hit home runs. Thanks to the classification system, any home run is an offensive ejection. By that, if Player A hits a home run, for the rest of the game, Player A's spot in the batting order is an automatic out. We knew this going in, thinking that it wouldn't be a problem.
Enter Mother Nature. Her main goal is to spite me as much as possible. Today's effort was to make it upper 70s in temperature but to have the wind blow. Actually, blow doesn't even come close to describing it. I'd say howl like a banshee would be more accurrate. It was steady out of the south at 30 mph, with gusts of 40+. First game we played, we played on the field that the wind was blowing out on.
First pitch of the freaking tournament and Beardsy rips a home run. Great, one automatic out. I wondered aloud to the umpire if this was any indication of the day to come. Turns out, it was.
We won our first game, thanks to a triple play, won our second game even after the umpire didn't have a clue.
Then we went back to the field we first played on. We managed to hit four home runs in that game, meaning we rendered four batters useless. We got run ruled in that one. Our fourth game was our final game as we hit three home runs in that one..once again becoming useless. We ended up fifth, one spot out of the regional birth awarded.
All i can say is Dammit!

posted by Rusty @ 5:23 PM Comments: 0

Horror

That's my reaction to the Virginia Tech Massacre. Pure unadulterated horror. Thirty-three people dead, including the gunman, a 23-year old senior in the worst mass slaying in the history of the country. When I first heard about this, I just caught a little bit of radio over the din of the place where I was eating lunch. However, I spaced it out, until about 3:00 when I slid over to espn.com to see if there was anything happening in the world of sports.
There was a large link to abcnews as abc and espn are partners. I read that and promptly changed the channel to CNN. For about an hour, I watched all of the details coming in, while watching the official death toll rise.
There was much desicion about lockdown procedures, and why they weren't implemented. Even our high school went through a lockdown drill and the response from students made me think. I don't think a lockdown in an unsafe environment is the proper idea. You've gone to lockdown with an armed, clearly disturbed person in the building. All you've effectively done is give the armed person more targets in almost a controlled environment. In this situation, I think the supression of the fleeing instinct is not the ideal route.
I know the guy at V-Tech chained doors. At least that was said on the news reports last night. Clearly methodical, this was certainly a tradgedy. I was bothered by a reporter this morning who called it "the greatest" shooting in history. Greatest? I mean really. There are 32 people who have been murdered for no appearant reason and he calls it great. I wish I was close to him, because I would have kicked him in the nuts for all of the families of the people who passed.
As the backlash from this grows, I see the University pres, getting the hammer dropped upon him. A mass email sent out at 9:26 saying there had been a shooting? Fourteen minutes later the 911 calls begin. Maybe it's me, but in light of the bomb threats they had, I think classes should have been cancelled immediately. That raises the question of how to get the word out. Surely, there are people in the building who have accsess to a phone. Type up a simple "All Classes Canceled Today" sheet and tape it to the front doors. Students will get the message.
As for me, I'm 30 years old. I don't even feel safe now, going to WSU. This incident will make people gaze at others out of the corner of their eyes and wonder. As sick as society is at times, copycats do happen.
What if....

posted by Rusty @ 7:17 AM Comments: 1

Seriously,

Why does Mother Nature hate me so much? Who did I piss off in a past life? The situation is that it's going to snow. AGAIN. To borrow from Caddyshack, "Is this Russia? This isn't Russian."
I mean really. Our first softball tournament is this weekend. Unfortunately, this isn't going to happen thanks to SNOW. Not only a little snow, but a full-fledged winter freakin' storm. Talk about happening three-four months too late. I'll play wherever though. I could actually see them moving the tournament to Sunday since it's only a one day tourney. Which could suck because of league games on Sunday. Oh well.
On a totally unrelated note, thanks to a good tip, I'm now a member of an Atlanta Braves forum. Probably not such a good thing because i'll spend a lot of time reading and responding. But hey, no softball will do that.

Yes, I know I'm bitter.

posted by Rusty @ 7:47 AM Comments: 1

In honor of the Fish

Since today was slated to be her first high school softball game, I must recite the following poem:

Rain, rain go away.
Come again some other day.
The Fish wants to play outside today,
So rain, rain, F&*@ OFF!

She was nervous as heck because she was catching. It could be possible that my father's constant "Did you let any get by?" everyday hasn't helped matters. Sure my pops played baseball, and knows his fundementals, but there are a lot of idiosyncrysies that he doesn't know. The worst part? He thinks he does.
I said to the Fish, "Why are you nervous? Coach trusts you, so go out and have fun. Don't be afraid to get down and dirty either." She looked at me and said "Yeah, you're right."
Hopefully, this stuff will slide out of here and we'll play ball.

posted by Rusty @ 8:38 AM Comments: 0

I mean really

It's April 5. It's spring in Kansas. Things are in bloom, trees are greening up, the grass is growing and it's been warm. Now it's going to snow.
What?
Excuse me? Snow? The last time it snowed in April, I was 13 and it was after the tornado. We're not talking flurries, we're talking 1-2 inches. It's supposed to be warm. Sports Illustrated can take the global warming and shove it up their ass. Al Gore can come over and I'll give him a shovel. He'll take a new perspective on things.
Snow. Damn.

posted by Rusty @ 7:44 AM Comments: 2

The Art of Curiousity

And I have enough to kill more cats than Jay and an old car.

The current story is perhaps a factor of my overactive imagination or not. One of our compadres in our pheasant hunting excursions goes by the nickname of Duck. Honestly, that's all I know him by so we'll call him Duck.
Duck is an avid deer hunter. His passion for hunting deer rivals my passion about pheasant hunting. Duck even takes it a step further as he will go looking for antler sheds during the spring and summer. As Dan puts it, Duck sometimes is oblivious to what we call property lines and often goes where he shouldn't. Keep that fact in mind.
On my way to school everyday, at about the halfway point on the west side of the road is a pond complete with some type of outbuilding. Behind the pond there is a creek with a lot of trees, a perfect spot for antler sheds and heavy deer foot traffic. This pond extends underneath the interstate to the east side of the road, so it's a fairly good sized pond with a little finger like cove on the south edge close to the highway. I have yet to actually see people in this place.
So one day Duck is out looking for sheds and somehow "gets lost" to the point where he's prowling back in the middle of these trees that shadow the creek. As Duck is traipsing about, he stumbles up on a mowed path that snakes its way through the area. His curiousity gets the better of him, so he follows the path. While he's following this path, he begins to encounter small stone buddha like statues in regular intervals. At this point, Duck began to get that nagging feeling that he was being watched. He followed the path for a while when he came upon a clearing in the trees. Tied to a tree limb by its feet was a chicken. The chicken had two problems, one it was dead, two it had no head. (which could have led to its demise, but i'm not jumping to conclusions) Now underneath this chicken as it was suspended fairly high, Duck said that the leaves and ground had been mashed down by feet, and the only thing he could figure out was that people were dancing underneath this headless chicken. By now the sense of being watched was overpowering, so Duck made a show of withdrawing his handgun he was carrying and he got the hell out of there.
Now I pass this place everytime I go to school. Often I've wondered if I could catch a fish there because it looked like it could be a good spot for fishing. However with the drought which haunted us during the fall, this pond barely held any water, including that finger cove in the south. I've always noticed a simple white chair in this finger cove as if placed there for fishing. However, with the water level slowlying dipping, the chair never moved. I noticed recently that the chair had been moved out of the way under a tree. In its place is a black and red chair. Curiouser and curiouser. Thanks to many mysteries I've read, I began to wonder if that chair has any significance. Is it some kind of symbol? Some kind of sign? The fact that it replaced the white chair, facing the highway even when there wasn't enough water to fish makes me curious. Why would someone go to that trouble? There has to be a reason that a chair was drug all the way around the pond well away from the outbuilding.
If my buddy Jar was here, we would have investigated this spot by now, but I'm not going to fly solo because I've used up all my good luck on a certain person. Plus I'm under incredible restrictcions not to go near that place alone.
It's enough to get the mind rolling, though.

posted by Rusty @ 12:46 PM Comments: 0