I went outside and did something today! This was preceded by a few hours resting in bed. I feel better, for the most part, but I’m just so weary. That’s gotten old already.
Anyway, there was baseball tonight. Auburn is hosting Missouri for a three-game series. The attendance was announced as a sellout, the first of the year.
Blake Austin slides in for Auburn’s second score of the game:
The third base umpire blew a call and the head coach, Sunny Golloway, let him hear about it. So did the fans, for quite some time.
It was a pivotal call and, perhaps, cost Auburn the game. The wrong Tigers won, 4-3. The problems were of the familiar variety. Auburn had four errors and stranded eight.
The great thing about baseball is that they’ll play again tomorrow.
Freshman Keegan Thompson threw his second consecutive complete game, striking out 10 and scattering four hits while allowing two runs. (So it was a disastrous 5th inning by his standards.) He threw 121 pitches. His 111th pitch was clocked at 91 mph. The kid is unbelievable. I hope they don’t break him.
Auburn won the first game 5-2 to take the series from the visiting Aggies. Thompson came out in the second game and played first base for a while. Auburn was put away easily in the last game of the series, falling 9-0.
So let’s talk fans! This group includes two of the four new Aggie friends we made today. Scroll beyond the photographs. There are things to read below the pretty pictures.
Things to read … because today hasn’t been all about baseball.
International news: Venezuela is likely more important to us than Crimea, though whatever Putin is doing in the home office is interesting. Meanwhile, just common sense suggests that of all the places you could cut the military here, slicing off parts of the navy is an inherently risky strategy.
Journalism items of interest: The lengths people will go to try to prevent reporters from doing their jobs often borders on the absurd. Here are two examples, and correspondence from Great Britain, which has been milling about on the wrong, lost, broken path for a while now, it seems.
Just stories: The first one is just strange, the kind where you know you don’t know the whole story, where maybe the whole story doesn’t matter so much, so long as the person is OK.
What a lovely evening for a bike ride. I have a ride scheduled for triathlon training — a schedule I am poor at keeping, but here’s a chance to ride — and this is a beautiful day and we’re just that much closer to spring:
But those aren’t the only signs we’ll see:
No problem. This is probably a bridge. There’s one down there. And I’ve gotten over bridges on closed roads before. Besides, going around means another five or 10 miles. While I’m not concerned about the miles, I am on a schedule, and the sun is growing weary in the western sky, so press on …
OK then, they’ve adequately sealed off the road with heavy machinery, as is the style here. This particular piece of awesome construction power fills the entire road. I’ll just walk my bike around on the shoulder, then, and ease over the old (or new) creek bridge. This is going to be a problem. There’s no road there:
How big of a problem? Can’t jump that distance:
Let’s be honest. I’m not jumping any distance.
The problem became that I had to get from this side to that side. And while getting down to the creek bed from myside wasn’t difficult, getting back up to the road was a challenge. On one side the opposite back was vertical, and covered in underbrush. On the other side it was almost vertical, and covered in pumpkin-sized erosion rocks.
The thing is I usually, for better or worse, come to a conclusion about things very quickly. I sat there on the side of the road for a long few minutes trying to figure this out. I had to get down, over and back up, carrying my bike. I’m as much a cyclocross rider as I am a jumper, which is to say not at all. Ultimately I went up the near-vertical side with large rocks, pulling myself and 17 pounds of aluminum and carbon with me. Suddenly, spandex didn’t seem that cool and cycling shoes didn’t seem that practical.
But I made it. Didn’t hurt myself. Managed to get scratched by a tree limb and got a dusty knee. Slowed me down enough that I ended up racing the sun home, which was not my intention. And I missed the start of the baseball game. But I got in 30 miles. And Auburn beat Texas A&M 4-0 to start SEC play.
Even when the roads are closed you can have a good day.
Sometimes life is so hard to figure out when you’re a big kid:
There was a red-tailed hawk floating over the baseball stadium for a few seconds this afternoon. I’d never noticed how the underside of their wingspan is camouflaged against the right kind of sky.
Another one of those shots is going to be one of the new rotating banners on the blog.
Oh, the game itself? Auburn took a 5-2 lead into the top of the ninth, but Mercer rallied to tie the score in the top of the ninth. So, at 5-5, Jordan Ebert led off for Auburn in the bottom of the ninth. He singled to left and then stole second. A one-out sacrifice bunt moved him to third. Two more runners got on to load the bases and that brought Ryan Tella to the plate:
On the eighth pitch of the at bat Tella pushed a ball just beyond the shortstop. The ball went into left and Ebert slid home uncontested to celebrate:
After the game I completed a training brick. They’re called that because of how your legs feel, right? I did a quick 17 mile ride and a slower three mile run. Nothing like 90 minutes of taxing your cardio to give you perspective, or lack of perspective. I find I can’t think of much of anything but the next breath.
I did ponder on how my bike got so slow. You take a few days off and the thing forgets how to move at a respectably medium speed. And I also managed to notice and marvel and wonder why my hip hurt for the first half-mile. But I could not figure out, for the next mile, why the stretching I was doing didn’t help my calves. Turns out I was flexing the wrong way, so …
The bird seed was left on the back porch, one of those “Let me put this down and deal with something pressing and I’ll get back to it” decisions. After a short time it was forgotten. At some point after that the squirrels and the chipmunks found it. The squirrels bit nice holes into the bag.
We noticed because Allie noticed:
We’ve learned, over the years, that the little meeping noise cats make is because they are frustrated. “I want IT.” Allie makes that noise when she sees wildlife in her yard. She also twitches up a bit. She’d really love to go outside and catch the thing, whatever it is she sees. But this cat is not a hunter. And even if she had enough speed to keep up with the other creature — bird, squirrel or chipmunk — she’d have no idea what to do about it.
A mouse, in a story so embarrassing a cat would beg you not to tell it, once scared her away.
She is fierce, this cat. Which is why, I suppose, I have a long scratch on the back of my hand right now. One of the few times she’s ever really done that. I choose not to interpret it as “You didn’t let me catch the thing, so you’ll do as a substitute.”
In baseball today Keegan Thompson pitched seven innings for Auburn. He allowed no runs and only two hits in collecting the win 4-1 over Mercer.
She is wrong. This wasn’t Thompson’s second win of the year. It was his third:
Actually I have no idea what she was talking about. But she held that position for a long time, so it must have been important.
A cutie at the park:
With one out in the ninth, Mercer had three runners on and the tying run at the plate. A ground ball to first sent center fielder Sasha Lagarde to the plate. The umpire said Lagarde slid in under this tag to score.
Auburn’s manager, Sunny Golloway, disagreed. He had a discussion about the best pizza toppings with the umpire. The plate ump decided he’d learned all he needed to know about the local fare. Golloway still had some things on his mind, so he circled back and brought up the best places around to get wings:
The umpire, not being a wing man, threw Golloway out of the game. Not everyone dips in ranch, Sunny. But the big emotional outburst — “How can you not like celery and carrots!?” gave struggling closer Terrance Dedrick the opportunity to regain his composure and he shut the Bears down from there.
Things to read … because some things are more important than a beautiful afternoon at the park. (Or so we’re told.)
I met Lance Cpl. Kyle Carpenter three years ago. It was a unique and humbling experience. Now, it seems, he’s getting the Medal of Honor. When you read his story, the instantaneous decision of a Marine of 21, which I thumbnailed in the first link, you’ll understand the common experience people get when they meet him, and why he’s up for the nation’s highest military distinction.
At Clay County Christian Academy, they call their favorite player “Codyman.” They have blue T-shirts with “Down syndrome awareness” surrounding a Superman logo on front. The logo has “C” instead of an “S,” and the back of the shirts says what Codyman fans feel about No. 12, Cody Morris: “Codyman, sort of like Superman (only cooler).”
Morris had his time to play in most every game this season, called “Cody Time.” It was that final minute when the sophomore took the court in the same uniform with his friends and teammates, and they made sure he got chances to shoot the ball.
And make no mistake. Morris can shoot.
I do enjoy those stories.
Finally: Chris Hemsworth. Liam Hemsworth. Meryl Streep. And Tom Hanks in The Bitman Begins:
In a way, this is actually a small culmination of the post-modern, highly social, remix era. The thing is somewhat funny on its face, but to maximize the video you have to understand several layers of nuance and references. Everyone probably has some basis for reference tough. The “Charlie bit my finger” clip now has more than 675 million YouTube views, so maybe you don’t need subtext.
