Alabama visited Auburn for a three game series, starting tonight. Things did not go well for the Tigers.
Ryan Tella was 1-of-5 with three strike outs:
Garrett Cooper had one hit in four at bats and struck out once:
Between the two they stranded five of Auburn’s eight base runners as Alabama won 6-2.
In the major sports – football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball – Auburn is now 9-43 against the SEC since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. I’m keeping count because someone has to.
In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
[…]
As far as the federal government is concerned, you’re disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it’s a judgment call made in doctors’ offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment — back pain, mental illness — are among the fastest growing causes of disability.
[…]
In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began to wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program.
After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.
“We talk about the pain and what it’s like,” he says. “I always ask them, ‘What grade did you finish?'”
What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job.
At the baseball stadium last night, before it turned cold again, Auburn hosted Alabama State. The hecklers were giving ASU’s third baseman a good-natured hard time. He had the misfortune to execute a poor slide in the early innings and then the good humor to laugh about it with the crowd later.
Late in the game, with ASU in the field, their short stop shifted far to his right. Someone pointed out how close the guy at short was to the third baseman. And then there was a weak ball up the line to third and the two guys ran into one another. Here is a dramatic reenactment:
Thereafter the Alabama State short stop was everyone’s hero, and he could do everything. Those guys were such great sports. The ASU third base coach offered free tickets to the Auburn students for their series this weekend. Auburn won 10-2.
We had dinner at Mellow Mushroom, which meant leftovers for lunch today.
It turned cold about that time. I debated turning on the electric blanket. No, I thought, spring is here. The windows were open earlier.
And then this morning it felt even colder somehow, which is to say the low 50s. We’ve been in the upper 70s, so there is a bit of chill again when you hit 54 at the high point of the day. Particularly when the sun is playing shy behind three or four layers of cloud cover.
Never could get warm today. I stayed curled up under a blanket with the space heater on. Spring is here, after all.
Sometime in the late afternoon, though, the sun finally came out. It was nice and bright and warmer, though the space heater stayed on all day, into the evening and night.
But we did get sunlight at the right time, my favorite time of day in our house, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before:
Those 25 minutes or so just feel magical. Anything is possible. The most ludicrous movie plots could become reality for those few moments. You revel in them, you wonder how they manage to escape so suddenly. And you reaffirm an incontrovertible truth; every house should have clear sight lines and plenty of windows facing west.
Tonight The Yankee made chicken tikka masala and naan, which is a new dish at home. It was good. Now, we’ve decided, we just want authentic Indian food.
Things to read: Usually videos like this are news simply because there is video. And usually it is some bad news, or something that barely qualifies as news. This, however, is awesome:
In an amazing rescue in Perth, Australia, a man administered CPR on a young girl who stopped breathing as her panicked and thankful father looked on.
Voyager is leaving the heliosphere, or may be leaving the heliosphere. It might be coming back, because it thinks it left the stove eye on. Or it could already be Vger. Whichever. Humanity is now interstellar:
What’s not in dispute among any of the scientists is that the spacecraft is now, undeniably, in a new and unexplored region—pushing the reach of humanity farther than it’s ever gone before. What we call that place is, in many respects, less important than the fact that we’re there at all.
According to new scientific findings set for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Voyager I has pushed into the great unknown.
NASA, however, remains skeptical about these new conclusions. “Consensus of the mission team is that NASA’s Voyager spacecraft has not left the solar system,” a NASA social media specialist told TIME via e-mail. “Statement soon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”
For years, scientists have speculated as to when Voyager would finally leave all traces of our sun behind — officially exiting the heliosphere, and entering the great undiscovered country beyond.
Every suspect is entitled to his day in court, but for accused Auburn shooting suspect Desmonte Leonard, Wednesday’s hearing had to be postponed because no one thought to bring him.
[…]
(H)e was never transported the 50 or so miles from Montgomery to the Lee County Detention Facility.
Your brain can’t remember pain. Of that I am glad. I don’t miss the pain. I’ll tell you what I miss though, I miss the weather.
Did I ever tell you about when I used to train in Italy in the winter? In the mountains the snow would fall for days, and the hillsides would be covered in thick blankets of white, their peaks looking like the hunched shoulders of giant beasts, faces bowed in shame. Those giant mounds of rock were too scared to face me and too cold to move, and so I rode up them, and made heat of my own. I would catch fire; burning in my layers of clothes, cutting through the cold like an electric heater. Sweat would drip from my nose onto the white road, snow tingling as it melted on my exposed skin. The world was frozen, but I was roaring in flames, as if I was driving an open-top-car with the heater on full blast. I was my own nature. I was defiance.
That piece, about bicycle racing, just gets better and better. Penance for complaining about the cold this morning.
The weekly post that puts a lot of leftover photographs in front of you and masquerading as good content. (So the only thing that is different about this particular masquerade is … Let me get back to you on that.) Anyway, on with the extra pics!
Saw this guy at the forestry preserve yesterday. He was just running in circles. I thought he needed a slightly less potent breakfast cereal. He was fun to watch:
The big little waterfall at the Louise Kreher Forest Preserve:
No need to take any more pictures of Michael O’Neal on the mound. I probably won’t get a better one than this. Sadly he was tagged with the loss yesterday, his first of the season:
Auburn was swept by Vanderbilt, losing 5-2, 8-1, 8-6. Vanderbilt is a really good team, number two for a reason, but all of last year’s problems crept back up for Auburn. You can’t give the second-ranked team in the nation mental mistakes and errors when facing two first round pitchers. You can’t strand 25 runners across the weekend, but Auburn did. Third baseman Damek Tomscha left six on base himself:
Connor Harrell drove in three runs and scored three himself for the Commodores this weekend:
Below you’re going to find out the story behind this balloon. Just keep going:
The cardinal in our yard:
We saw a Rolls Royce the other day in Atlanta. This is the most unattractively plain car I’ve ever seen:
This satellite receives only plays half the hits, some of the time, at the Warehouse Bistro in Opelika:
Dewayne Reynolds is one of the best balloon makers around. He just happens to be here. Engaging guy, we see him everywhere, he never ceases to amaze. He works the baseball games on some weekends. He stopped by and asked if anyone wanted a balloon and someone asked for Taylor Swift and the screaming goat. (Look it up.)
Dewayne went right to it. “Sure!” And then he probably came to regret taking up the challenge. But it was awesome. Now I hope the guy that got the balloon figures out a way to preserve it. Some creations deserve to be kept around a good long while:
Talking turkey with professor Mark Smith at the Louise Kreher Forest Preserve. He lectured on most everything you could think of about the wild turkey, what they eat, how they choose mates, how they raise their young, mortality rates and so on:
And then we made turkey calls. We yelped and clucked and keekeed and gobbled on slates and boxes.
Because we know people at the preserve we got to hold turtles:
The Yankee and her mom did not enjoy watching the turtles eat their worms, though.
We walked to the waterfall, meandered through the woods and then had subs for lunch. We went to the baseball game, which we aren’t going to talk about this weekend at all, it seems, because it hasn’t been good in any way. Except for the weather, which has been stunningly gorgeous the last two days. These are the days you’d order from Amazon, have them shipped Prime and be in disbelief when they arrived early.
We had dinner at Warehouse Bistro, which is always delicious. They’d called us to say there was a hot water problem, so we’d be dining outside, but by the time we got there that was fixed.
We sat next to a long table of one large, happy family who celebrating a life or a marriage or a death. It was hard to say, but they all took turns giving speeches and it was beautiful. I filed one away for future use.
The chocolate torte was also wonderful. But try the duck breasts. That’s what I had tonight. Or the rack of lamb, which is another favorite. Or the filet, or the crab cakes … Really, anything at the Warehouse Bistro is worth having. Also they’ll unabashedly play Hank Williams next to the Delta Blues next to Harry Connick, Jr. I don’t know why that matters, but I noticed it and it seemed like it could be important later.
The one day of the week when you can count on even less being here. So we make up with it with pretty pictures. More often than not, though, they are very average. They often have reasonably interesting stories though, so let’s stick with that.
From the swimming and diving meet last Thursday. Did I mention The Yankee was a diver? She’s twisting here, and she probably doesn’t like that, but it looked cool:
Did I mention she won? This guy, meanwhile … As I suggested to the judges, a diving coach and whomever else was standing nearby, if you make a sound, you earned extra points. Have a heart, judges of America:
Those dives were off the one-meter board. And, yes, you can spring high enough to generate enough velocity to land with a resounding smack that catches the attention of everyone in the natatorium. It happened.
Here’s The Yankee swimming:
She was warming up for her three races. She won one of them, a 4×200 relay:
And they aren’t just out there for giggles. There were some serious competitors on that pool deck:
I am disqualified as I can’t swim in a straight line. We all have our burdens in life.
To the baseball! This is a fan from Brown. He’d come all the way down from Rhode Island, avoiding winter and enjoying our beautiful pre-spring weather and walked over to tell the hecklers in Section 111 that he’d enjoyed listening to them all weekend. That was pretty awesome.
Here are a few more crowd shots from Plainsman Park. There’s a story below, too, so keep scrolling.
Auburn claimed a sweep of Brown with today’s 6-3 win behind Rocky McCord’s 6 2/3 innings and eight strikeouts. This is his last pitch of the day:
But the man of the hour was Brown head coach Marek Drabinski. He’s also coaching third when Brown is at bat, and that brought him a weekend’s worth of good-natured ribbing from the hecklers.
By late Saturday he was even talking back to that section of the crowd a bit. Hecklers were trying to get him to stand in his box, but he refused:
Fans were chatting with him and ultimately trying to bribe him. At one point we invited him to sit in the stands. It is hard to imagine Skip Bertman or Jim Wells getting that offer. Appealing to Drabinski’s northeastern tastes the offer became “Dunkin Donuts if you’ll only get in the box!” On Sunday afternoon he asked where his Dunkin was. We had to sadly tell him that our Dunkin Donuts wasn’t running yet. But it would be built by next season, if only he’d bring his team back down.
He teased us all with the box. He’d walk over to the edge, look down and walk away. He’d slink over and put one foot in. He’d come back later and but one foot inside the box and just over the other foot above the box. On Sunday he promised he’d get in the box later.
And at the end of the game, with his team down, but rallying to try and avoid the sweep, Drabinkski walked over to the box in the last at bat.
He’d disarmed us all with his charm by then. The guy was enjoying himself with the hecklers, and they were enjoying his good spirits.
Coach of the year? Coach of the year. And a great reminder of what college sports is supposed to be. We all kind of hope he brings his Bears back down this way next year, so we can treat him to Dunkin. And make him get in the box.
That was the most fun we’ve ever had with a coach, easily, including when you can see the hecklers getting into their heads.
Finally, here’s a picture of my friend, Stephen’s, daughter. It was her first Auburn game, but she loves baseball:
I took a picture of their family together at the park, four generations. What a great way to wrap up a weekend at the park.
Then I went out for a bike ride. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
