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.
Here’s, perhaps, the dumbest story of the day:
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.
Don’t make any attic jokes.
The best writing of the day is at Rapha:
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 title? Emily Post.)
