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2005-05-24 - 11:49 a.m.

Baseball much?

I've been meaning to write another Baseball for Casual Fans installment. Really, I have. But have you seen how the Cubs are playing? If not, let me summarize it for you. If Mark Prior and Carlos Zambrano don't pitch complete game shutouts, they lose. If they do pitch complete game shutouts, they get hurt. Add in a little looking-like-a-AAA-team during the White Sox series, and I've been having a hard time with the baseball fandom lately. I've been reading my lobotomy/baseball book (look at the cover and you'll get the lobotomy thing), and it's GREAT. Some coastal bias, of course, but when you live in the Midwest (even if you live in one of the premier cities in the world), you learn to expect people to be all "blah, blah, blah, YANKEES! blah, blah, blah, RED SOX! blah, blah, blah, blah, METS!" I really like the writing though. It gives you scenarios, possiblities, reasons why, and all sorts of behind the scenes stuff. Then I'm getting (soon, I hope) a book on why keeping score RULES. From the amazon.com review: "There are two reasons to head out to the ballpark. One is to passively watch the game, the other is to actively see it, and you can't do the latter without a scorecard." So I'll have plenty of stuff rattling around in my head to spit out and make you read. Hee. I'm like a dominatrix but with forcing people to like baseball.

Also, a public service announcement. If you see a female keeping score, don't offer to help her unless she asks. Because by the end of the softball game, when she's realized you're a nice guy and you've complimented her multiple times on the fact that she was assigning errors, scoring fielders choices, and scoring inning where the teams have batted around, she'll STILL be annoyed that you assumed she had no idea what she was doing. Not that that happened to me last week or anything.

It's happening again.

My husband is going out of town again. For those of you who remember the China debacle, I'm not good with being alone. Things tend to happen like, me going to bed at 8am, the furnace dying in the middle of March in Chicago and my having to deal with it, me realizing that I'm horribly boring when alone, etc.

He's only going out of town from tomorrow morning 'til Wednesday night, so I'll make it one night. Maybe. Expect a very boring entry tomorrow though.

Wait, I'm already boring.

I did laundry! And I managed to do enough of it that I can see the bedroom floor!

This is really pretty exciting. Because while I've been pretty good in the past couple years about keeping the house livable, working regular hours has taken a toll on my housekeeping abilities. Before, when I worked the hated retail job, I would have lots of time at home when my husband wasn't around. So I could do lots of housework instead of spending time with him. But now, we're little mini social butterflies and we are out running about on the weekends, so nothing gets done.

Now I'm getting better about keeping up with things. Pretty much as long as I don't have wine with dinner (ahem, like last night) I manage to get dishes done. And as long as we don't go out of town on the weekends I can get laundry done. I just needed a place to start.

My Irrational Fears: A List
These are the mild ones. I can't talk about the big ones because then I would blame myself if they came true.

-Pigeons pooping on my head. Or dying and falling on me out of midair.

-Getting hit in the eyes by the sparks that sometimes fall from the wheels of the el trains. Some of the downtown crosswalks have little aluminum shelves that protect people from stuff that gets thrown from the train. Most don't, though.

-Parasites. (I contend that this is NOT irrational*) Also, tent worms (aliases - army worms, tent caterpillars, gypsy moth larvae) terrify me. There was a freaking invasion of the little shitheads when I was about 10 years old living in northern Michigan. They were everywhere and you couldn't walk without stepping on them. So now when I see their tent in a tree out the car window, I freak out and have to concentrate not to drive off the road. Also, once I got one in my room at college, and I had to call my (then future) husband and make him come all the way across campus to remove it while I cowered in the corner.

-Lightning (again, perhaps not so irrational?).

-My husband flying in airplanes. I'm fine with myself flying and am not scared at all. Anytime he flies, though, I turn into a little ball of fear until I've tracked online that his plane has landed safely.

-My dog getting stolen by dog-fighters to be used as a bait dog. (Think I watch too much Animal Precinct on Animal Planet?)

-Getting hit in the face by a foul ball while watching a game. No, really. I love baseball, but I'm a fan. My reflexes are not so good, and my catching skills are worse. This may be part of the reason I love keeping score so much -- it forces me to pay attention so I can get the hell out of the way. I also always put my husband on Foul Ball Duty, but when he's playing (as in a softball game) I'm out of luck. Granted, getting hit in the face with a 16" softball would probably be less of a problem than getting hit with a baseball, but I don't really want to find out.

*I hate parasites. I don't mind most bugs -- spiders, bees, ants, none of them really freak me out. Except tent worms and parasites. About a year ago, we came back from Wisconsin on a Sunday evening. I had Monday off, but my husband didn't. I was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper after he left for school on Monday, and had an itch on my head. I scratched it, felt a bump -- like something was stuck there, and pulled off a HUGE FREAKING TICK. So then I was sitting there with a live tick on my hand that had just been sucking blood from my head. Of course, the only logical course of action was to shriek as loudly as possible, wave my hand frantically (until the tick flew off and onto the wall next to me), cry, and call my husband. He couldn't do anything except try to calm me down (gotta love the phone call from a frantic sobbing wife to make your day a bit more interesting), but he did tell me that if I got the tick into a ziploc bag I could microwave it to kill it so that if I needed to have it examined for diseases it would still be whole and identifiable. So now I had to get the tick into a baggie by myself and I was also convinced I had Lyme disease on the back of my head.

The outcome: I didn't get Lyme disease (YET), I got the tick into a baggie, and it took FOUR different times of microwaving it on high for 2 minutes each to get it to stop moving. Then the next day it had started moving again. Those little suckers are tough.

If you think I'm great at handling stress after this story, wait until I tell the one about the time I lit my bathrobe on fire.


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