Welcome to October

'sniff'

Smell that? That’s called baseball, and the air is thick with playoff anticipation. The Los Angeles Anaheim Angels are back in the hunt after winning the American League Western Division title and clinching a playoff berth much earlier than other teams. I think this will be a real key to their success, as they’ve had plenty of time to get their pitchers rested and the rotation set while other teams like the Yankees, Red Sox and White Sox went down to the wire to secure their playoff hopes.

Red, white and blue!

Proving yet again why everyone hates the Yankees, their players and coaches have already started whining. I guess it’s a good sign that your opponent is focused on things like this when they should probably be focused on how to beat the Angels.

I don’t have tickets this year, because I work an early shift and wouldn’t have been able to see the majority of games. But, I can say that Angel Stadium will be electric tonight. I’d hate to be in the Yankees shoes, although Boston proved last year that the Angels can be beaten even with home field advantage. Still, the Angels seem to have had the Yankees number over the past few seasons, even in Yankee Stadium.

It’s going to be a great week! Enjoy!

Turtle Talk

Sometimes it just comes down to someone’s sheer creativity to really impress you. Lately, to make up for Disney’s California Adventure’s many shortcomings, many millions have been literally thrown at the park.

One gem, which I suspect didn’t cost a huge amount of cash, is Turtle Talk with Crush the turtle from Finding Nemo. We went in and visited Crush and were pleasantly surprised. You enter a small room with theatre seating for about 100 people, and more floor seating near the front for the kids.


At the front of the room is a large screen that looks like a huge fish tank with all the accoutrements of undersea life present. After a host goes over some rules, Crush swims on to the screen and starts talking about how he wants to learn more about humans, so he has some questions for you! Of course, he’s a bit concerned as he says, “dudes, there’s no water in your tank, dudes! Weird, dudes! You humans have serious thrill issues!”

Now this is where it gets really cool. Crush starts asking to talk to people in the theatre, while the host runs around the theatre with a microphone so everyone can hear. The entire show is completely interactive, which is just really cool, because how many times have you interacted with a character from a beloved movie?

And of course, the best part of the experience is learning to talk turtle! Dude, cha! Catch ya later, dudes!

Up The Hill!

I recently discovered that there is a fairly large public park very close to my home. What’s more important is that this park is located in the foothills which means it’s time to get on the mountain bike again! :)

It’s a good 3 mile ride up hill to the back entrance of the park. I made the trip and explored a few horse trails, but didn’t want to push myself much further since I’ve been out of mountain biking for awhile.

The view from the top

I’ve always liked to mountain bike, but in the past few years, I’ve never really lived near a good place to bike that I could ride to from my home. Looks like my wish has been granted, so it’s time to get out there and see how fast I can break my neck!

Pool Blogging

So I get this idea that I should take my tablet out to the pool and see if I can pick up my wireless network. Bingo! Next idea: put a towel underneath the tablet so I can wipe my hands and keep the keyboard from getting wet. Works like a charm.

So here I sit on my pool barstools and typing away. Why, oh why you ask? Because I can. So there. :)

Actually, I've been in the pool a lot lately. After a run, or today's mountain bike ride, I jump in and cool off. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at idling for all that long and poking around in the pool without some friends to talk to or something to do gets boring so I retire to the house. So having a poolside computer is right up my alley!

I’m pretty happy that this works. I’ll just have to try and avoid turning into a prune!

eBay Searches

I’m sure the functionality I just stumbled upon on eBay has been around for quite some time. It just makes sense.

Currently, I’m improving my wardrobe, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that my career may be moving in a direction that requires me to be in front of clients on a regular basis. I’m beginning by wardrobe empire building by collecting Allen Edmonds shoes. I’ve always been a big fan of these shoes because I have a large foot (13 E) and I will go through a poorly made shoe in a matter of months. The 3 pairs of Allen Edmonds shoes I’ve owned have lasted at least 2 years, and that’s with almost constant wear.

The downsides of these shoes are the price at $300 a pair, which is what I’ve paid for each before now. Enter eBay. eBay has this really cool option to create a search, save it, and then have it run daily for you and e-mail you any new listings. Very cool! So I now have a search that looks for “Allen Edmonds 13 E” shoes. I’ve already won two auctions; one for under $100! Yea! What’s even better is that there’s generally very little bidding on these auctions because I would think that 13 E’s are a fairly small subset of the eBay buying world.

In any event, two thumbs up for eBay for providing this automatic daily search feature that requires no interaction from me.

Adventures in Cooking: Wild Mushroom and Asparagus Risotto

The one word to describe preparing this dish: deceptive. Risotto is one of those foods I’ve always enjoyed at a nice restaurant but had never tried to at home. I was perusing Alton Brown’s recipes on Food Network, and ran into this recipe.

The deceptive part comes into play in the preparation. It’s very simple to make; or so it would have you think. Essentially put the rice in a pan, add some stock and wine, a little heat and let the rice take its time soaking up the liquid.

The recipe indicated that I’d be done in about 40 minutes. An hour later or so, it looked like it was finally done. However, upon tasting, it still had just a hint of a mealy taste, so I think it needed to spend even more time in the pan. Or perhaps I wasn’t using enough heat?

The other downside of this dish is that I didn’t have access to wild mushrooms and used regular instead. I know that really is no substitute, and it definitely came across that way when tasting.

I’d like to be able to rate this recipe, but I can’t, simply because I don’t think I prepared it right. It was still good enough to eat, but I didn’t have seconds and ended up tossing the rest of the batch. I’ll give this another shot in the near future and let you know my results!

Memories of Running

For me, life has a way of being dormant for long periods of time, followed by short periods of high stress. A volcano if you will. It’s at these times that I turn to running.

During Marine Corps boot camp, there were 2 things that I always looked forward to: church and our daily run. Church was always a pleasant experience, because the Drill Instructors didn’t attend. It did not matter if you had any religious beliefs; going to church gave you an entire hour away from the people that made your life a living hell. Everyone went.

To relive the stress in boot camp, I always looked forward to the runs. Here you were pushed to excel and to yell! Ultimately, you knew that the run would end and it’d be right back to living hell, but it was a short reprieve.

I had never been a big running fan before joining the military, but since then I’ve always seemed to fall back into running when life notches up the intensity, without asking for permission first. And life certainly did not ask permission recently.

Lately, life is definitely offering up its challenges, and I push back with a run. I think the key for me is that I let myself be emotional while running. When the emotions get to be overwhelming, I sprint, and it’s like they’re burned from me. It’s almost that I’m purging these feelings by sheer will.

I’ve got to go; I have a date with my running shoes.