Our once-a-year baseball game…

For the past couple of years we have been making a once a summer trip down to the Jake to watch an Indians game.  Again, I know it is no longer the Jake, but that is what I will call it for the rest of my days.  Since neither of us are baseball fans, we really only need to attend one game per season.  I would much rather go to a football game, though not in Cleveland if that could be helped.

Usually S’s supervisor gives us a set of her season tickets for the Indians.  That has been quite nice and her seats are good.  But this year we got even better seats.

Those are the box seats behind home plate tickets we used for the game.  Not too shabby.  Although S was worried through the whole game that we were going to get beaned with a foul ball or a broken bat.  We were just 15 rows up from the plate.

That’s the view from our seats. 

That sign used to say Jacobs Field, but now it doesn’t.  I’m a wee bit bitter.

That is the backside of the Indian’s mascot, Slider.  Shad no idea what it was.  I’m sure all of the regular fans around us thought she was a dolt.  I thought she was adorable.

That is Ryan Garko at bat.  Last year he was pretty good and there were some brand new parents who named their children after him.  This year, apparently, he is a bum.  At least that is what the guy behind us was yammering on about all evening.

This is S, after the game, being all goofy with baseball statuary.

Sadly, the Indians lost to the Giants, 3 to 2.  But it was a good game and it moved along quickly. 

I got a $6.75 beer served in a cup made entirely from corn.  The Indians pride themselves on being one of the “greenest” ball parks in the country.  I wanted to save my cup and mail to someone in Mexico with a note that says, “Sorry you can’t afford to eat anymore.  But I drank out of this corn cup. Neat-o.”  We also bought two sodas in Indians cups, sort of a tradition for us.  S ate some cheese fries and a helmet sundae.  I had two of the best hot dogs I have ever eaten.  The Jake has good food, my friends.

 

Exciting week ahead…

Tonight we are going to an Indians game at Progressive Field.  It used to be Jacobs Field but nobody respects tradition anymore. And yes, I know it was called some else before that and the people who liked that think I don’t respect tradition… But I digress.  S got two tickets in a box behind home plateas a token of appreciation from one of her students and their parents.  That is one of the nice surprise perks of being a teacher. 

We are not huge baseball fans but we do like to go to games.  Mostly we love ball park food.  And we like beer in special Indians cups.  And helmet sundaes.  And S is a big fan of ball park nachos.  I’m partial to a good ball park hot dog with Stadium Mustard. 

It’s not that we aren’t Indians fans, we are.  Baseball is just a little boring until September.  And the Indians are 6 games out  in their division, so September probably isn’t going to be exciting at all.  Now, if we had gotten tickets for a Cubs game at Wrigley, now that would have been exciting even at this middle stage of the season.

Oh, and guess where we will be on Saturday…  Go on, guess…  Okay, fine…  We are going to Kennywood!  It’s a fine, fine amusement park in the Pittsburgh, PAarea.  We’re going to be roller coastering on the Racer and the Jack Rabbit.  We’re probably going to ride that Jumping Kangaroo ride.  Maybe do a little time on the Whip and the Pirate Ship.  We are going to skip the Thunderbolt as it has been having more and more mishaps in the past ten years.  Scary.  We are also going to skip going through Noah’s Arc because years ago they added a steam room feature and it spurred an asthma attack our last time through.  Not fun.

But again, a major attraction of the amusement park trip is the food.  S has a long time hankering for some Potato Patch fries with cheese on them.  I always get a Kennywood corn dog.  And we can’t leave the park without a bag of cotton candy for the car ride home.  We love Kennywood.

It’s going to be a good week, I think.

Colonel Mustard…

Back on March 26th, I wrote a post called Random Thoughts, which really was chock full ‘o’ random thoughts.  A few of those thoughts focused on how our yard has become Mecca to all the loose dogs in the neighborhood.  One of those regular visitors is Colonel Mustard, a little Scotty dog who lives across the street with a little old woman and a bunch of teenagers. 

Colonel Mustard’s teenagers don’t keep a real good eye on him during the day when his little old lady is away.  He gets out of their house and comes over to our yard to relieve his bladder and bowels.  When he first started visiting I worried quite a bit that he might come over when our dogs are outside and there would be lots of fur and spittle.  Perhaps there would be blood.  Sometimes I would chase him off but often he would just stand in my yard and bark at me like I was the intruder.  That pissed me off, so I stopped worrying so much about his saftey in MY yard.

Apparently I shouldn’t have ever worried at all…

That’s Colonel Mustard sneaking up on Emma.  Emma is not so much of a gaurd dog though.

Usually Emma is such a wuss, she runs away from any sign of trouble.  If she so much as smells a skunk nearby, she demands to be let into the house.  But she played with Colonel Mustard.  They romped around with one another and did the sniffing thing. 

When Rummy relaized there was a yard visitor, she wanted to be let outside.  I thought she might chase Colonel Mustard off, but no.  They sniffed one another several times and then she followed him around while he marked our yard as his territory.

Same squirrel, different savagery…

This, I firmly believe, is the same squirrel who was getting it on in my previous post, Sweaty Squirrel Sex.

This morning I noticed him hanging around my garage door.  By the way, I have named him Marvin Gaye.

“There’s nothing wrong with me squirreling you… Squirreling yourself with me can never be wrong, if the squirrel is true… Let’s get it on…”

Anyway, it kind of looked like he was digging and biting at the garage.  I watched him for several minutes and then grabbed the camera because, you know, I’m a little obsessed with Marvin Gaye’s antics.

He totally knew that I caught him doing whatever it was that he was doing.  But then he just went back to do it.  Not the “it” from my previous post, the “it” concerning the garage.  He finally ran off when I yelled at him.  Mostly though, he just ran up a nearby tree and stared me down.  While I was yelling at him, he was yelling back at me in that “cluck-cluck” sound that squirrels make when they are mad.  Which, by the way, is slightly different than the sound they make when they are doing their Marvin Gaye type activities.

When I inspected the garage, this is what I found:

The paint has been stripped away and…

There are teeth and claw marks in the wood.  Marvin Gaye is eating my garage.  Maybe he wants to get into the garage so that he can turn it into a private Love Shack.  Maybe this is his way of telling me I need to refill the bird/squirrel feeder.  Maybe he is just a hoodlum.

 

 

Sweaty squirrel sex…

At first I thought they were fighting.  It seemed like they were going at it pretty savagely.  But then I started to suspect that they were not so much fighting as they were… well… you know.  So, of course I grabbed my camera.

Sadly, I missed out on all of the mounting photos.  If I had just captured a few of those, I could have started a magazine dedicated to squirrel porn.

Secretary of Defense…

This is Rumsfeld, my Secretary of Defense.  This is the face you will meet if you break into my home.

However, if you are not an intruder, you can just call her Rummy.

Watching the grass grow, day 40…

Previously posted: Watching the grass grow, day 13…

Okay, so I didn’t give weekly or even bi-weekly updates on the Scott’s PatchMaster grass seed.  But it has done fairly well.

Here is a picture of the previously bald spots from today, day 40.

The previously bald spot that was behind the lawn chair filled in better than I had expected.  I actually cut it last week and it handled it well.  The previously bald spot in front of the lawn chair only filled in spottily.  To be fair, the birds were picking at that oval quite a bit.  They probably took off with half of the grass seed. 

I suoppse I can now recommend the product since it worked really well in the one area. 

Nice day for a bath…

The best thing about summer and warm weather is that the dogs can be bathed outside with the garden hose.  In the winter they have to be bathed in our tub and, well, Rummy fights it like you wouldn’t believe.  It can take two hours to bathe her indoors, with one hour devoted to getting her into the tub and another hour to actually complete the bathing process.

But outside, with a hose, she can be gotten with relative ease.  Well, ease for me since S is totally in charge of bathing the dogs.  I just stand by with towels and a camera.

Today, after the initial hose down, S had to chase Rummy up into the back porch area to finish the job.  It was a bit of a struggle, which Rummy eventually lost.

Emma is much easier to bathe because she is kind of old and much more docile than Rummy.  She just sort of gives in.  She doesn’t much like a bath and you can control her behavior by saying the word “bath”.  And we found out yesterday that she now knows how to spell the word because she reacted in the predictable way when S said “b-a-t-h”.

I think Emma likes the feel of the scrub bruh…

In the end, they are both rewarded with a post-bath pancake.

Hopefully, for them, they won’t require another bath until August.

Blueberry update…

They are starting to turn blue…

 

Mike’s garden…

From where I sit while I type this, I have a good view out of two windows.  When I put the desk in the office I set it away from a wall, in the corner, allowing me to watch out over the back yard from one window and to look out of my neighbor’s garden from the other window.  It’s a good view.  I love our back yard and when the dogs are out there I can keep an eye on them.  I also get to watch the bunnies, squirrels and birds all day long. 

And the view of Mike’s garden is nice too.  He must pump steroids into the ground because his greens grow like mad.  And last summer he had about a dozen tomato plants which entertained me to no end.  Entertained me because even though there were a dozen plants and each one was heavy with tomatoes, Mike never got to eat even one of them.  The squirrels ate every single one of them.  And I watched them do it.  They would steal the tomatoes and then jump up on a tree in my yard and eat them.  But they would only eat half of the tomato and then they would toss the waste into my grass.  And even though they had just wasted half of a tomato, they would jump back down from the tree, back into Mike’s garden and steal another tomato.

This year Mike is fighting the good fight.

He has crafted a scarecrow out of one of his polo shirts.  It sure scared the hell out of Rummy the first few times she saw it.  And it must be scaring away the bunnies because his greens are way bigger now than they are in the picture above.  But he hasn’t put in his tomato plants yet.  That will be the real test.