Ugh. Life is moving way too fast for me right now.
Slow down, okay?
September is a busy month in my family. My birthday,
both my daughters’ birthdays, one of my nephew’s birthday. (The end of August
has my godson’s birthday, and the wife’s is coming fast in October.) So we
enter a six week stretch of endless parties, celebrations, the going to stores
for the buying of gifts, wrapping presents, cleaning the house and cleaning the
house, planning the special occasions. It’s fun but it also takes its toll. It’s
tiring, to be honest. My own event, which I normally downplay as much as
possible (ideally a wife-cooked steak dinner and quietly opening a few wrapped
books at the dining room table with my girls), involved a full afternoon of
staining the deck, followed by a two-hour Back-to-School night for Little One.
Thankfully the wife and I were able to sneak out to Chili’s later on for tacos.
Add in Labor Day at the beach, soccer practices and
games, CCD, and all the school stuff and you have a nonstop month.
I spent four days staining our backyard deck, an
unpleasant task I have to do every four years. This time we used a heavier
stain designed to last up to six years. I told Little One, soon-to-be-eleven,
that the next time the deck needs to get done, her future boyfriend will be
doing it. And even more unpleasant, Fall really hasn’t settled in yet in these
parts. Temps reached the nineties and, man, did that sun flame down on me as I
painted. I christened the deck the Sun’s Anvil. I sweated, lost a lot of salts
and minerals, and got a September sunburn.
However, all is not an unfettered gripe. The writing
project continues apace, albeit glacially, as I eke out an hour here and there
to get that intimidating to-do list accomplished. Very pleased with my results
so far, though I wish I had accomplished more up to this date. Still on
schedule though, but barely. I estimate eighty hours to complete it, forty to
get the essentials done. It’ll be tough. Take that into consideration, okay
Life?
Have notes for a few blog posts on deck. Just need to
rearrange them into sentences, paragraphs, you know, writing kind of stuff.
Shouldn’t be too hard. Patch is home sick with me today, and both girls are off
tomorrow for the Jewish holiday, so the gulf between what I plan to get done
and what I actually get done will be substantial; it’s only a question of
whether I can leap it with all the baggage I have hanging off me.
Still unemployed. Every week I answer an online ad or
two for the few jobs in my wheelhouse, and send out unsolicited resumes when
the online ads aren’t forthcoming. It’s highly depressing and demotivating.
Chips away at the self-esteem, day-by-day and even hour-by-hour. Have to keep
busy and try not to be too hard on myself. I’ve also been racking my brains every
now and then for another industry or occupation I can try my hand at. Nothing
yet; you’ll be the first to know.
One pleasant diversion from all the previous paragraph’s
worriment is baseball. After dropping them post-childhood, I started following
the New York Mets again three seasons ago. Now they’re having a decent season,
somewhat comfortably in first place and should make the playoffs barring a
catastrophic collapse in the last twelve games of the season. Shouldn’t happen,
based on their schedule, but you never can be sure with the Mets.
Anyway, as a birthday present this year, the wife and
little ones got us tickets to see the Mets play the awful Braves last night.
The weather was absolutely fantastic – no humidity, sixty degrees, a slight
breeze, not a cloud in the sky. The seats were pretty good – not nosebleeds,
close enough in left field to give us all a good view of the action. The only
problem was meeting my wife at her place of work in NYC. Since school has
started, I had to wait for Little One to get out (remember, I had a sick
Patchie with me all day), drive over to the bus station, take the bus in
through the Lincoln tunnel, grab a cab at Port Authority, meet the wife, take
her car to Citi Field. Though we were late (made it to the stadium by the
second inning), we had those de-licious stadium hot dogs, washed ’em down with de-licious
soda, and had our seventh-inning ice cream cones. And the Mets dispatched the
Braves 4-0 to top it all off. Good times.
In the past we’ve gone to one baseball game a year,
usually a Yankee game, usually at the behest of my father-in-law, a big Yankee
fan. Haven’t done it regularly, though, since the little ones were born. This year,
in contrast, we’ve gone four times, twice to see the Mets and twice to see the
Yankees, and haven’t really spent as much as you’d think. Both teams won one
and lost one. We sat in the highest, corner-most seat at Citi Field. We did the
Yankee stadium bleachers and fourteen rows behind home plate. We saw two
extra-inning games. We were so close to A-Rod I’m sure he heard my little girls
cheering him on. It was a fun season, and we’ll probably do it again next
summer.
Now – back to the grind, writer boy!
Ah, I love this (relatively) new stadium!
Yours truly with a goofy, sugared-up Little One
Somewhere near the end of the game ... hard to see, but Little One
snapped this shot of the ball in the air halfway towards home plate
And some pics, here, of our first trip to Citi Field earlier in the season.
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