The Recovering Hopper: Birthdays and a Baseball Game

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!