matthearn.com

Welcome to Spring! It couldn’t have come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. You may recall last week we had SNOW, and just 4 days ago the wind and rain and temperatures were that of a normal January day. And it sucked. Like whoa.

Now we’re going to get a week of warm temperatures, which is nice because most of next week I’ll be working nights, enabling me to rest and relax outside during the day. Which I will undoubtedly spend sleeping. Come on, summer!

The warmer weather does enable me to exercise more; I ran twice this week in the cold and was very unhappy about it, although I did set personal bests for 3.3 miles and 1.1 miles. Yesterday I ran a mile in 8 minutes 27 seconds, which is the fastest I’ve run a mile since 8th grade, when I managed a 7:45 once. At the time, I weighed maybe 130 pounds. I, uh, don’t weigh that little anymore.

Since I hate lifting weights, but want to exercise my arms and abs and back, I decided to supplement my running with some batting cage fun. I have the interesting problem of throwing left-handed but batting right; this is the result of teaching myself to hit when I was little by throwing the ball in the air with my left hand and swinging across my body at it. The end result of this is that I’ve always been next to useless from a baseball/softball perspective, since left-handers can’t play 2nd or 3rd base or shortstop (because a left hander throwing to first has to turn his body around before whipping the ball over, which takes extra time), and right-handed batters are as common as pigeons. (Not that this makes much difference in softball.)

Anyway, I thought it might be fun to actually learn to bat left-handed, thinking that as an actual lefty I would be a better hitter from that side, and also give myself the benefit of batting switch, so I can direct softballs to weaker fielders (who are invariably at first base and right field). So I’ve been swinging from the lefty side, and I can report the following: apparently there are muscles in my body, that you only use when batting left-handed, that have completely atrophied. Because I am in Pain.

I went to the cages on Monday and was completely crippled until Wednesday, including bizarre unexplained pain in my NECK muscles, which I had not believed were involved in the act of swinging a softball bat. I thought myself recovered today, so I went back, and within 20 swings I was reminded of why exercise makes Baby Jesus cry. Ow. I’d be in less pain if I had simply handed the bat to someone and told him to go to town on my arms and torso.

The lesson, as I believe I have mentioned: I’m a wuss.

My office has geese. Not, like, indoors; that would probably interfere with our business processes, and Baby Jesus knows we have more than enough problems already. No, the geese are outside, but they are plentiful, and they have distinctive personalities.

I know what you’re thinking; geese are geese, man! Even worse, they’re Canadians! But I tell you truly, these geese all behave completely differently. For example, there’s one that hangs out by the big pond out back, right next to the path I take to get into the building. It seems to have taken up permanent residence there, and has no apparent fear of humans. I walk within 2 feet of it at least twice a day and it barely even takes notice of me, preferring instead to eat pieces of grass and leave nasty green poop on the concrete sidewalk.

However, there are at least two more who see fit to avoid humans as much as they can, so they sit by themselves out by the running track, hissing at all passersby. (A hissing goose is HILARIOUS, if you haven’t seen it happen. They are the least threatening creatures I’ve ever seen.) By the sixth lap on the track, I’m openly yelling at them “Stop hissing at me! I’ve run by here 5 times already and have yet to threaten you!” But they never learn.

Those are the three that seem to be permanently on hand, but sometimes we’ll have entire flocks of them, splashing around in the pond, nearly getting run over in the parking lot, and hissing at the dreaded humans.

I guess I should be glad; my good buddy Kyle works in a place with a significant goose population, and one gander in particular actually started attacking folks because he thought they were fronting on his woman. Yelling “I have no interest in your woman, you feathered freak! Leave me alone!” had no effect. And in case you’re wondering what a goose attack is like, basically they run directly at you with their big wings a-flapping and hoping to maybe nip a bite out of your arm.

Kyle weighed his options: he could kick the bird’s ass, but he would feel guilty about it, and also probably be FOUND guilty of bird abuse by a court of law; he could call animal control, but figured there wasn’t much they could do other than take the bird away and probably kill it; or he could exercise the third option, which was to buy an air horn.

So Kyle went out, wandered up to the gander, which, as was its wont, came at Kyle with murder in his eyes, and Kyle fired off a blast from the air horn as soon as the bird got close. The bird immediately stopped, honked the goose-speak for “My bad, dude, I didn’t realize you were the head gander all up in this peace, I’ll be going now,” and shuffled back to his lady.

I’d give up to $100 to have video of this, btw.

(Speaking of Kyle, and of money, he and a lot of his close friends are Virginia Tech alumni, so this has been a tough week for all of them. I don’t really have anything useful to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere, so I’ll just link to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund and prevail upon you to donate some small amount of whatever vast cash reserves you may have.)

A Work of Fiction.

Chapter 1

“Jimmy, you know, you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Bob smiled warmly, as if he had just dispensed sage advice on a loving disciple.

I hated my job, and Bob Roop was a big reason why. He was only five years older than me, but he insisted upon treating me (the whole team, really) like we were children. I can’t remember how many times I had sworn to myself, “If he calls me ‘Jimmy’ one more time, I’m going to drop a monitor on his head.” Luckily for him, I’m very non-confrontational, or as my ex-wife liked to call me, “a pussy.”

“Bobby,” I replied, “I am dressing for the job I want. I want a job sitting around my apartment drinking beer and chatting online with hot babes, all day.”

He laughed. “Who are you kidding? If you had a job like that you wouldn’t even put on pants.”

He had a point.

“Jimbo, technically you’re within the dress code rules. You’ve got on a collared shirt, and you’re not wearing jeans. But look at Steve, for example; pressed shirt, dark slacks, and shoes he didn’t steal from a hobo.”

A hobo? What is this, 1923?

“Yeah, and he spends all day writhing in his chair because he’s wearing wool pants in July and it’s giving his ass a rash. Bob, if I’m uncomfortable, I don’t do my job well. Comfort for me means sneakers and clothes made of unnatural fabrics that don’t make me scratch my junk all afternoon.”

Bob took a long sip from his coffee mug, something he did when he wanted to seem thoughtful. “Fine, but remember; promotions tend to go to guys who dress the part.”

I took a deep breath to prevent myself punching him in the balls. “We’ve been over this. I don’t want a promotion. I want to keep typing away at my computer, getting periodic cost-of-living raises, until someone like you gives me a heart attack by bugging me about my damn collared shirt. Now, I’ve got fifty emails to read and a conference call that starts in one minute. Can I get back to my job?”

Without waiting for an answer, I put on my headset and started dialing into the conference call. Bob stood there for a minute, trying to look intimidating, and walked back to his office.

A chat window popped up on my monitor. It was Steve, being a smart-ass.

S.Albert: u know, it wouldn’t hurt u to buy 1 nice pair of pants!!
J.Graves: Suck it, Steve.
S.Albert: im just sayin, if u wanted to go shopping later i have some time before i meet angela tonite, we could get u a couple shirts and slacks

The last thing I wanted to do was spend any more time with Steve than I already had to. Angela was his latest flame, and every hour you spent in his presence required you to listen to at least 45 minutes of detail about their spectacular sex life.

J.Graves: Hey Steve, you have a pendejo hanging off your mustache again.
S.Albert: a what
J.Graves: Look it up.

I closed the window and logged out of chat, just for a few hours, until my glowing hatred of all humanity had dimmed.

I know nobody really wants to read about the weather; either you’re local to me, and already aware of it, or you’re not, in which case it’s not a concern for you. Nevertheless, what in the ham-handed hell? There was SNOW this morning in North Wilmington, which is like 10 miles north of me. It was sort of sleeting when I left the house this morning, and the wind about caused me to dent my car with my head. As B pointed out, we basically went through a category 2 hurricane. And Al Gore wasn’t anywhere near us!

Anyway, I’m tired of this weather, and I’m tired of being sick, as both are preventing me from exercising, since there’s nothing worse than riding a bicycle in cold weather, and jogging sucks bad enough when it’s dry. I seriously need to exercise, because I keep doing things like making pans of cinnamon rolls and eating the entire batch in a weekend, despite the fact that they kinda sucked because the dough never rose properly (I blame low-fat buttermilk, which I think was acidic enough to kill the yeast before it could get its rise on). I did get a LITTLE exercise on Saturday, mowing the lawn and putting dirt around my patio and whatnot, but the end result of that mess is that my back hurts and I still weigh 240+ pounds.

I am a large devil, I am.

I’d like to get at least some amount of exercise every day, but my legs just can’t take running every day, based on the ankle pain I suffered through last week. So I’ve decided to hit up the batting cages around the corner from my office a couple days a week. Work the core and arms, develop some hand-eye coordination, learn how to switch-hit; it’s win-win-win-triple-X-throwdown-WIN! Plus it helps improve my odds of being called up to AAA.

Yes, I played something like 15 hours of video game baseball over the weekend. Update: you may recall I made myself a switch-hitting catcher. By “mid-June” I was batting around .320, with 11 home runs and 25 or so RBI, so they called me up to the majors, where they made me play first base. I was like, whaaaaaa? I guess they needed a temporary backup for Ryan Howard. Whatever. After 4 games (I was batting a healthy .300 or so, but only had 6 or 7 ABs) they sent me back down to AAA, where I am continuing to play first base for some reason. Argh. I’m going to try and get them to move me to the outfield, where at least I have a chance of platooning with Burrell.

Not that you care about ANY of that. Ha ha! That’s the joy of talking about fantasy and video game sports: nobody cares. It’s just like the weather.

Lots o’ little thangs:

• Some new photos over at CharlesHearn.com, check them out with great gusto.
• This Don Imus thing has gotten out of hand, for reals. At this point, listening to the racial opinions of a nearly 70-year-old white guy in a ridiculous hat makes about as much sense as listening to my great-grandfather expound upon the “Slavering Huns” (he was in The Great War, you see). Who cares? So an old man made a racist joke on the radio. There are worse things going on in our culture, trust me.
• Don’t tell my wife, but I have secretly acquired a copy of “MBL 2007: The Show,” on a recommendation from my buddy Kyle. I plan a full review next week, but here are a few thoughts:
  • I haven’t even tried anything but “Road To The Show” mode, in which you start as a young player in the minor leagues and work your way up to the bigs and see if you can make the Hall of Fame, and which may be the most addictive thing I’ve used since I got out of the methadone clinic. Apparently there are a variety of ways in this game to play it like a regular video baseball game, but I don’t have time for that because I’m living and dying with a 19 year old switch-hitting catcher who’s batting .265 for the Ottawa Lynx, a triple-A Phillies affiliate. I’ll give all the details of this mode in next week’s review, but I’d just like to leave you with my most recent game’s effort: 6/6, with 2 doubles, a home run, and 4 RBI, and would have gotten “Player of the Game” honors if the bullpen could have held an 8-3 lead.
  • I did play a game with Kyle over the weekend (before I bought my own copy) and I can report that the graphics are a little irksome; Chase Utley, for example, is so dark that Kyle and I referred to him by his full name, “Black Chase Utley,” every time he came to bet or fielded a grounder.

  So far the game gets a 10/10 out of ten for gameplay and a 100/10 for “unintentional hilarity.”

• Speaking of Kyle, he also lent me three books, which I may or may not also get around to reviewing:
  • Why My Wife Thinks I’m An Idiot, by Mike Greenberg. I never really listened to Mike and Mike on the radio, because sports radio is about as interesting to me as The World Beard Championships, so I didn’t know much about Greeny going in. The book was good, and hilarious, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he seemed like a bit of a dick. And I can’t explain why, exactly. He describes himself as a “metrosexual” and tends to go into great detail about the expensive clothes he wears; I also like expensive clothes, but every time he said something like “my Prada backpack,” I kept envisioning an overtanned 19 year old brunette sitting in the college cafeteria showing off her new Uggs to her Long Island hookers friends.
  • Fantasyland, by Sam Walton, which details his season playing in the toughest fantasy baseball league in the country. I haven’t finished it yet, but so far it’s been equal parts interesting, revealing, and hilarious.
  • Moneyball, by whoever it is that wrote Moneyball who I don’t feel like looking up. Okay fine, it’s Michael Lewis, you guilted me into it. I haven’t gotten to this one yet, so I’ll just relate a couple of other people’s blurbs:
    • Weekly Standard – May be the best book ever written on business.
    • Wall Street Journal – Another journalistic tour de force.
    • Hearnwife – Stop sitting on the toilet reading those $%#&ing books and come to bed.
• I may be setting a pointless record for “unordered list depth” for blog posts.
• And speaking of sports, just check this out; scroll down to the line for Robert Horry in the San Antonio box score.
• Everybody at Team Hearn is sick again. Charles is pretty good at bringing home germs; he, of course, is over them in all of a day, and we suffer for 2 weeks. I’m going to go to bed. Have a nice weekend, and avoid the clap.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for baseball. Teams in the Midwest are losing entire series because of SNOW. (Even here in the East temps are topping out at a balmy 50 most days. And tonight there’s supposed to be rain! Argh.) The Indians are playing their Seattle series in Milwaukee, which is a bit counter-intuitive (isn’t Milwaukee NORTH of Cleveland? And thusly colder?) until you remember that Milwaukee has a dome. The media of course has been freaking out, but remember that a couple quick doubleheaders and the Indians and Pilots Mariners will be all caught up. What’s more annoying is that anyone with those players on their fantasy teams has been kinda screwed (I’ve been starting CC Sabathia every bloody day in hopes that he might actually throw the ball; no dice).

And speaking of fantasy baseball, our season is basically straight jacked at this point because ESPN’s IT department appears to be staffed with chimps. The statistics are all wrong, and entire rosters keep disappearing and reappearing randomly. ESPN’s solution to this is to WIPE OUT EVERYONE’S RESULTS and start over, by simply resetting our teams to our opening day rosters and calculating the last 11 days of results based on that opening roster. They’re simply discarding any roster moves we’ve made. Which is totally great because

• I’ve placed one guy on the DL and replaced another guy because I needed more pitching; all of that is gone and will have to be redone.
• In our league you can change your rosters every day, so most of us have been swapping starting pitchers in and out of the rotation in order to maximize wins and strikeouts; none of that will be happening.

This is the second time we’ve ventured from Yahoo for a fantasy league, and we won’t be doing it again.

And best of all, the Phillies are 1-6. ::openly weeping::

So, baseball’s in the dumps for me right now. But things are looking up! I ordered a copy of MLB 2007 “The Show,” a highly recommended video game which features the ability to create a player from scratch and move him through the minor leagues into the majors and hit baseballs with him! With his bat, I mean, not with, like, his head.

I’ll tell you, having kids produces some highs and lows. And I haven’t even gotten to the point where Charles is reporting amusing anecdotes about other people’s thighs, or reminding us that it’s time to eat by repeatedly pointing at his wristwatch and gaping mouth. So far the greatest thing Charles does is grin like an idiot at pretty much everything, which is pretty entertaining, and sometimes during diaper changes he grabs his own junk and giggles, which is HILARIOUS, though often painful to watch.

His cousin Nathaniel is slightly more advanced in hilarity. Yesterday we were all at my aunt’s house in Lancaster, enjoying a spot of dessert, so Nathaniel decided it would be fun to steal everybody’s fork and all of their food. Later, he pulled his pants down and stumbled around. (I’ll try and get the pictures up later this week.)

Charles and Nathaniel also had lengthy conversations with my aunt’s sheep, although Nathaniel was a bit scared by them. Charles was mostly trying to figure out if there was any way he could eat one. (“How can I eat that” is his main train of thought; it applies also to neckties, fingers, furniture, chunks of drywall, cats, and paint.)

The lows consist mostly of when you go to put your son to bed at 8pm and he feels kinda warm, so you take his temperature and realize it’s 101.6. Not high enough to call 911, but high enough to make HW and me scramble for all our baby manuals and find out exactly what to do, which was “check it again later and see if it’s gone up.” Since he was asleep, we figured we’d check it in the morning, or earlier if he woke up.

Which he did. At 3am. With great displeasure. Sarah went in to try and calm him down; she changed him and gave him a bottle, but to no avail. She tried a little tylenol, which seemed to make him a bit happier, but didn’t make him tired. Around 3:30 I took over. We played on the floor for a bit, tried the bottle again, tried reading “The Little Engine That Could.” He rolled onto his belly, pulled his feet in, wedged his head into the corner, and seemed to be drifting off, until about 3 seconds before I was about to stand up and sneak out, he sat back up and said “Woowoowoo bleh DAH” and then sobbed a little. We played some more, and finally about 4 I said okay that’s enough, laid him down, and went back to bed. He alternated screaming and loud whimpering for about a half hour until Sarah went back in to get him.

She brought him into our bed, and together we calmed him down enough so that we all went to sleep around 5, until 8:30 when he woke up and grabbed my hair and giggled.

You may notice that this particular post is sort of rambling and makes no sense. This is because my son kept me awake from 3 to 5. Which you would KNOW if you would READ MORE CLOSELY. So there.

To cap off a week of not posting any funny stuff at all (for reals, it’s like I’ve turned into Thomas Pynchon, except that Thomas Pynchon probably never took a picture of his junk and put it on the interwebs), here are some shots I took whilst a-wandering aimlessly around The City Of New York with Teh J0sh. Enjoy ye them!

I know how you love that artsy shiznitzel.

I could write some stuff here, but nobody wants to read that crap when they could be looking at pictures of the cutest 10-month-old-who-looks-like-a-2-year-old in the history of the universe, right? Right.

I’ve been getting swept up in a lot of “Disaster Recovery Tests” here at work, which basically means I end up driving out to some hotsite for a few days and working my tail off. The basic idea is that we have to assume that our data center was destroyed by a comet or overrun by Commie Nazis or something, and we have to rebuild everything. I actually enjoy them, because while it’s hard work and long hours, it’s almost completely technical problems, which is the part of my job I don’t despise with every fiber of my soul. Unfortunately, many of the technical problems appear to be with stuff I don’t control (invariably the backup systems get all screwed up and take 3 times as long to get running as we had anticipated; so far this has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME, and yet we invariably allocate like 3 minutes to get that stuff built), so I spend a lot of time sitting there watching OTHER people panic.

Anyway, we did one starting Friday morning in Carlstadt, New Jersey, which is like one good camel spit from Manhattan. My part in the test wrapped up at about 2am Saturday morning, so I went back to the hotel, got some sleep, packed up, checked out, and drove through Manhattan to Brooklyn to meet my boy Josh for some Wild Fun, which at this stage in my life consists mostly of eating everything I can find.

We grabbed brunch at a nice place called Rosewater (very reasonable; I think we paid about $36 for our grub, which was pretty nice by NYC standards), and then headed into the city to misbehave. We wandered all over Greenwich Village and its environs, ate at Joe’s Pizza (really good), got ice cream at Cones (bloody outstanding), and then a few hot dogs at a street vendor (tasted like a tobacconist’s carpet), along with going into a few fun shops selling things like raccoon penis bones (really).

We went back to Brooklyn to chillax for a while (my left knee has developed the annoying habit of developing AGONIZING PAIN if I walk more than a few miles, so I needed to rest it up), met up with Josh’s girlfriend Cassie, and spent a few hours jamming on our Guitars (we, sadly, did not play Freebird). After Cassie’s nap, the three of us went out and got delicious BBQ (I don’t remember where). Mmmmm…brisket. Then we went back into Manhattan to go to a party, at which I met a large number of Josh and Cassie’s friends and drank too much vodka.

I may or may not have said horribly racist things in the cab on the way back to Brooklyn. I honestly remember nothing of the ride (I fell asleep for most of it), but woke up the next morning with a feeling in my stomach that indicated either I had cast aspersions on the heritage of various persons, or had simply poisoned myself with alcohol, or both. So, to all who were in the car with me (Cassie, Josh, and some poor Middle Eastern driver), I apologize for any and all things I may have said about anything. (This is a pretty standard boilerplate statement that I issue whenever I drink more than 3 cocktails in one sitting.)

Sunday we all slept in until about noon, and then Cassie had to go meet friends for brunch, so Joshums and I went to the Miracle Grill, a satellite location of the official one in Manhattan that’s mostly known for being Bobby Flay’s first big restaurant, before he got famous and turned into a dick. I had an omelet with herbed goat cheese in it, which was ridiculously good.

Then we hung out at Josh’s apartment playing Burnout until I got back in the car and drove home, where I collapsed and entertained myself by tickling Charles to make him giggle, which is HILARIOUS.