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Woooooooooooooooo baseball! Spring training is winding down, and we are rapidly nearing opening day, which is Sunday, or Saturday, or something. I can’t keep track any more. Time was, I could just check the Reds schedule, but then the Yankees started having opening day games in Japan in like mid-March and then playing some more spring training afterwards, and I think the Red Sox and Phils are playing one last grapefruit league game at CB Park on Saturday, and God knows what else.

Anyway, I feel good about this season, despite the fact that the Phillies webpage currently features a story entitled “Phillies’ bullpen issues are top concern,” which is doubly frustrating ’cause it seems like bullpen issues have been the top concern for, oh, 10 seasons running. So far the most notable thing to happen to the Phils pitching situation is that the guy who was their #1 starter (but who is now in the bullpen?!?) bought a truck that cost more than my effing house.

Why do I feel good? Let’s go over the short list:

• Ryan Howard, the reigning NL MVP. He reminds me of me, if I was 2 inches taller, 20 pounds heavier, 5 times stronger, and, uh, black. And if we’re super lucky, pitchers might actually throw him strikes! This all depends on how Pat Burrell does, of course, since if he keeps pulling his “completely unable to hit the ball with anybody on base” routine, Ryan’s OPS will be .900, .700 of which will be OBP. (That’s lamer-baseball-speak for “he’s going to get walked a ridiculous amount.”)
• Chase Utley, who is entering the season hoping to three-peat as “Phillie For Whom Matt Hearn Would Be Most Likely To Go Gay,” and who has a good chance to get stranded at 2nd base 120+ times this year when Howard gets walked and Burrell strikes out. Plus he’s got killer hustle playing 2nd, so undoubtedly he’ll get taken out by Barry Bonds on a routine double play, tear 74 knee ligaments, and cause me to emit “The Scream Of Having 666 Ravenous Demons Eat My Wang.” But I’m gonna stay positive!!!
• Shane Victorino, who is the fastest Hawaiian I’ve ever seen. He needs a little more experience on the basepaths (he gets thrown out stealing FAR too much for somebody who can outrun my car), but I still giggle when he takes off. I NEED MORE GIGGLING.
• Cole Hamels, who gives me a terrifying Mark Prior vibe (unbelievable talent derailed for months at a time by being depressingly flimsy), but who has basically cornered the market on Upside. The boy can throw, really really really hard. I love him a little bit.

Now, the things that scare me:

• Pat Burrell, who needs to be traded to a team he can periodically DH for so he doesn’t have to play left field, since he runs like Billy Martin after a bender. It’d also be nice if he could bat, say, 6th, and take some of the pressure off, since right now he’s not exactly protecting Ryan Howard as much as inviting other teams to throw directly at his eyeballs.
• The entire pitching staff aside from Cole Hamels, which is about as reliable as Billy Martin’s wang after a bender. I’m predicting the Phils will need to average about 9 runs a game to get enough wins to take the East. That would be a rather staggering offensive display.
• Manager Charlie Manuel, who seems about as effective sober as Billy Martin dead. I think his flaws will be exposed even more as we get to the end of the season and find the Phils in a situation where they need to win 4 of the last 6 to clinch the wildcard and the bullpen is BEYOND wiped out.

Nevertheless, I am stoked for opening day on Sunday and wish I could go to the game to throw batteries at Chipper Jones. And if that seems like a crappy way to end a post, remember that it’s 6pm on the Friday before the start of the season and I need to get this posted with a quickness.

Yesterday was Sarah’s birthday (she’s heck of old), so we went to Red Robin (which recently opened near us, and which we had been advised was rad) to get some burgers and meet up with friends. There were perhaps 15 of us, 5 of which were small children. I spent most of my time making sure Charles didn’t eat silverware, but here’s what I came away with:

• The burgers are fantastic. I had something with egg on it, and I say, anything you can do to add fat and protein to my meat, DO IT. (More on this later.)
• The fries are free. Let me repeat that: the fries are free. And they just keep bringing them to you, like tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants. And they’re not little cheapy fries, but enormous steak fries, one of which was the length of my forearm. I wouldn’t want to meet that potato in a dark alley! Ha ha!
• The burgers aren’t bad reheated and feasted upon the next day, either.

It wasn’t haute cuisine, but it was good, and Red Robin himself was there, to the mirthful delight of all. If I could describe Charles’s response to the enormous mascot, it would probably have to be “speechlessly enamored.” Sarah even got a picture with RR, which I can’t find at the moment or I would have scanned in.

I’ve been in a pretty serious burger mood recently for some reason; Friday night, I took a last minute trip to NYC with my parents and ate at the Ben Ash Deli, known worldwide as “The Deli Across The Street From the Carnegie Deli Which Is More Famous.” Like all good NYC delis, the meals are enormous. I got a basic bacon cheeseburger, which contained a half-pound of beef and easily another half-pound of bacon. As I was eating it, I somehow finished the beef first, and was left with a bun and a handful of bacon. I actually had to stop: I had had enough bacon. This has never, EVER happened before. My mother wondered if I was feeling okay.

We were in New York, incidentally, to see the St. Thomas Choir of Men and Boys sing the Bach St. Matthew Passion; it was last minute ’cause my rents were going with a friend who had to back out. It was, nevertheless, 8 bombs of awesome. They had TWO orchestras of “period instruments” (wooden flutes, weird fat oboe things, old-style violins strung with catgut and bowed with tree limbs or something), a good gaggle of soloists, and of course St. Thomas Church, which is a rather resonant place to sing. Plus the conductor looked like an Austrian Richard Marx. I was going to shout “PLAY HAZARD” during a tender moment, but my mom grabbed my arm skin with her fingernails like she used to do when I misbehaved in my vigorous youth.

The Phillies preview is TOTALLY COMING, I swear! I might even throw in something about how my fantasy baseball draft went! I’m sure you’ll be thrilled. Hint: Mark Teahen is the highlight of my team. It’s going to be a GREAT season.

In which I hate technology, and technology hates me right back.(All up in my grill, yo.)

It’s heck of warm out today (low 60s), so, being a forward-thinking individual, I thought to myself yesterday “I should TOTALLY go running at work and try to eliminate the enormous amount of fat located between my crotch and my boobs,” and brought in running clothes and a towel to store in my locker downstairs in the poop room that has showers. And lo, I took an early lunch, went out, and ran 2.75 miles before the agonizing chest pain and developing foot blister made me stop.

Have I reached my point yet? Not even remotely.

So I came back in, showered, and grabbed lunch, which consisted of a Salisbury “Steak” made of, as far as I can tell, pressed gerbil cremains, along with green beans and cheesy potatoes au gratin (a quality side, to be sure). A few hours later, I realized I was still pretty hungry, so I said to myself, oh man, the SNACK machine will hook me up with FLAVOR.

So I wandered into the snack room, bought a bottle of Diet Coke, and then studied the snack machine for delectables. Sure enough, they had some kind of Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish, all over which I desired to jump. I attempted to stick my dollar into the machine, but was foiled! It would accept no bills. And I had just used the bulk of my change on my drink. Bemused, I pressed a few buttons on the front of the machine, which showed no sign of even being powered on. Argh!

I wandered aimlessly around the halls, looking for another snack machine, and finally found one. Sadly, it had no Apple/Cinnamon-flava’d Danish. It did, however, have a three pack of chocolate cupcakes of the type I subsisted on in high school, so I inserted my dollar and pressed the proper buttons. The machine whirred for a moment, then beeped, and a small light appeared next to some words reading “Please make another selection.”

“What?” I replied. “But the other selections are not what I desire. Don’t mess with me, machine, I COLD RAN 2.75 MILES EARLIER AND AM NOT ONE WITH WHICH YOU SHOULD TRIFLE.” And I pressed the buttons again.

“Please make another selection.”

I tried to outwit the machine by requesting my dollar back, which came back in quarters, and inserting exact change, but I came to the conclusion that whoever inserted the latest supply of foodstuffs had improperly loaded the chocolate cupcakes. In the end I realized that the machines were involved in some kind of conspiracy not to sell me anything that might increase the amount of lipids bonded semi-permanently to my stern. I relented, bought a small package of peanut butter crackers, and went back to my desk to weep silently.

Oh hi! Long time no see, and all that noise. Once again, I have come through my semi-official March no-blogging-allowed time unscathed. In case you’ve missed things and need to catch up, the high school show that Sarah and I rock out on happens in March every year, so basically I disappear off the face of the internetz for the duration of the really hectic part. Which is now over. So I am at your service, once again.

Not that you asked, but the show went really well, almost surprisingly well, considering we started out short on time and THEN lost rehearsals to snow days, such that the pit band had only gotten together twice before tech week. Woo! Also, we waited until the last possible second to find a pianist, and through the blessings of Sweet Sainted Baby Jesus we were able to get the inimitable Steve Weatherman, who singlehandedly saved the show at least thrice. Wooooooo Steve.

Adding to the miracles was the fact that pretty much every single person involved with the show caught the Rotavirus during tech week. In case you are unfamiliar with how Rotavirus works, here’s a snapshot of the symptoms: first, you spray liquids from all of your major holes, and then you sleep. Then you wake up and spray some more, and then feel achy for a few days. This is not conducive to dancing and singing, but everybody pulled through, with the help of a lucky snowstorm Friday that postponed that evening’s show. Oddly enough, I was almost completely unaffected, aside from a queasy feeling all weekend and being unbelievably achy on Saturday. Somehow, we survived.

Now, of course, everyone’s asking me “Hey, now you have all this free time! What are you going to do?” Well, duh: all the of the crap that’s piled up for the last 6 weeks. It’s amazing Charles has gotten bathed and fed, with how little time I’ve had. It’s amazing I’ve been bathed and fed, although to be honest, I do smell a little like fish. I haven’t eaten fish in weeks. I’m wondering if there’s a flounder trapped in a fat roll on my back. (It happens sometimes when I go swimming in the ocean, too.)

Anyway, my plans for the next while involve cleaning my house, playing with my son, napping, and watching baseball. Yay, baseball! BTW: Phillies preview coming up in the near future.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, which was like 26 days ago so this is TOTALLY CURRENT AND UP TO DATE AND YOU CAN’T TELL ME DIFFERENT, here are a short list of various reasons why I love my wife:

• When we took a road trip to the Outer Banks last fall, I made a mix CD of various recent tunes that I liked, which included some Alison Krauss, John Mayer, and that new Avril Lavigne song, “Keep Holding On,” which is in 3/4 and therefore I like it. (I have a thing for that meter.) After listening to the first few tunes, HW turned to me and said,

  “Were you on your period when you made this?”

• Yesterday, we were in the kitchen feeding Charles and making lunch, and she walked by me and bumped her hip into mine. I said,

  “Did you just do what I think you did?”

  Sarah giggled. “Yep.”

  “All trying to give me the hip bump?”

  “I farted.”

• She takes so much in stride:

  Me: I just pulled a chunk of wax out of my ear the size of a lady bug.
  Her: Eww dude
  Me: Jeepers, what the hell. I thought I cleaned this ear the other day. I’m getting even MORE wax out.
  Me: What the [very bad word]! I think a bee tried to build a hive in here.
  Her: EWW
  Me: I’ve scooped out 3 big chunks with my pencil, and I think there’s more.
  Her: Oh, weird.The date on my watch is messed up.

So, in short: Sarah is rad.

On the news front, the show is chugging along; we open Thursday, with three rehearsals between now and then to get things right. Woo! I’m terrified, but I always am at this point.

Things with the high school show (“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Mar 15-17, 7pm, Brandywine High, come check it as it will be RAD) are ramping up rapidly, so we’re heck of busy with that. Still, a few things worth sharing:

Our friends Brian and Karen got married over the weekend; check out a few choice photographz here. Everybody was HOT.

I also put up some new pictures over at CharlesHearn.com. They are so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend checking them out.

I’ve had my Sanyo Katana for almost four months now, so I figure it’s time a little review, so I can let you know whether or not it’s awesome or Teh Suczk.

You may recall my short post a few months ago when I bought it and alerted the world that you could actually call me (the previous phone had been broken for a while). At the time, I was totally enamored with my new little flip-phone, and now that the initial puppy love has dissipated, it’s time to take a hard look at the pros and cons, yo.

Pros:

• It’s super-slim. Seriously, it’s like a half-inch thick. It would fit comfortably in the rear pocket of my jeans, even with my gigundous black girl booty, if I wasn’t afraid of sitting on it and crushing it with Teh Fatne$$.
• I can hear people on it, and they can hear me. This may seem like a basic thing, but after the problems I had with the last phone, this is a major improvement.
• HUGE screen. For websurfing it’s still a tad small, but I was able to download Google Maps’ free mobile client for it, and now I never get lost! Which is teh sweet.

Cons:

• You can use it as a wireless broadband device, which is pretty cool, but Sprint wants you to pay $40 a month for the service. With Sarah’s phone, which is a bit older, you can do it for free. What a gyp. $40 a month, which is about what I pay for 3Mb/s cable modem access, for something no faster than about a 38400-baud modem. No thanks, losers.
• The ringtones are too soft. All the ringers are too soft, in my opinion. Most of the time, that’s good, since I don’t need the thing playing the theme from “The Greatest American Hero” (Sarah’s personal ringtone) at 110 decibels while I’m at, say, the proctologist, but when I’m driving in my car and singing along with “My Sweet Escape” by Gwen Stefani, I usually can’t hear it. Which of course is when wives, when they are pregnant, go into labor. (Note: HW is NOT currently pregnant, for which she thanks Baby Jesus.)
• This is a biggie: the stupid side button keyguard is set up in the most ridiculous possible way. The phone, like many others, has little buttons on the side that perform a variety of tasks, like controlling volume, scrolling through the phonebook, and, while the phone is closed, activating the speaker phone and dialing the most recent number. Since I keep my phone in my pocket, and since I wear very, very tight pants, this is bad, because if I don’t turn on the keyguard the phone continually dials people, the end result of which is my father-in-law saying “hello? hello?” over and over again to my junk.

  Not cool.

  You’d think you could just set the keyguard and not have a problem, but get this: you can disable the keyguard by just holding the button down long enough. Which happens at least twice a week because, as I mentioned, I WEAR TIGHT PANTS. (Everything’s tight when you are 45% ass.) This is the major flaw in the phone, in my opinion; I’m hoping they issue a firmware patch that allows you to completely disable the side buttons when the phone is closed.

Final verdict? A solid B+, which is far better than any other phone I’ve had. (The last phone probably started out a B and ended up as an F———— because by the end it didn’t actually function as a phone; it was more like a $30 a month pocket watch.)

Walking through my local Acme on Monday, I discovered that, of all things, they were selling Ducklings. 5 pounders. On sale for $1.99 a pound. I was like, whaaaaaaa?
I have a more or less permanent craving for duck, and have always wanted to make it myself, but never found a place that sold it (I guess I could check a local butcher, but there’s not one that’s at all convenient). I consider it rather a gourmet item, so finding it Acme seemed incongruous; I half expected to find, I dunno, bricks of foie gras or something nearby.

Anyway, I grabbed me one and brought it home. Sarah was out with Charles, having dinner with friends, so I had plenty of time; I made a nice brine, pulled all the giblets out of the bird, and threw that puppy in there for a good soak. Mmmm…sugar salt water. While that sat outside in the snow to keep things from getting too bacteria-y, I worked in the garage building a custom-sized baby gate for our main staircase, which is only 5 steps high but 48″ wide, and all the pre-made gates that fit that size and were hinged were going to run us $60 and I said HA HA to that. HA.

After a couple hours, I covered the bird in salt and pepper, sliced up the skin a bit to promote rendering and tasty browning, and threw it into a 400 degree oven to try and get me a nice crispy skin. After about 20 minutes, the skin was sort of bubbling, but not yet brown; I lowered the temperature a bit and put my probe thermometer in the thigh.

After an hour or so, it started beeping. I was like, wait what? I thought this thing would take 2, maybe three hours. Nay nay, apparently. The skin was still kinda squishy, but I’m not terribly picky, so I cut in, and was nearly bathed in dark red liquid. Ummm…yeah, done my fat pink booty. Back into the oven it went, and I upped the temperature to 500 to try and crispify things.

5 minutes later….beep beep beep! What the hell. I got out my instant-read thermometer, though, and everything said 165, which admittedly is lower than the 180 demanded by the government, but if I did everything the government said I’d have a lot fewer hobo bodies under my floorboards. There was still red liquid, but I said to myself, hey, this is duck. Not nasty salmonella-y chicken. I’m gonna eat it.

And I did. And I’m still alive! It was delicious, although the skin needed way more crispitude. Next time: I’m just gonna let that bastard broil.

Just a few short notes for today:

• They still haven’t plowed my neighborhood, and so now the ice has sublimated and refrozen and is perfectly slick. I basically sledded out to the main highway today. Note that the 1998 Mazda Protege is NOT equipped with runners. I’d make some calls, but you know me, I don’t like to create a fuss. Plus I have a sneaking suspicion the guy in our neighborhood who is in charge of such things has probably taken 37 calls on the subject and might strangle me through the phone if I call him up and employ Sarcasm. So I’m gonna let it slide. For now. Unless I’m driving home with my son and I slide into a parked car at 5mph.
• My homeskillets Ped and Andy have started themselves a blog in which they intend to ridicule all things artsy. I fully support this, and not just because I’ve known the two of them for like 8,000 years.

  In fact, it’s an odd story, woven through the millenia: I knew Ped when I was like 8 or something, in public school. I think we ran across each other in Math League every year all through middle school and high school. Andrew I knew because we were in band in high school, but he also may have done dorky science and math stuff with me before then. And then we were all in the Ychromes together in college. Delaware is a small place.

  Anyway, check out their site, it’s highly amusing.

• I’m setting myself up for a serious amount of abuse here, but on the advice of my attorney Josh, I have invested in a neti pot. The idea, and this is really gross, is that you make a saline solution, and then you pour it into one nostril while it drains out of the other one. Then you switch nostrils. It’s very new age. It cleans out your sinuses, and then you get to spend a few minutes spraying water out of your snozz and spitting out nasty wet loogies.

  It’s almost as fun as it sounds, but I can report that my sinuses are so clear it’s disturbing. I’ve used it twice a day for about 3 days (although not this morning, ’cause I was in a hurry, yo) and have achieved major awesome results. There are downsides, however:

  1. The sensation of water pouring into your sinuses and back out the other nostril is pretty disturbing. It goes against all my principles of “avoiding sinus burn in the pool.” Doesn’t burn a bit, though, unless you’re an idiot and double the amount of salt in the solution.
  2. Sometimes the saline gets sort of trapped in your sinuses, and you can’t really feel it in there, then later on, you bend over for some reason, such as to kiss your wife, and salt water pours out of your nose all over, say, your wife’s face. Her response to this may be unpleasant.

  Still, it’s given me a reasonably clear schnozz for the last few days, and I’m looking forward to finding out if it improves my singing noticeably.

Man, local civic associations are AWESOME!

Wait, did I say awesome? I meant POINTLESS, ANNOYING, AND LAME.

We have a nice neighborhood civic association to whom we give twenty bucks a year, in exchange for which they operate some kind of community watch and send out monthly letters begging deadbeats to send in their dues. (They’ve actually started publishing the addresses of folks who don’t send in the cash, which I find greatly amusing; so far my block has been pretty good about paying up, because the monthly flyers seem to imply I’m expected to join a roving band of vigilantes to walk up to miscreant households and torch them to the ground.)

From these monies they also pay for mowing of the community park areas, and snow plowing in the winter. Which would be great if the plowing was done. It ain’t gettin’ done, son. You may have noticed on Wednesday that we had a pretty significant snow/sleet/freezing rain “event,” resulting in 2-4 inches (depending on where you measure it) of rock-hard ice on our streets and lawns. My wife spent about an hour yesterday chipping it off of our cars. (I would have helped, but it was HECK of cold out there.)

Now it’s been sitting for a day, and is thusly not going to melt until August, so we get the joy of driving over it for a few months. AWESOME! Er, LAME!

Okay, sure, the community watch does seem to deter crime; we haven’t had a murder in our neighborhood in 2 or 3 years (true story). And I do approve of them getting the grass mowed rather than, you know, letting it overgrow the jungle gym. Now if they could just find a way to prevent my across-the-street neighbors from parking all their crappy cars in front of my house. (Sadly, it turns out it’s illegal to slash their tires! Who knew?)