So Long Scooter, Hello Vivian

So in other major world news, I sold my beloved scooter so I could purchase a car. A 1975 Mercedes 280 named Vivian, to be precise. She also goes by "The Benz." A lady at my work was going to sell this off cheap, and I couldn't resist. So as much as I loved my scooter, I decided this was a slightly more practical commuter solution. I can drive it in the rain and do other useful things such as picking up my shirts from the cleaners. It definitely wouldn't be a dependable long-commuter car, but for tooling around the greater La Jolla/UTC area, she will suit me just fine. For a 1975, it's a pretty smooth running ride. Here she is in all her glory...



























The interior is a little more rough than the exterior, but still not in bad shape. And the seat covers alone make up for that. Also, as you can see, it apparently comes with an inherited membership in the St. Jude Travel Club, so, you know, that's pretty cool.

More Cohen Pics...

I know, I'm behind the times. But better late than never, right? Here's the handsome profile...


















Here's his foot... (it took the nurse like 5 minutes to get this shot because he was moving around so much)


















And here he is doing a mime routine... (He's in a glass box - No wait! A uterus!!!)


















Once again, I'll resist posting the gender shots, though I have to say they were pretty dang hilarious looking.

Say Hello to Cohen Ray! (And some other stuff too)

So we found out we're having a boy!!! (Yeah, I know it's old news for most...but what can I say, I suck at blogging. So whatever, man. Get off my back. Geez.) Here's a couple pics - I'm not going to post the one's that show the necessary evidence for gender determination...that just seems a little weird. But we went to one of those 3d ultrasound places, and while these pictures aren't all that clear, the video was pretty cool. I think Jess has more on her myspace.









And since I'm posting old, outdated news, I might as well fill you in on our Valentine's day...a month ago. First of all, the night before, my wife somehow managed to "borrow" my keys, lift my building access card from my briefcase, hide decorations in a "bag of thrift store stuff", and totally sell me on a "going to the store" story. The end result was that I showed up to work the next morning to find my desk looking like this:














Quite frankly, Jess generally sucks at being sneaky, so needless to say I was very impressed. (And the whistling monkey and balloon are still on my desk.) As for dinner plans, Jess unfortunately had to work that night, and she didn't know when she would be off, so reservations were out of the question. So I decided it would be best to do dinner at home. (on a side note, Jess has a new job now at Kindercare that she totally loves, and she works M-F 8-6:30....Glory Hallelujah and Amen.) But anyway, I was running late due to large crowds at the grocery store, and we didn't end up eating till after 10:00 - but I think I pulled it off....




First things first, you have to set the mood with some music...







Here's my lovely wife perusing the night's menu. (And yes, that's only sparkling cider on the table for prego.)











What was on the menu? Well, the appetizer was mashed potatoes with herbs, and sauteed garlic asparagus.






The entree was a dish called "Halibut Olympia" - a totally unhealthy yet delicious way to eat halibut with a sour cream and breaded topping mixture.






And for dessert, chocolate lava cakes (not home made) with vanilla ice cream (not home made) and a strawberry sauce (home made). Although the strawberry sauce thickened up during dinner more than I expected, so when I attempted to drizzle, it kind of just splattered. Looks like a slasher was on the loose in my kitchen during dessert. But it was an excellent sauce nonetheless.



And here's a picture from the end of our dinner - Me with a double chin, and my wife with a new 8G Ipod Nano. What can I say, I'm pretty much the best husband in the world.

Babies and Baseball Broadcasters

So the news this week is that my sis Lani had her baby on Friday - a little girl named Lilah...they should have pictures up on their blog soon I believe, so check them out. They are all doing well, so congrats to them on numero quatro...

The other big news this week was, again, from the baseball world - though of a much more heartening nature than the last piece baseball news I shared. Dave Niehaus, the Mariners broadcaster since their inception in 1977 (31 years now), was finally voted as the Ford C. Frick award recipient this year. For those of you who don't know, [almost everyone] this essentially the highest honor a baseball broadcaster can receive. It means he gets inducted into the Broadcasters Wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY this summer - along with the likes of Mel Allen, Vin Scully, and Harry Caray. The announcement came this Tuesday, on his 73rd birthday. Way to go Dave! This is actually the most excited I have been as a Mariner fan since 2001. To put it simply, Dave Niehaus IS Mariners baseball to me. Having listened to him almost exclusively for all my baseball loving years, I associate his voice with the glory of the game more than anything else. And on a professional level, he truly is as good as they come. I have never heard an announcer who can match his ease, descriptiveness, and professionalism yet. In fact, having been spoiled by Niehaus, most play-by-play announcers make me cringe. He can hold your attention without over-talking/reacting, and can relate the ambiance and feel of the ballpark better than anybody. And although he is the M's biggest cheerleader, he never criticizes the other team (as many announcers do), but is always very complimentary of them. I could go on, but since I'm already risking being called a nerd again, I'll simply encourage you to check out some of these links...If you are a baseball fan you will appreciate them. And if you aren't yet, then perhaps, as he has done for thousands of others, Dave can help you become one.

This is a link to a USSM post regarding Niehaus. The author, Dave Cameron, eloquently states how most M's fans (myself included) feel about the honor...go ahead and read the comments too - you'll find I'm not the only nerd around here.

Here's a link to one of the many articles on the Mariners website and MLB.com. I highly encourage you to click the video link at the top of the article entitled "31 Years of Niehaus." (Stupid MLB.com is pretty stingy with their content. I've never yet found a way to even link directly to their player, much less embed video anywhere.)

And here's an ESPN article about Dave...and found in the middle of it are several audio clips of some of Dave's classic calls. Well worth a listen.

So there you go...all in all a pretty good week.

At Long Last...

So today was the day that you all have been waiting for - Mariners pitchers and catchers reported to Peoria for the first day of Spring Training 2008!!! Baseball is back!!! Now that I live relatively close to AZ, I'm hoping to perhaps make it over there at some point this spring to catch a game or two - money and time permitting. (Though I'm not holding my breath, as I rarely find money and time to be in very permissive moods. They remind me more of the overbearing parents of a teenager. They never let me do what I want.) I must however confess that I would be much more ecstatic about the beginning of this season had the M's GM and front office not gone and made more horrible off-season moves. Anyone who has bothered to read this post this far has probably ascertained that I'm speaking of last week's Bedard-Jones + trade. Bavasi went into the off-season letting everyone in the world know he was desperate for a "#1 type starter." (One can easily assume his job is on the line this season, and he's still trying to recover from last year's Ramirez/Weaver fiasco.) And it's true, they needed pitching. So I give them credit in pursuing Kuroda strongly...If they wanted to sign somebody, I think he was their best bet. There weren't many top-notch arms on the FA market, and (fortunately) they didn't really have enough to buy into the Santana Sweepstakes. But they lost him to the Dodgers. So then, rather than coming to the long over-due conclusion that "maybe-we- should-develop- our-own-young-pitchers- from-within-and- spend-our-money-on-improving- our- defense- and-offense-instead-of-using-it-on-over-priced- free-agents," they signed Carlos Silva for 4 years @ $44 million. Not a great move - his skills aren't a great match for Safeco at all. But hey, he's a decent pitcher, and they didn't have to give anyone up. So it could have been worse. Aaaaaaand then it did get worse. The M's have been grooming Adam Jones for years, and I've been waiting for him to have a permanent spot on their roster for a long time. And with the departure of Guillen, it seemed like this was finally his year. He's a 23 year old solid 5-tool player. Even if he never lives up to his awesome potential, at worst, he will be an above average major leaguer. And at best, he's gonna be a superstar. But no, Bavasi couldn't give up, and decided to mortgage the team's future for his "# 1 starter." He sent Jones, George Sherrill (one of the best lefty specialists in the league,) and 3 good minor league pitching prospects to Baltimore for Erik Bedard. That's 5 for 1, folks. And keep in mind that Jones would belong to the Mariners for 6 years. Bedard is up for free agency in 2. If they don't get an extension worked out soon...well, let's just say I won't be happy. Now don't get me wrong, I think Bedard is a stud. And it's going to be alot of fun to watch him and Felix go back to back. But by filling one hole, they created even more. They had options for filling their rotation, and they really needed to focus on improving their corner defense and power. They could have fielded an amazing, young, division contending team in a couple of years. But they decided to jump the gun and bet the house on Bedard. I hope it works. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I'll obviously still be rooting for them all the way. But I just don't see them beating the Angels with this offense. As a die-hard fan, it's just frustrating when your team's front office seems incapable of making smart baseball decisions. Sure, they have made some good moves over the years (Ichiro, Hernandez, Betancourt, etc.) But it seems like their specialty lies in signing over-paid under-achievers, (Weaver, Ramirez, Vidro, Cairo, etc.) singing the praises of mediocrity, talking big - and finishing in second place. But I guess I'll just look on the bright side. We have two of the best young pitchers in baseball, a young Cuban defensive whiz at short who's alot of fun to watch, the ageless, enigmatic hitting machine known as "Ichiro", and at worst, alot of genuinely nice guys filling out the roster. And hey, it's baseball....anything could happen.

(If you disagree with this assessment, or want more info, the USS Mariner is a good place to start. But be forwarned: those guys are hard-core stat geeks. They analyze this way deeper than I do...compared to them I'm almost a "casual fan"! They're also a bit more pessimistic than I like, though not entirely without reason...)

Songwriters of the Future

Back when I was young, we had these online discussion forums called web boards - what? They still have those? I guess I just haven't used one in a while, since someone told me blogging was the cool thing to do. I'm sure in the near future, it will all be considered antiquated technology. I have no doubt that the very child now growing in my wife's womb will someday look at me in shocked hilarity and exclaim "You used to post on web boards?!? Wow, I didn't know my dad was such a fooblerond." (In the future, of course, they will have new words to describe someone who is hopelessly out of touch.) Then the child will take a 6D holo-video of their embarrassing dad with their Apple i-Robot and send it via telepathy-text to their best friend/virtual classmate in Tokyo. I will probably be put out by this disrespect, and become slightly defensive. "Is it really necessary to make fun of me to your friends?" I will say, "They'll see this all tonight on Reality World anyway." (By this time, you know, the entire world will be a reality tv show. There will be camera crews in every house 24/7, and thousands of channels for each geographical region. But being the self-absorbed people we are, everyone will only watch their own channel to see what happened to themselves and all their friends that day. There will also be, by necessity, a spin-off reality show called "Lives of Reality World Camerapersons" that targets the only demographic not receiving regular exposure on the rest of the Reality World Network.)

Ummm...sorry, I got sidetracked. I was talking about a web board - to be more specific the "Webb Board" located on the website of a wee bald musical genius named Derek Webb. There was a very friendly, intelligent, artistic community there that kept a lively discussion going on a smorgasboard buffet of topics. (Although I now believe that many of them were only covertly looking for spouses...*turns to his cousin and winks*...) Btw, I use past tense when describing this community only because I no longer frequent it - i don't know if it exists still or not. Maybe I should find out. Anyway, there was an ever-present thread going there for songwriters. People would post their latest pieces and get help and critique from the rest of the community - and I remember that it was really a great outlet and encouragement for my feeble attempts at the craft. I started thinking about that now, because I believe I'm finally coming out of a musical dry spell that I was beginning to fear might last forever. I haven't played guitar or written songs in so long...but now...well it seems like the creative juices are at least beginning to trickle. Perhaps if I come up with anything worthwhile in the future, I'll post it here... Writing a truly worthwhile song, however, is the hardest thing for me to do. That's actually what I was going to elaborate on in this post, but now I've already rambled too much. So sometime in the future (before blogs and the internet go out of style) I will post my thoughts on songwriting, and perhaps a few of my favorite lyrics of all time. Cheers.

Christmas @ Big Bear

I know this is a little after the fact, but I thought I would post a few pics from our weekend at Big Bear. There wasn't alot of snow on the ground, but It was still definitely good to get up in the mountains. And the lack of snow didn't seem to bother most of these snow-starved Californians... they still lined their cars up at every wide spot in the road and flocked by the dozens to frolick around in little patches of crusty, dirty snow leftovers. It was amusing. At any rate, we kept a roaring fire going and lazed around the cabin most of the weekend stuffing our faces and playing foosball. On Christmas Eve it was about 50 degrees and we went to a tubing run, and then on Christmas the temp dropped to freezing and stayed there all day. The big bummer for the weekend was that we had to take Grandpa to the hospital on Christmas. Their doctor had told them they didn't need to take oxygen up, but because of the altitude change he started having congestive heart failure again, and we had to have the paramedics come to get him down the killer set of stairs at the cabin. They got his oxygen levels up at the hospital and just kept him in over night and he's doing fine now. The big fun for the weekend of course was springing the news about our baby in the making...that was fun. I thought we did a good job keeping it a secret up until Christmas Day - even with Jess eating constantly and nonchalantly dashing to the bathroom to throw up. Most of all we just enjoyed at least feeling like we were out in the woods again, smelling the pine trees and wood smoke and watching the critters... Ah, the simple life.