Tag Archives: rant rant rant

No, it’s Iowa. Could’ve sworn it was heaven.

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It’s been a long, strange week. Most of them are.

I’ve spent a good part of the week angry at the Phillies, as I imagine anyone in my position would be. When they’re winning the wildcard for the first time in a damn long time, I let my hopes grow. And of course, when the Phils drop three to Houston, and are suddenly in third place for both the wildcard and the division, with a two and a half game gap in September, it concerns me. They’re breaking my heart, and I knew they were going to break my heart (they haven’t been in the playoffs since ’93) and I let them in anyway, and now they’re breaking it. So of course I’m going to call them heartless bastards when they give up a two-run single in the seventh. (I’m telling you, they’re playing the bullpen too hard — why the hell can’t we get some starters who can play more than 5 innings in September? And now we’ve lost Padilla for God-knows-how-long…It’s been a long September and there was reason to believe maybe this year would be better than the last.)

I watched them play while cooking dinner tonight, cursed a bit, then we flipped through the channels for a while, and landed on AMC, about a minute and a half in to Field of Dreams. Now I’ve seen The Natural more times than I can count, and though I’ve never seen all of Bull Durham, in order and complete, I know enough to mutter “eight and sixteen… how did we ever win eight?” under my breath when the going gets tough. But somehow I’d never seen Field of Dreams for more than ten minutes even once.

I won’t tell you about the movie. You’ve either seen it, and know how it makes you feel the grass between your toes, or you haven’t and there’s no way I could describe it any more than I could describe how ghosts in a corn field turn into a baseball movie. Watching it is playing wiffle ball in every yard we’ve ever owned. It’s learning how to score at my brother’s little league games. It’s standing on the mound – any mound – and listening to the air crackle around you. The smell of the leather, the rough feel of the bat, the sound of the dirt and the taste of the air. Doesn’t matter who’s playing, or at what level, or what time. The choice between a fastball and a curve, between a pitch and a throw to first, between an all-out run and a head-first slide. I breathe baseball.

And it took a movie about a corn field in Iowa to remind me of that feeling you get when the sting of the Eagles’ season end is still fading, and the grass is green for the first time. The sky is so blue that sometimes, it doesn’t have to be about the pennant. Sometimes, it’s about the curve of the blue plastic seats at the park, and the hot smell of suntan lotion on my husband’s neck, and the sound of Harry Kalas calling a long fly ball.

Boys, I forgive you. Even if you manage to come back this season and make it to the playoffs only to break my heart again… I’ll still forgive you.

Try to win a few more next year, huh?

why won’t you be an asshole like i asked you to?

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okay. so sometimes i’m not mentally healthy. stress buildup mostly. and usually i can let off steam by writing melodrama that would make you puke. i keep at least one or two tragedies going at any given time for such a purpose.

and i’m in one of those moods right now – too much everything for my puny self to handle, so i’ve turned back to this sort story i started a while ago. i’ve been looking forward to this one since before school started and now that it’s done it’s time to write some horrible tearjerky thing that will have even me groaning in five years’ time.

but the problem – okay, it’s about a guy who falls in love with this girl, but she’s going out with someone else, and that someone else breaks her heart so she’s really fragile but the first guy, he loves her anyway but he doesn’t know how to show it and he does something incredibly stupid. stupid stupid stupid. unthinking and stupid and tragedy ensues.

but that’s the thing, if he doesn’t do the stupid thing, there’s no plot. and see, i’ve really started to like this guy. he’s a nice guy, if a bit dumb on the relationship end of things, and he really does love her and it’s horrible how they end up and it’s not fair and, well, i don’t want him to do this horrible stupid thing. i like him.

(a quiet part of my brain just chanted, kira’s got a boyfriend, but that’s unfair ’cause that’s a different tragedy altogether.)

anyway, he’s taken on a life of his own, which is okay and all, but i still really need him to do this stupid thing, or I’ve got no climax. No plot. No denouement. (look it up.) Without this, there’s no change in the characters, and believe you me when you see what a stupid thing he does, you’ll know change is necessary. Dammit. I want to yell at him….but something tells me that yelling at the nonexistant people in my head is frowned upon by the sleeping denizens of this household.

Sleep is going to be sketchy tonight. maybe tomorrow i’ll stuff him back in the box.

get.back.in.the.box.

On miracles and mental breakdowns.

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Yeah, so last night at about 11:30, I was working on some code for a little side-project while watching the Phillies game and generally trying to spin down from a crazy day. I got about 2/3 of what I needed done, and I tried to push a new stylesheet up to the system, when suddenly everything choked. Dreamweaver, which is prone to the occasional odd error message, informed me that it couldn’t upload the file in question because, well, the file didn’t exist, or maybe I didn’t have permission to use it.

And, well, that’s bunk, because I’m the ONLY one with permission to use these files, and this particular one had been uploaded mere minutes before. So I logged on to my web host and decided to manually upload the file instead…. only to discover that Dreamweaver wasn’t lying; the directory I was working in was empty. So were most of the others. Most of the pages here woudn’t load, and a good chunk of my other work was just plain gone.

Panic ensued.

I sent a note to the support team, waited a few minutes, and watched as one by one entire directories just poofed. No backup files, no forum, no wordpress… Another panicked note to the support team. This time, a response: they’re aware of it and working on it and it’ll be up within the hour. But that was at 1 AM and I have to be to work early today for a meeting. (yay meeting.)

Did you ever go to bed at night and wonder if everything you’d done was going to be there in the morning? Not a comfy feeling. I think I “get” Neverending Story in a whole new way now.

After a fitful night sleep, I’m back, and so is everything else. The support team was, as always, good to their word. And I am immediately applying what I learned. First, a backup was done. (I do these regularly, but not regularly enough.) And second, I’ve added a link to my Xanga blog in the links section. Strangely, when everything else was disappearing rapidly last night, the homepage was still there, so the links section was still functional. If all else has failed, I’m relatively sure Xanga will still be standing, and since it doesn’t live on the same server as everything else, it’s a decent place to post updates when I can’t post updates. Of course, in case of catastrophe, homepage mileage may vary, so you may want to make note of that one somewhere if you haven’t already.

So anyway, mental breakdown over, and I have to get my butt to work. Here’s hoping the next 24 hours contains fewer heart-attack inducing elements for all of us.

July 27th cannot come fast enough.

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COMMENCE WHINING:
I’m up to my eyeballs in Javascript and PHP and MySQL on only six hours of sleep during my vacation!. Had Hershey’s chocolate and a cherry Coke for breakfast, which have kept the headaches at bay. Need to work on the yard, clean the house, etc. etc. etc. I could use a vacation from my vacation.

I have 15 days until this class – and my degree – are complete. I cannot wait.
WHINING COMPLETE (for now).

Baseball!

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Today my family and I sat in the hot July sun just up the third base line (100-level seats! whoo!) and watched the Phillies beat the Washington Nationals 5-4 in 12 hot innings.

It. Was. Awesome.

Don’t get me wrong – the Phillies stil haven’t convinced me that they’ve even got a shot at climbing out of the basement and finishing even in a respectable 2nd place for the division. Despite their 12-of-13 winning streak earlier this season (a streak that made them the leaders of the wildcard all-too-temporarily) they’ve wrested defeat out of the jaws of victory enough times this season that today’s win was wholly unexpected.

In fact, I’ve already reached a point where I call my cousin just to rant about “those bums” (as generations of my family have done before), and a good portion of last week was spent muttering “Eight and sixteen… how did we ever win eight?”

Maybe that’s why today’s win was so sweet. It was messy – they stranded too many runners – and it was hot, and we ran out of lines on the scorecard and had to start writing the score information in the “at bats” and “runs” columns, but when it was all said and done it was a mark in the win column.