packing and ranting

Not much to say about today. After making my last post, I did infact succeed in packing SEVEN BOXES WORTH OF STUFF!!1!!!1 I also ended up watching various stuff on the videotapes I was intending to just figure out what was on them, including an episode of Maison Ikkoku, some TMBG TV appearances, half of an episode of Saturday Night Live from around 1990, and the first half of the movie Double Switch, which to this day I would still rank among my favorite movies, if I could only find the second half of it. Stupid Disney Sunday Nights. I think George Newbern was the first actor I ever had a crush on. It's neat to see that he's now doing voice acting for stuff like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, heh.

Oren came over out of boredom in the late evening and we ended up going over to Chipotle for dinner. I guess it was good to get out of the house.

I came back, packed CDs and watched the third episode of 魔女の条件; I can't explain why I'm watching it, really; it must be the hidden soap-opera-watcher/romance-novel-reader in my subconscious. I've come to the conclusion that every Johnny's Jimusho boy, in order to graduate to their full idol potential -- where not only does every screaming teenage girl want them, but also their moms and grandmoms -- has to do a TV dorama in which they fall in love with an older woman and have some sort of forbidden affair. I've obviously not seen all of them, but so far, Tackey's role in this show fits it (him with his ten-years-older teacher played by the lovely Matsushima Nanako), as does Matsujun's in the show Kimi wa Petto, where he became the eight-years-older Koyuki's "pet boy", and Yamapi in "Sore Wa, Totsuzen, Arashi No You Ni", where he convinces the fifteen-years-older Esumi Makiko to take dance lessons at his studio, only to draw her away from her husband.

It's weird, because somehow I haven't seen any doramas yet that focus on relationships with the opposite age disparity. I don't think they don't exist; it's probably just that I haven't seen any yet, though; or that it's more "natural" for a guy to be the older one, that it hasn't been a story focus per se. I suppose in Akimahende, Sumire's dating that older dude, and Sakurai does go after Aoyama in Densha Otoko... but these aren't main plot couples. I dunno.

Uh, so anyway, on another note, I cropped some of my Pittsburgh pictures, well, at least, the baseball-related ones; I also have (mostly for Megan's sake) a great picture of PNC Park that makes a nice desktop wallpaper if you feel like downloading the 1.2 MB it currently takes up. It's my background though and I am quite happy with it.

Jonah Keri confirmed that he'd come to Seattle Baseball Book Club next weekend when we discuss his book. Now I just have to find some people to actually, like, go to book club. :) I think there'll be a better turnout due to the Prospectus-ness of it, plus he said he'd see if he could put a note about it in the Baseball Prospectus daily email on Monday. Jonah's so awesome.

I'm heading down to Tacoma for the Rainiers game tomorrow! Well, games, really, being as today got rained out and it's a doubleheader to make up for it. And assuming I wake up on time. But I should. It's time to sleep now.

Tacoma Rainiers fun

I spent today in Tacoma. Went down for the Rainiers-Bees doubleheader. It was fun. I basically spent the day with two of the guys from Mariners Morsels -- I sat the first game with Paul and his wife and son. His son is like 4 years old and spent the whole game yelling "SWING BATTER BATTER BATTER BATTER!" and such. It was cute, but I have to admit if I had paid more than $7 to get into the game, I'd probably want to kill him. Still, it amused most of the people around us. The Rainiers won that first game, despite Jered Weaver striking out 12 of them in 6 innings; they blew apart the bullpen for 4 runs in the 8th inning to win 4-2.

Inbetween games, Paul and his family decided to leave, but he found me Marc W, another guy from Mariners Morsels. Marc's dad had decided to take off after the first game, so I came down to the home plate box seats and sat in Marc's dad's seat. And OH MY GOD, I was literally three rows behind the foul ball screen by the plate. At one point I simply walked up and took some pictures from right inside the screen. Also, Clint Nageotte (one of the Mariners/Rainiers pitchers) was sitting three seats down from us, and Francisco Cruceta was in the row ahead of him -- Cruceta had a radar gun and Nageotte had a pitch chart sheet, and they were keeping track of all the Rainiers pitchers. Marc and I went up to Nageotte and got him to sign these 8x10 pictures Paul had printed out for us. So it's really rad -- I have a great signed picture of Nageotte pitching the Rainiers Opening Day game. How sweet is that? I guess it's a good thing he really sucked when the Mariners called him up for a day or two, or he wouldn't have been down in Tacoma. Dustin Moseley and one of the other Bees pitchers were sitting a few rows behind us doing pitch charts for their team. I had no idea that the team has to do that stuff.

Marc was also pointing out all the players' families to me. He was like, "See that cute little Korean kid jumping up and down and running through the stands over there? That's Shin-soo Choo's son," and stuff like that. Minor league games are fun like that.

The second game was supposed to only be seven innings, but the Rainiers managed to tie it up 3-3 in the bottom of the 7th when Hunter Brown reached base on an error. So it went into the 8th inning, aka "extra innings", but Dallas McPherson hit a home run in the top of the 8th, and that's where the score stayed, the Bees winning 4-3.

I had a blast getting to hang out with Marc though, talking about old baseball stuff and Japan and other crap. He had to take off after the game since his wife expected him home a lot earlier than 7:30pm from an afternoon game, but I'm sure we'll hang out at a game again in the future.

Since it was late and I was starving, having not eaten anything all day, I ended up going to Claim Jumper with Oren for dinner, where I got *too much* food. Oops. Afterwards we watched ESPN's Baseball Tonight for a bit until we saw the web gems and got sick of John Kruk, and I came home.

Whoosh.