Many apologies for not posting recently, but I’ve had one busy Memorial Day weekend! Matt Hotham came by and Yaeka and I got to play a bit of tour guide as well as enjoy this year’s Sasquatch Festival. Images of the performers are up on The PhiLL(er) and other images from another baseball game and the trip to the festival are on their way.
This morning was the first time I ever took advantage of the 764-HERO tattle tail services. Usually, when Phill and I see a single occupancy vhehical in the car pool lane, we never are able to get the license plate number, make, and model of the car all written down or memorized before we can call the number. But this morning I was prepared and we called him in. It was very exciting. I’m sure nothing actually happens to these people since there is no proof that he really was violating the carpool lane, but all my life I had wanted to call that number.
Jade Tree Records out of Deleware was kind enough to allow me to link to some MP3s on their server on The PhiLL(er). It would be tremendous if you would check them out here and download them all. There’s some really good stuff there and I want to make sure that Jade Tree knows I appreciate their help.
I need a motivational coach or go to one of those motivational seminars once a week. It really sucks to be so apathetic about everything. It makes it really difficult to think of things to write about in the blogs and seem like an interesting person. I’m getting duller by the second! I think my new drugs to fix my brain is helping me become even more lazy and apathetic. Now I can actually stand to spend all day long in front of the TV watching crappy shows all day long. I also can now tolerate listening to my boss talk out of her ass through an entire meeting. I think I was more productive thinking about other things during meetings. I think my laziness is going to affect my productivity at home as well.
With the help of my new drugs I have spent more time reading the daily dumb articles on the MSN homepage. Yesterday, I learned how cellulite forms. Turns out if I don’t want a dimply fat ass I have to excercise and drink water. Go figure. Well there was one interesting thing I learned in the article. Cellulite is also effected by estrogen levels as well as the body’s ability to remove toxins from its system. Being on the pill promotes the creation of cellulite. UGH! That sucks. But I guess not having babies is better than having a cellulite-y ass.
I changed the layout of The PhiLL(er) tonight. I started working on it yesterday and probably prematurely put it up as there are always changes and adjustments to be made, but I’d like any comments.
There are two main things I wanted to accomplish. The first was to change the background of the main text to white so that cover art wouldn’t clash with it at all and also I wanted to make the site more compatible with browsers other than Internet Explorer.
I’m far from satisfied with the top banner area as I think the white may be a little too much when present up there, but it was the quickest and cleanest solution. Something I am definitely happy with is the little symbol preceding all of the review/feature links in the left hand column.
After enjoying a game on Thursday night, I was suprised to get a phone call from Yaeka asking if I wanted to go to the game on Friday versus the Yankees. Turns out that my boss had gotten a pair of tickets from the owner of the company, but he wasn’t going to be able to make the game. This game was definitely a hot ticket before the season started and the Mariners began their steady decline, but while waiting to cross the street to the field, I overheard a scalper talking about how difficult it was to sell tickets despite the fact that this was a game against the Yankees who are always able to draw a large crowd.
Yaeka and I were excited to go to the game and were curious as to how the crowd would react to the return of Alex Rodriguez as a Yankee. Before we could enter the game, however, we had to meet up with one of the clowns — literally a clown — that Yaeka works with to return a magic prop. Unfortunately for us this clown lacks some common sense and didn’t seem to understand that there would be traffic getting to the stadium area for the handoff. This led to us missing the introductions of the teams as well as the enormous booing of A-Rod as his name was announced. Oh well, at least we got free tickets and stumbled across some secret free parking!
I entered the game in a pretty poor mood due to the whole ordeal of dealing with the clown, but seeing the field guys do their dance routine brightened my mood. I watched a news report last year — the first year they began doing occasional dances between innings — where they interviewed players and most of them seemed to be embarrassed about it for the guys, but they sure seem to have a good time dancing that I’m sure they don’t care what the players think.
Remember how I was upset about not being around to hear the booing of A-Rod? Well if you read the article linked above, you’ll know that Seattle loves to boo him and I had no reason to fear. He got booed every single pitch of every single at bat.
Here’s a nice shot of Safeco Field. This is definitely a nice field, not a bad seat in the house. I haven’t been able to witness the roof in action, but I did learn from Yaeka that it costs about $1.50 to close the roof. That’s pretty cheap to move a huge thing like that!
I’ve been known to question why in the world the Mariners would bother re-signing Edgar Martinez when he should have just retired last year, but on this night he proved to be quite effective hitting his 500th double and 299th career homerun as well as barely missing career homer 300 by about 5 feet. He finished out the night with 4 RBIs.
While I’m sure for most fans beating the Yankees was the highlight of the night, but for me it was getting this awesome picture taken with the Mariner Moose.
We are breaking up! John in the morning and I are no longer. I knew he was cheating on me but I didn’t know it was this bad. Turns out that not only does he do a weekly radio show on the local commercial radio station, but he also has a weekday slot as well. How can he betray me like this! I wish he would stay pure to the public radio station KEXP. John in the morning is helping the evil commercial radio whores at 107.7 be much cooler than they deserve to be!
I am getting back together with the V-slice. It’s been a while since he was my boyfriend. This John would never cheat on my like this.
So I was checking out all the sites I have linked and happend to catch Kevin Rose’s posting on getting Visual Basic .NET 2003 Standard Edition for free.
I actually just bought a book on VB and ASP .NET so something I am definitely interested in checking out to help expand my little toolkit and maybe make it a bigger toolkit.
Basically, all you have to do is watch 5 of these Microsoft produced videos and rate them and then they send you a redemption code. As Yaeka likes to say, “Free is a price I like”.
The owner of the company I work for decided that this year would be a great year to get season tickets so that he could “watch a winning team”. Boy did he pick a really bad year as the Mariners are doing just plain awful. About a week and a half ago, he wasn’t going to be able to make the game so he gave his pair of tickets to, no, not me, Gabe the forklift driving expert at work. Gabe was pretty excited to get the tickets but as the day wore on he started having doubts about whether or not he’d actually be able to make it. After a quick phone call to make sure our busy schedules were free, Yaeka and I had scored some pretty good tickets on the Avaya Terrace Club level.
After a quick stop at home for some food and to check on the cat, we were off to see the Seattle Mariners play the Minnesota Twins on a Thursday night.
This shot is indicative of the usual state of gasoline in Yaeka’s cars with all of the commuting we do, but we had faith we’d make it to the stadium with no problem. It’s not like we were driving a short bus or anything.
In addition to the excellent gas mileage Rupert gets, Safeco Field is just a quick drive across Lake Washington on the floating bridges.
They weren’t giving away anything cool that night at the stadium, but as you can see it was Wheel of Fortune night. Not really comparable to a bobblehead night or anything like that but we did get to see a few cool things.
Here’s Vanna White throwing out the first pitch. As you can see, Vanna decided not to get her shoes dirty and throw the ball from about 25 ft away. Now that I think about it, she might have actually tossed it underhanded Rookie of the Year style. Her son decided that he couldn’t let it end that way and a pitch of his own from the mound making it to the plate in one bounce.
With all of the formalities out of the way, we were ready to hear Pat Sajak say “play ball” on his pre-recorded message shown on the big video screen.
As I mentioned before, we were sitting in the Avaya Terrace Club level. They have people that come to your seat and take your order as well as deliver it so you don’t have to miss one bit of action. We decided that the extra 17% gratutity wasn’t worth it though and did the walking around the ballpark thing instead like real people. While walking around and checked out Juan Rincon warm up in the bullpen. The ball goes really damn fast when you’re that close.
These aren’t the best shots in the world, but we at least capture Ichiro doing his vertical bat and shoulder touch thing as well as an action shot.
On the way home we had to stop and get gas at the low low price of $2.249 a gallon. Gas at that station today, a week and a half later, is probably about $2.349.