The Kids

I guess there’s probably nobody reading this who only knows us through this blog (such as it is), but just in case, this is what our kids look like now:

Today’s the Day…

I guess it’s a little premature to write a post about the birth of my second son (third child) since he’s probably still hours away, but I’m sitting here in the hospital room while Kristin sleeps (thanks to the wonders of medical science in the form of an epidural) through the early/middlish part of her labor. I was watching some show on Netflix and there was a mention of writing in a blog, and… well, connect the dots.

So Tyler Aaron Washburn [not Jack or Logan. Reasons? Kristin wanted Jackson, not just Jack. I like Jack, but not Jackson. Logan? We both liked it (still do, I guess), but we couldn't come up with a middle name that we liked with it. Surprisingly, Kristin didn't veto it altogether when I told her that when I first thought of Logan, it wasn't about where Utah State is located, but actually from the alias James Howlett used before he decided to call himself Wolverine] isn’t here yet, but he’s very close. AJ was born a week early (induced) and was 9 lbs., 6 oz. Tyler is also going to be a week early (and induced, although technically a week early would have been yesterday, but they don’t really induce on Sundays) and is very likely going to be at least a little bigger than AJ was at birth. Yikes.

We made it through the holiday season, though Kristin was pretty miserable throughout. I think she enjoyed herself, but it’s tough to enjoy much (I’m assuming here, having never been pregnant) when you’re uncomfortable 24/7. AJ and Alexa were spoiled, as usual, but I think we did a decent job of not being totally out of control. This was made easier by the fact that we didn’t have as much money to spend, thus keeping us closer to where we ought to be.

In other news, the last fish finally died. There’s nothing else interesting to go with that (he said seriously, implying that there had, at some point, been something interesting about fish in this blog). I think I really will clean out the tank and start over again, at a later date, when I can reasonably afford to spend money on fish.

The MBA program is progressing nicely, which is to say that I’m doing well. I’m really not sure how to feel about it at this point. I guess I hope it continues to be as easy for me as it has been so far. On the other hand, at the risk of insulting any University of Phoenix alumni who might be reading, I’m still sort of blown away by how much easier it’s been at UoP than BYU was. I guess I understand why an MBA from UoP doesn’t carry the same weight as the same degree from the Y or the U (or Westminster). It’s also possible that my experiences thus far are simply a result of the fact that the classes I’ve taken so far are sort of introductory to the program. The last few classes I took at BYU were much harder than the first two classes (plus one week of a third) at the University of Phoenix. Too early for judgment, I suppose, but those are my initial impressions.

I’d promise further details about Tyler and stuff, but if you’re reading this blog, chances are you already know I may or may not write, and promising will do no one any good…

I’m… ba-ack?

I guess a lot has happened since the last time I felt like writing in this space. My last post was a little more than fifteen months ago. Since then I got a job, finally finished my bachelor’s degree, and (most recently) started an MBA program (that’s “started” meaning “enrolled in and began to take courses,” not “created,” “sponsored,” or anything else that word can mean). We’re having another baby in January, and Kristin hasn’t been nearly as sick and miserable this time as she was with AJ. Alexa’s not that excited to have another baby brother, but she loves AJ and she’ll love this one (who could possibly be named Jack or Logan, but very likely will be called something else entirely), too.

For those who still remember the fan-favorite featured here on this blog that I lovingly refer to as “The Fish Chronicles,” I have an update. I can’t remember what the status or count was the last time I wrote about them (and I’m far too lazy to go back to the last fish-related post and find out), but the current status is this: they’re all dead, except one. One of the blue Gouramis (which may or may not have been part of the Washburn fish population the last time I updated), whose names were Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, is still hanging around. This is really only noteworthy if I fill you in on the rest of the story.

[Note: Contrary to what I wrote just a few lines ago, I got over my laziness just long enough to go back and look at my last post.]

So we had 19 fish, I guess, or maybe 18 after the last post (which was specifically about the death of a fish named after Byron Scott). The next 12-15 died slowly over the next year. Three or four hung on for a few extra months, and then all but the last blue Gourami died. But here’s the thing: after the three algae eaters were dead, I kept saying I needed to clean the tank myself and/or get some new algae eaters. Unfortunately, I did not do either of those two things. I had a good reason for not buying more algae eaters (unnecessary spending during tight financial times), but no good reason for not cleaning the tank myself (apart from the aforementioned laziness). The algae growth got worse, and then the filter/pump-thingy stopped working. I’m pretty sure that was the point when they started dying off more quickly.

By this time we were down to the last three or four fish, and I repeatedly declared that I was going to clean out the tank any minute. I, of course, did not, and the last few fish (except Flora, Fauna, or Merryweather – whichever one is the one that’s still alive) kicked the bucket. Here’s where it gets really bad. I got even more lazy (I know what you’re thinking, but it’s always possible to get lazier, as long as you’re not dead or in a coma). Not only did I never get around to cleaning the tank (even now, it sits disgustingly against the wall, desperately in need of a good cleansing), but I pretty much gave up on the last fish. I thought sure it would be dead, so I stopped turning the light on in the morning and off in the evening. I even stopped feeding the fish.

When I turned on the tank light to see what was up after a few weeks, I was shocked to discover that the last fish was still alive. I put a pinch of food in the tank, but the Gourami pretty much ignored it. I didn’t watch to see if it ever ate, but I don’t think it did. Another week or two went by and I checked in on the Last of the Gouramhicans, obviously expecting to see a floating fish corpse. Nope. Still alive. I put in another pinch of food, but this food was ignored like the last time.

I’m out of town for a few days, but I won’t be at all surprised if “The Fish That Wouldn’t Die” is still aimlessly wandering around the tank (I’m not sure it’s grammatically possible to “wander” while swimming, but you get my meaning), ignoring any food I might offer.

Another Casualty

Well, all our fish have names now, but one died this morning.

The Blue Gouramis got named after the fairies from Sleeping Beauty, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather. I have a strong suspicion that one of the Gouramis is a male, since it spends quite a lot of time chasing another Gourami, but that’s okay.

Two of the algae eaters are are significantly bigger than the third. When we were trying to think of good names for the fish I said, “It’s too bad we don’t have a pair of unnamed fish. We could call them Flotsam & Jetsam.” Depending on how well you know me, you may be surprised to find out that I was referring to the electric eels in The Little Mermaid, rather than the thrash metal band of the same name. Alexa said it would be funny if we named the little one Ursula, since… well, if I have to explain it I guess it isn’t that funny at all. It probably isn’t funny anyway, but that’s okay.

The Gold Barbs are now officially named 5 Guys Named Moe (aka Moe 1, Moe 2, etc.), which I threw out mostly as a joke, but Alexa liked it, so there you go.

The remaining 8 nameless fish stayed nameless until last night when I decided to take matters into my own hands. The Tiger Barbs are now Magic Johnson, Byron Scott, James Worthy, A.C. Green, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which was the starting lineup for the Lakers’ 1988 NBA Championship team. (Byron Scott (the fish, not the current coach of the New Orleans Hornets) died late last night or early this morning.)

The last three firsh to be named were the Green Tiger Barbs, who are now known as Ty Detmer, Jim McMahon, and Steve Young.

More Fishies!!!

Well, we got a bunch more fish. I’m pretty sure we’re over the limit of what they say you’re supposed to have, but the fish all seem to be happy and doing well together so far. It’s only been a little more than 24 hours since I added 13 more fish yesterday, but nobody’s died (or been killed) so far. The reason I say “been killed” is because some of the fish we got are semi-aggressive, as opposed to the peaceful fish we’ve had up to this point.

So here’s the deal: we started out with the Calico Goldfish, a bunch of Neon Tetras, a couple of Mollies, three Glofish, and a bigger Tetra (which I found out later is actually considered semi-aggressive, even though I was originally told it’s a peaceful fish… and this brings me to my biggest pet peeve so far (no pun intended) about these fish. Well, not about my fish, so much as about the people I’ve been dealing with regarding the fish. I’ve been using Petco, and maybe that’s the problem. I’ve never had pets before (as I said at length, I believe, in my first fish post about two months ago) so I don’t know if maybe Petco is the pet store for morons, or the pet store where nobody who works there really knows anything about fish, but it’s their job to know, so they just pretend to know the answers to the questions… but I’ve gotten distinctly different (and usually conflicting) answers to a lot of fish questions in the last two months. There are four or five different employees who have helped me with my fish and my fish questions in my many visits to Petco, and there doesn’t seem to be hardly anything upon which the five agree. I’ve been told that any big fish will eat any fish small enough to fit in its mouth, even if the big fish is an herbivore. I’ve been told that any semi-aggressive fish is only safe with other semi-aggressive fish… except if the peaceful fish happen to be really quick fish. But then I’ve also been told that some of the semi-aggressive fish are only dangerous to the peaceful fish if you only put one or two of the semi-aggressive fish in the tank – meaning that you need to put enough of them in the tank that they will school together and leave the other fish alone. Someone else told me, however, that if you put a group of them together they will hunt the other fish like a wolf pack… so whatever. Anyway, that Buenos Aires Tetra is supposedly a more aggressive fish, despite being referred to as a peaceful fish. The thing is, that piece of information came to light when I asked the girl at Petco if I could put some slightly more aggressive fish into the tank (assuming that I was willing to risk the lives of the weaker and/or smaller fish), so she may have just been telling me what she thought I wanted to hear because she didn’t give a crap… I know this isn’t the record for the longest parenthetical section I’ve ever written, but it may be the longest I’ve ever written in this blog).

After a few died we added another couple of Mollies, some replacement Neon Tetras, and some Zebra Danios. Then we added three Platys, but at that point we had had 33 fish in our tank and only 11 were still alive. Since we’d been through so many fish and the Petco people had tested my water sample and said there was too much ammonia in the tank, we decided not to add any more fish until we figured out the water problem. They (the geniuses at Petco) said that they thought I had too much ammonia in the water because I didn’t have any new (as in, only the old, useless stuff was still in there) carbon substance (usually charcoal, I guess) in my filtration system, which is supposed to absorb the ammonia. But apparently once it absorbs to saturation, it doesn’t work anymore.

So I took out the under gravel filter (UGF), mostly because it turns out the maintenance is much extensive, and I didn’t want it to be that much work. I installed a hanging filter, which has plenty of charcoal and is easy to change once a month. When it seemed the water was doing what it was supposed to do… which is to say that the fish were healthy, the water was healthy (which, unfortunately, means that it’s producing a lot of algae, making the tank green, and we were ready for more fish.

I talked to people at Petco a bit more and came to the conclusion that it was time to get Cody (the Calico Goldfish) out of the tank. Apparently goldfish produce a lot more ammonia (yes, I did think at that point that maybe all the earlier problems could have been avoided if I’d just taken Cody out earlier… but I digress), so we got a small (2 gallon) tank for him. It’s not nearly big for him in the long run… maybe in the short run, too, if you believe what the Petco people are telling me. Evidently you’re supposed to have a maximum of 1 inch of fish per gallon of water in the tank… oh, except that with the goldfish you’re supposed to count them as double… oh, and did I mention that you’re technically supposed to count their theoretical adult size when you’re counting these inches per gallon? Yeah, so even though most of them will never live that long… whatever.

So Cody is about 2 inches long right now, and he’s supposed to live 30 years or more (yeah, right), eventually growing to a minimum of 12 inches… which means that right now he needs at least 4 gallons of water, and eventually he may need more than 24 gallons. Well, he’s got 2 gallons of water, and he seems to like it just fine. I’m not moving him unless he seems to be way too big for the water at some future point (assuming he lives long enough to get big).

Once Cody was out of the tank, we were ready for more fish. But because of all the rules they seem to think we have to observe, I started forming a Machiavellian sort of plan to get the fish in there that I wanted. Actually, it wasn’t that complicated. All I had to do was either A) buy the fish when the main person I had talked to wasn’t there (that would be Ryann (that’s not Ryan, it’s Ry-ann, but just spelled Ryann), because she knows (at least as far as she remembers) more or less how big my tank is and how many fish (and of what species) I have in there), or B) lie to Ryann.

The first time I went in, which was on Monday, I didn’t have to lie yet, but Ryann wasn’t there. I had decided I wanted some of the fish to do some of the work, rather than having to scrub all that new (healthy) algae off the glass and the rocks, so I got the three algae eaters I talked about in the last post. They still don’t have names, but Alexa has vowed to choose names for the many nameless fish we now have in our tank.

If you’re keeping count, the subtraction of Cody the Goldfish from the tank took us down to 10 fish (Pablo, Midnight, Snap, Pop, Dusty Bottoms, Ned Nederlander, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, and Doc). Then we added 7 on Monday (the algae eaters, three Blue Gouramis, and the Bala Shark), 6 of which are also without names (Jerry being the exception).

But then I decided to really go for it and make the tank the way I had wanted it to be all along. So I went back on Friday (yesterday) and Ryann was there. That meant I had to go to option B. See, they guarantee their fish for 15 days, but I think that if you don’t follow their advice, they can basically say you’ve voided the guarantee. So I couldn’t tell her I had 61.75 theoretical inches of adult size fish in my 55 gallon tank already, because then she wouldn’t have sold me the fish I wanted. So I told her I had taken a bunch of the fish out of the tank. I think I told her the Bala Shark, the algae eaters, and Pablo were the only fish in the tank. If I remember correctly (it was yesterday, so of course I do) I told her that we had moved the other fish to a second tank… which is technically only misleading, but I knew I was lying. With my lie convincingly in hand, I told her I wanted a bunch of the semi-aggressive fish. So I got 5 Tiger Barbs (they were on sale, 5 for $5), 5 Gold Barbs (same sale), and 3 Green Tiger Barbs (not on sale; they were $4.29 each). None of these 13 new fish have names either, but you can be sure I’ll be back to report on their names when Alexa and I decide what they are. We now have 19 nameless fish (out of 30), so if you have any helpful suggestions of name groups for three groups of 3 and two groups of 5, I’m all ears.

AJ: 36 Weeks

AJ was busy making a mess of his evening oatmeal when it was time to take his picture. Rather than wait for him to get cleaned up for the picture, I decided to just make this the picture.

Just in case there’s anyone reading this who cares about the fish stories (and because I promised Alexa I would do it), here’s the latest. We got 7 more fish yesterday: 3 Blue Gouramis (who don’t have names yet), 3 Gold Algae Eaters (who also remain nameless), and a Bala Shark (whose name is Jerry Tarkanian… for those of you who don’t get that reference (he wrote as though anyone ever read this blog), Jerry Tarkanian was known as Tark the Shark).

We also took our Calico Goldfish, Cody, out of the tank and put him in his own 2 gallon tank, which isn’t nearly big enough for him if he grows much, but he’s making our big tank so dirty that I had to get him out.

AJ: 35 Weeks

Since he’s past the 35 week mark, I guess I ought to go ahead and post this one, too. AJ has learned to clap, and I got lucky on this one, catching him in mid-clap. Since I use my iPhone to take most of the pictures, it’s pretty hard to get a good shot of him when he’s moving. I don’t know if digital cameras work the same way old-fashioned cameras work, but if they do, the iPhone camera has a pretty slow shutter speed… in other words, I get lots of blurs with pictures of AJ because he never sits still.

AJ: 34 Weeks

I was going to wait a day to post AJ’s 34th and 35th week pictures, but I guess it doesn’t matter.

This one was taken at my in-laws’ house after an early softball game, with AJ sitting in his grandpa’s chair.

This also happens to be (not that anyone cares – including me, come to think of it) my mom’s favorite AJ outfit.

AJ: 33 Weeks

Well, I’ve fallen way behind in my posting again, but since I’m the only person reading this, who cares? That’s right: NOBODY!

What’s New with Alexa?

This is Alexa. I’m posting under my Dad’s Blogger ID, because the stupid system won’t let me create my own for some reason. I wanted to be able to contribute to the family blog, but I can’t have my own user ID, so I’m borrowing this one.

Violin is going pretty well. I’ve been taking violin lessons since last June. My teacher is really nice.

School’s almost over. Next year I will be in 3rd grade. I’ve been getting good grades lately. I’ve been sitting in the back of the room every time my teacher rearranges the class since January. I don’t really like sitting in the back, but the reason I get stuck there is because I pay attention and don’t get in trouble. Mostly the boys have to sit in the front because they don’t listen.

This summer I’m going to take tennis lessons. I’m really excited. We’re going to set up our back yard pool at my dad’s house (if he ever gets the weeds to go away).

Fish Tales, Vol. 6

We lost two of the new fish the first day, but get this: apparently Petco guarantees all their fish for 15 days, so when we lost five of the original fourteen, we could have had all those fish replaced. Unfortunately, no one told us about the guarantee until we were buying all these new fish on Tuesday. So today we went back to Petco and they gave us another Black Neon Tetra (to replace one of the Seven Dwarfs – Doc, but only because I always just pick the last name in the series and say that’s the one that died), and a Zebra Danio (to replace Pop). They tested our water (part of the guarantee is that you have to bring them a sample of the water so they can test it. It’s not a condition of the refund, but rather an effort to minimize the number of fish killed by unsafe water), and said that it was mostly fine, but that the ammonia content was a little high. I told her that we had a Calico Goldfish (which, we had been warned, produces a lot of ammonia), but she said that it was more likely that it was because of the introduction of so many new fish at once (since we did add eleven new fish that day). I was going to buy five or six Neon Tetras (like the artists formerly known at the Three Amigos), and maybe a couple of Red Platys for color, but she said that I should wait a week or so before adding more new fish (apart from the two replacement fish, Doc and Pop).

Les Poissons, Part V

If that title doesn’t make sense, don’t worry. It will. Or you can get clarification here.

We finally got the filter pumps for our fish tank and we also got a few rocks (pieces of coral, actually), so we decided to go back to Petco and get a few more fish. And by a few more, I mean, we more than doubled the number of fish in the tank. The problem with this, of course, is that they’re not all unique (well, obviously they actually are unique, but not in a way that is easy to see while they swim around in the big tank), so it’s a lot harder to tell if they’re all there. I suspect we may lose a few and not really know about it, just because there are now twenty of them and many are not easy to recognize.

I took a picture of them, but it’s pretty hard to identify them in the picture… although… that actually gives me a good idea. Well, not really a good idea, but a thought, at least. If I really wanted to figure out which fish were still there, a picture might not be a bad idea. That’s not really important, though. I can see fifteen of our twenty fish in this picture, though not all are easily identified.

The nine holdovers from the original fourteen are as follows:

• Cody, the Calico Goldfish
• Pablo, the Buenos Aires Tetra
• Mac, the Silver Molly (formerly known as Molly, until yesterday when the girl at Petco told us that his behavior indicated that he was most certainly a male)
• Midnight, the Black Molly that gave Mac’s behavior away
• Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three Glofish (genetically engineered Zebra Danios)
• Manny and Moe, the two remaining Black Neon Tetras

Due to our recent purchase of eleven fish yesterday, we have renamed some of the fish. I already said that we changed Molly’s name to Mac (Alexa’s call) after finding out it was a male. The other new fish we got are these:

• D’Artagnan, a Blue Danio (so named because it’s supposed to be the 4th Musketeer, since apparently that blue Glofish doesn’t actually exist. It’s not really blue, anyway (more of a silver with a bluish tint to it), but it’s at least a cousin to the three fish that are named for the Musketeers, even if it’s not actually the same species
• Betty and Veronica, two more Mollies, but I’m not sure what they are beyond that. We told the girl at Petco that we had a Silver Molly and a Black Molly and that lately Mac (the Silver Molly) had been sort of harassing Midnight (and by “sort of harassing” I mean, pretty much following Midnight around 24/7 and nibbling at her fins). At the time we had no idea that Mac was a male or that Midnight was a female, but as I said earlier, she told us that their behavior indicated that Mac was male and Midnight female. She also told us that we should always keep at least a 2:1 (male:female) ratio of Mollies in the tank to keep the males from fighting over the females (if there were too many males) or just harassing the female mercilessly (if there was a 1:1), so she sold us two more Mollies (Betty & Veronica). She called them Speckled Mollies first, and the tag on their tank said they were Dalmatian Mollies, but I can’t find any evidence of any fish in the Molly family referred to as “Speckled” or “Dalmatian,” so I’m not really sure about them
• Snap, Crackle, and Pop (named by Alexa) are three of the regular Zebrafish (Zebra Danios), like the Glofish and the one that’s not really, but without colors. Well, they’re not without color, they’re just not brightly-colored like Athos, Porthos, and Aramis (and to a lesser extent, D’Artagnan)
• Last, but certainly not least, we got five more Black Neon Tetras. Since we now have seven of them, we decided that the two remaining Pep Boys needed to change their names from Manny and Moe (because, really, what’s Manny & Moe without Jack? Not the Pep Boys, I’ll tell you that much) to join with their five siblings to be called the Seven Dwarfs (I’m not clear on how it became acceptable to call them “Dwarfs” when the plural of dwarf is dwarves, but I looked it up in the dictionary and apparently both are correct. I get that English has a bunch of exceptions for every rule, but I have to say that I really hate the fact that anything can become a correct way to say something in English if enough idiots say it wrong for long enough). Officially, they are called Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, & Doc, but we have a hard enough time identifying seven fish that swim around constantly, let alone telling any of them apart

Sports and Stuff

Writing has become my favorite thing to do, but it’s not the only thing I like to do. I also love to read. I don’t really read nonfiction much. I’m not in it for the learning. Not that I don’t like to learn, but when I read it’s sort of escapism, and I don’t want to be bogged down with real life. I don’t watch the news either, for that matter. There was a time, before I got remarried a little more than a year and a half ago, when I spent a significant percentage of my free time watching movies (the understatement of the week. I used to watch between five and fifteen movies per week. I’m sure there are people out there who watch even more than that, but that’s probably not a group of which I want to be a part).

Another of the things of which I am a big fan, is sports. I used to think the world revolved around sports. Some days I still act like I think that, but for the most part my love of sports has backed off from the level of obsession to just a level of, well, I really like them a lot. Not all sports, mind you. For example, I have no use at all for the most popular sport in the world: soccer (or football if you live anywhere but the U.S. of A.). I also have no use for the fastest growing sport in America, NASCAR (or any kind of racing, for that matter). It’s not that I don’t think racing is cool. It’s just that 500 laps is beyond my level of fascination. I’ve watched a lot of drag racing in years past, so that can hold my attention for a time, but not for very long.

I watch lots of sports when the Olympics roll around that I wouldn’t watch otherwise. Lots of track and field events, swimming, and even gymnastics will get some time on my screen during the Olympics, but only once every four years do I have any use for those sports. The sports I really actually like to watch any time are football, baseball, basketball, and golf. That’s not the right order, though.

Baseball is my favorite, even though it’s certainly the slowest moving of the major sports. I can appreciate a good pitchers’ duel and I don’t mind watching a game where there are no runs scored and only a scattering of hits. And when it comes to baseball loyalty, I’m all about the Los Angeles Dodgers. The ONLY Los Angeles team. If I’d had this blog a few years ago when that team from Anaheim changed their name, you’d have gotten a ridiculous rant about the name change. (I don’t acknowledge their existence anymore, but in case you don’t know who I’m talking about, I guess I’d better clarify: the Angels, who were the Los Angeles Angels about a zillion years ago until they decided to move to Anaheim in 1965 and changed their name to the California Angels. They changed the name to the Anaheim Angels about thirty years later for reasons about which I neither know nor care. Then a couple of years ago the new owner of the Angels decided to change the name to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Now let’s forget everything else about this discussion for just a minute. Everything else aside, the “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” is without question the stupidest name for a sports franchise ever. The only thing that rivals it is the renaming of baseball stadiums with an attempt to retain the original name (or a sentimental or team-related name) while sucking up to sponsors for their advertising dollars. Examples of this irritating phenomenon would be 3Com Park at Candlestick Point or Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

The funniest part about the whole name thing is that Artie Moreno (the Angels’ owner) seems to be the only person who likes the name. People from Los Angeles (including Yours Truly) don’t want the Angels using the name of their city. In the interest of full disclosure, I suppose I should say that I don’t now, nor did I ever live in actual Los Angeles. I lived in north L.A. County for ten years (’84 to ’94), but I still claim to be from L.A., as I plan to continue doing for the foreseeable future. To my way of thinking, I lived there from the summer before I started 4th grade until after I graduated from high school. In my opinion these are the most formative years of a person’s life and the time when you become who you really are. Back to the point: Not only do Los Angelenos not want the Angels to use that name, but people in Anaheim don’t want to be associated with L.A., so they don’t like the name either. Apparently there is something called the “Orange Curtain” that has to do with people in Orange County not wanting to be linked to L.A.

I had heard there was a lawsuit to keep the Angels from using that name, but it turns out that the people suing Moreno (or the Angels) were not the Dodgers organization, as I assumed. It was the City of Anaheim. Evidently they thought that using Los Angeles in the name of their baseball team would be counterproductive in the efforts to establish Anaheim as a destination city that wasn’t just an extension of L.A.

Wow, look at that. You got my rant about the name change anyway. I wasn’t expecting that.)

So I bleed Dodger blue and I hate the Giants and the Yankees. I’m not crazy about the Braves either, but they’re not a rival to the Dodgers anymore, since the leagues got divided more or less geographically. Actually, the Yankees haven’t been a rival for fifty years, but I hate them for a different reason. I don’t think I need to explain the Evil Empire.

Basketball is my second favorite, and the Los Angeles Lakers are my favorite team. I never really watched basketball until we moved to L.A. in 1984. (Actually, I never watched sports at all before that. Until the summer before I turned 10, I don’t really remember ever sitting down to watch sporting events.) I became a Lakers fan then, and I will remain so forever. I can’t say that I’m crazy about Kobe Bryant, but I accept the fact that anything the Lakers do that is a team success will come about because of Bryant. I hate that we have to hang our hopes on an adulterous (probably) rapist, but it’s what we’ve got.

I like football a lot and I root for the San Francisco 49ers. I don’t remember when I became a Niners fan, but I do know that it was before Steve Young. This is only worth mentioning because apart from my love of professional sports, I’m also a college football, basketball, and (on occasion) baseball fan. I went to Brigham Young University and that’s my team.

AJ: 32 Weeks

Well, I missed it completely this time. We had another late softball game on Monday night and Kristin’s parents came over to stay with the kids. I forgot to set the reminder to take AJ’s picture to an earlier time, and because I was playing softball, I didn’t see the reminder at 9:30 until about 11:00. At that point I would have just gone into his room and taken his picture then, except that I always take the pictures with my iPhone and it doesn’t have a flash. If I had turned on the light in his room, he’d have woken up instantly. Getting him back to sleep isn’t usually a problem, and I don’t think it would have been on Monday night either, but I didn’t really want a picture of him in the throes of just having been jolted awake by his bedroom light. A picture of him sleeping is fine, but crying is not ideal. So I decided to just wait until the next morning and take it when he was awake and cheerful.

It’s Weird, but Then, It’s Me

I never imagined I’d be in a position where this would be an issue. Well, that’s not entirely true. I guess I may have had a daydream or two where I was a good enough hitter, but this was never the result. I guess the real problem stems from the fact that I play in an unbelievably weak league. Oh, I guess I should point out that I’m writing (ranting) about softball here.

So this league is sort of important in the grand scheme of things, because it’s where I met my wife. The guy who runs the team (Randy) has been managing a team in both the summer and fall versions of this league for many years. He was the coach of the ward team I played on in ’04-’06 and he recruited me to play in this league, too. His daughter is one of my wife’s best friends, and Randy started this league so they could all play together.

It’s the kind of coed league where you have to alternate male/female every other batter, and you also have to have 2 male outfielders and 2 female outfielders, 2 male infielders and 2 female infielders, and the pitcher/catcher have to be 1 male and 1 female. Which is all fine. Here’s what’s not. The park is pretty small, so a lot of guys can hit it out pretty regularly, and a few of the girls can hit it out on occasion. In our regular line-up, all 5 of the guys could hit it out almost every time up, if that were allowed. It’s not. Not even close, in fact. From the time I began playing in this league (Fall ’05), the rule has always been that teams are allowed one home run per inning, though that does allow for one by the males of the team and one by the females, though, of course, the girls rarely hit home runs.

During the five seasons I’ve played in this league (3 fall & 2 summer) that rule was annoying, but acceptable. A lot of teams would hit a home run almost every inning (including us), and would only have to swing carefully on occasion. The only time that rule ever really screwed me up was a game last season where we were down by three going into the bottom of the last inning. Our lead-off guy (Dave) hit a home run, so we weren’t allowed any more for the game (unless we went to an extra inning). The 5 people between me and Dave in the lineup loaded the bases and made two outs, so when I came up, we were down two with two outs and three runners on base. If I could have gotten a good hit that stayed inside the park, we’d have scored at least enough runs to tie.

I choked up about three inches on the bat so that I’d have better control and slapped a hard line drive, thinking I could maybe get one to the fence so that the runner from first could score, too, and we’d win. Unfortunately, the line drive didn’t level off. In a seeming show of defiance of the laws of physics, the liner just kept rising and flew right over the fence. So what would have been a walk-off grand slam in a league without that stupid rule turned out to just be the last out of the game instead.

For this new season, however, they decided that the one HR per inning per team rule wasn’t good enough, so they changed it to the worst rule I can imagine (short of making all home runs against the rules): Now teams can never have more than one home run more than the other team. So if your team hits one in the first inning and the other team never hits one, you can’t hit any more for the rest of the game. And for some reason, we’re the only team that has more than one or two people that can hit it out. So we’ve been nailed by the rule on several occasions.

The problem for me is not that I have to hit a home run every at bat. It’s not even as though I’m actually likely to do that, even if it were allowed. What it is, though, is just that the knowledge that hitting a ball over the fence when it’s not allowed has made me tentative. I don’t swing as hard, so a lot of balls that would hit gaps and roll to the fence or even hit the fence on the fly end up as fly ball outs because slowing my swing is screwing up my swing. It’s not as though I can’t hit at all, but I’ve not been hitting well lately. At this point I’m much rather play in a park with deep enough fences that I could almost never hit it out, but be allowed to swing away. At least that way I’d be able to hit some doubles and not worry that I was accidentally going to hit an illegal home run every at bat.

On the bright side I have managed to field pretty much everything that’s hit on the ground in the front of the infield. I pitch most of the time, and even though softball pitching is nothing like baseball pitching, it’s a lot of fun. The thing about it is that it’s not as though my pitching is going to be what gets the hitters out. Fielding has to be responsible for that. And that’s how slow pitch softball is played (at least in this kind of league). You have to make the plays on defense, and you have to hit.

Well, one of of two isn’t terrible, I guess…

Up and Running

Okay, so I’ve got the first two chapters of my fanfic up. Follow the link at the right or this one to read it.

I have also posted the first chapter of each of my two original novels (actually they’re prologues, if you want to get technical. Since I always do, I guess I should). You can read them by following the link at the right or this one.

In an effort to keep up with my proposed posting schedule for the three aforementioned works, I will likely limit myself to posting here only if I have something that really needs to be said. (Okay, I realize how ridiculous that sounds. I should probably go back and delete it, but I thought it and then I wrote it (typed it), so I’m leaving it.)

AJ: 31 Weeks

This picture was taken before we took AJ to a softball game with us. The weather wasn’t great, but they weren’t canceling the game, so we had to bundle him up.

If you read the Washburn Wanderer, you will recognize a very similar picture which I posted there. I can’t get enough of him in that bear suit.

Not that anyone cares, but another fish died. In fairness, however, that fish died just after the last fish died, but I forgot to put it in the blog. Alexa asked me if I had, and I decided not to lie to her about it. So she said I need to tell everyone that Jack (of Manny, Moe, and Jack: The Pep Boys) had died also. However, that was a couple of weeks ago and the remaining nine fish seem to be holding strong.

Slowly but Slowly

Well, I haven’t had a lot of time for the blogosphere lately, so I haven’t done what I want to do with this blog yet, which is (at least partially) to funnel my reader(s) to my non-blog writing. There are links to the right, but they don’t link to anything meaningful. I promise they will very soon. Well, meaningful is a subjective term, but I think you get my meaning…

AJ: 30 Weeks

Well, another week has passed and AJ’s another week older, as are we all… And now almost a week has passed since I typed that first sentence, so I guess we’re all another week older than I said before.

This one was taken in our living room just before we left for a softball game. My brother and his wife came over to stay with the kids because we had a 9:30 game, which seemed a little late even for die-hards like my kids. AJ was very nice (says my brother, though it should be noted that Jeremiah could never find fault in AJ no matter how badly behaved the boy might be. Jer has some sort of baby fetish, though I don’t know if that word is really right for what I mean. More like obsession, I guess. He loves to hold babies. Anyone’s babies. Any time, any place. I honestly have a pretty hard time with anyone’s kids that aren’t my own. I don’t know if that’s residual feeling from my years of babysitting (that would be from October 1986 to September 1990), or what, but my nephew Cameron is the first baby that didn’t have 50% of my DNA that I ever really wanted to hold. It’s not that I hate kids, it’s just that, well, no I guess I do sort of hate kids. No, that’s not true. I’m just not very tolerant of the typical behavior of kids, I suppose. It’s easier to tolerate that kind of behavior when it’s not coming from my kids, which has pretty much always been the case, since Alexa has always been well-behaved and AJ hasn’t gotten old enough to be a pain in the butt yet), (Whew. Long parenthetical) and Alexa was typically docile.

We won the game and the kids were good, so I guess it was a good night. It was a testament to the fact that we play in what must be the most pathetic example of softball around, however, since I got walked with the game winning run on third. Now I can actually hit the ball out of that small park, but the team we were playing doesn’t know that. And my hits in that game were all infield singles, so… whatever.

Other Works

Originally posted 27 April 2008 at 11:32 on my family blog

In addition to putting (read: wasting) countless hours of my life into a Harry Potter fanfic that exists almost exclusively for my own entertainment, since it can never be published and will likely only ever be read (if I ever finish it) by two or three other people, I have written parts of four other novels. That might be a bit of an exaggeration. Well, no. It’s accurate, but it’s at least misleading. Those four parts consist of the following:

1. Almost 31,000 words of a crime novel about a cop chasing a serial killer, tentatively titled Angel of Mercy. I think it’s pretty good, but I’ve been a little lost for direction on it lately. It was my first idea for an original novel, and I actually have vague ideas for three more novels featuring the same protagonist. These would theoretically be called Avenging Angel, Guardian Angel, and Angel of Destruction, if the series actually happens.
2. My second original novel (started, but nowhere near completed – not quite 25,000 words so far) is a fantasy novel about a guy who wakes up one morning to find that he’s in an alternate universe. It’s tentatively titled The Demon Hunter, which is the name of the main character, but also the name of an original character, from my own mind (rather than borrowed from the existing set of characters), that I wrote for my Harry Potter fanfic. Obviously I can’t make use of anything JK Rowling created, but since this particular character belongs to me, I decided to change the character slightly and write a story that focuses on his adventures. It is in no way related to the world of Harry Potter, and the story is not about teenage wizards and witches.
3. I thought that a story geared to a younger audience might be a better way to go, so I started a story about a kid (a high school senior) with a higher calling. It may be a little too Buffy the Vampire Slayer to really work, but I dabble in it from time to time.
4. A little less than 1,000 words of a novel introduction about a boy (10 years old, if memory serves), but I don’t know that it has any substance that will ever amount to anything. It came about when Kristin suggested that I ought to try writing something for kids because kids books seemed easier to get published. I’m not sure where she got that, but it must have sounded like a pretty good argument to me at the time because I started trying to write one right away.

If anyone ever starts actually reading this blog, I’ll post excerpts from these (at least the first two) novel attempts in this blog.