Opportunity - use it or lose it

I'm taking advantage of North Carolina's victory to post one of my favorite pictures of all time.

Now let's Play Ball.

Prime the Margarita Machine

Buffett tickets on sale tomorrow and Pitchers/Catchers next week. Yep - Spring's gotta be around the corner.

The Real Groundhog Day

With Pittsburgh and Punxsutawney dominating today's sports and "Dear-God-When-Will-Spring-Get-Here?" news, I for one am happy to see the calendar flip to February because that means Truck Day's coming.

For the uninitiated, this is the glorious day each year when a semi pulls up alongside Fenway and several hours later heads toward I-95 S with a belly full of hats, bats, balls, and double bubble. Shadow or no, the march toward Opening Day will take a giant leap forward on Friday.

Camelots in my Kitchen

There is blue sky visible today - quite a change from the last few weeks. The sunlight shining in through the windows highlights with no uncertainty the fact that my house needs a good scrubdown. So this morning after coffee, I put the Jimmy Buffet Live at Fenway in the Bose, unleashed my inner clean freak and got to work. (Side note - Brad and I were at that show in 2004 and saw Pedro pitch and Scott Kazmir's Fenway debut the next night. It wasn't pretty. I think TB hit a homer off Petey's first pitch of the game.)

Skip forward to second cup of coffee. I'm sitting at the bar looking out the window and spacing and I notice the two black and white framed photos that are on opposite sides of my dining room windows. The one on the left is a photo I took in Hyannisport of boats at the pier. The one on the right is a gorgeous photo of a snowy park in Chicago at night with skyscrapers in the background. Just an interesting coincidence to note...

Carb Free: This Rice is an Alright Vice

Now that Jim’s in the Hall and we had a Joslin appointment yesterday, this seems like a perfect time to reprise blogging, which is apparently tracking the same as my workout habit – feast, then famine.

While Remy and Don rule the booth, Rice is the greatest sports commentator behind the desk. This guy is a bonafide star. His analysis is sometimes surprising, sometimes funny and the fashion is second to none. Oh, and apparently he was quite a moonshot hittin’, green monster mastering left fielder, too. (I love those crazy left field hitting machines.) Having spent his entire career with the Sox and continuing with the team in various roles since retirement, I predict we’ll see #14 hanging soon in Fenway. Congrats to the baseball writers for finally getting this one right.

And though Reagan’s attention span is more suited to Nick sitcoms than 9 innings of baseball these days, she definitely has a memory suited to players and stats, past and present. She was about 8 when she watched Fever Pitch and piped up, “Hey, there’s Jim Rice!” Proud moments in parenting…

I'm Sitting Here Completly Surrounded by No Baseball

College football has been OK this year - it's seeing me through October and November, at least. But I hate, hate, hate the hot stove. It's nothing but Scott Boras, losing players you love and getting players you aren't real sure about. I know a lot of people see it as some sort of renewal opportunity or a chance to get some great new blood, but I only see renewal possibilities on opening day. Preferably an opening home game with a ring ceremony.

First Manny and now Coco. Reagan said he was a "home run catcher" and followed that up with "Kansas City? 'Never heard of 'em."

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

The seat warmer in my car, cream of wheat, salad with walnuts and craisins, colorful sharpies, L'occitaine hand cream, making my husband laugh, geraniums, tempurpedic, NESN from April to October, wool socks, building a stockpile of test strips, Tanglewood, lists, dunkin' coffee, squeezing my kids, fixin' up this old house.

Bless Me Great Pumpkin, For I Have Sinned

It has been three years since my last carving. My intentions are the best, but let's face it: I am the bah-Humbug of Halloween, a sinner on the devil's holiday.

I have been sick on more October 31sts than I can count. Once, in an ICU and this year in the ER for a migraine. (Didn't even get the 'good stuff' but that's another story.) And now, we are a diabetic family with an insatiable sweet tooth, which is a perfect disaster in the making. The Candy Man is my nemesis.

For dress-up, to sew would be divine, but those intricate, delightful and oozing with love handmade fairy costumes have never materialized. Haven't saved a dishwasher box to convert into a Rubik's cube, either. To top it off, I had simply the greatest idea for my own costume and swore to hell and half of Georgia that this year, I would make it happen - A Rod in a skirt with bobby socks and pumps, an Easter hat, gloves and handbag, a kaballah string and a vintage Madonna record. Perfect for scaring all those little Variteks and Pedroias knocking on the door for loot. Did. Not. Happen.

My biggest guilt is that I think the pumpkin carving thing is kinda gross. Especially now that you can buy such a nice selection of pre-fabricated pumpkin-themed junk at Garden Ridge (or our "Garden Ridge of the Northeast", the open year round Christmas Tree Shop.) For far too many a Hallows Eve, I have waited until the last minute, unintentionally denying my children the pleasure of scooping nasty-smelling orange gunk with a soup ladle, slinging it at one another and then fighting over the butcher knife. So with the best of intentions, we always have a punkin on the front porch. And it always rots, both its scare and pie potential unrealized.

But this year, a miracle occurred! Sometime on the evening of Friday, November 7, one or more yard perpetrators of the squirrel or chipmunk variety used it's gnarly little front teeth and carved a 6 inch diameter circle straight through our uncarved friend, eating its way to the middle, with a detritus of seeds strewn across the deck. The next day, the hole was larger and more of the middle nether-region had disappeared. And on the third day, they wiped out the buffet. So I rolled the giant gourd shell away to the curb, confident that those cute, but nasty yard rodents will do nature's dirty work and the pumpkin will rise again - from some random place in my yard late next summer.