Haikus

These are for Sarah,
Who is up in Alaska,
And asked me to blog.

We have no snow here,
In fact, it is quite nice out,
Unlike at Toolik.

The Detroit Tigers
massacred Minnesota
in Saturday's game.

But I was away
watching Indiana Jones
under the night sky

with Dave and Martine
at the old Starlite Drive-In
in Cincinnati.

Now Kansas City
is where the Twins are playing.
Easy victories.

Red Sox road trip slump.
Can Manny hit five-hundred?
Not in Seattle...

Maybe Baltimore
is where the Sox can catch up
to the Devil Rays.

Here Come the Grooms...

Big news out of California... with some timely personal significance for my friends Brad and Russ who have been engaged for about a year AND are moving to California this summer so Brad can start a professorship at USC. Hurray Brad and Russ! Now they need to work on having kids so that we can call them Brussell Sprouts... and yes, they're aware that I've been saving that pun for awhile now. The most intriguing part of the NY Times article was the following:

"The court left open the possibility that the Legislature could use a term other than 'marriage' to denote state-sanctioned unions so long as that term was used across the board -- for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples."

I've been saying for years that the answer is to just get rid of the term marriage in the legal system and make all domestic partnerships, gay or straight, civil unions. I realize this might not play well in the bible belt, but they got over interracial marriages (well, most of them did).

How to Make an American Quilt

Inspired by vague recollections of a similar quilt owned by tfazio, lately I've been working on creating my own T-shirt quilt. Today I finished the front side -- which is about 5'x7'.

Now I just need to create the back (same thing, but with the backs of the shirts) and sew them together... which means I'm less than halfway to being finished. If I ever make another quilt, I'm buying myself a rotary cutter. Cutting all those squares and strips with scissors is really tedious. If you want to see more pictures, they're here.

Red Sox 5, Tigers 1

It took all the way to May to get me to the ballpark this year -- the latest for a first game since 2004, when I waited until June. I had some nebulous plans to attend the Twins-Tigers series back in April, but a family emergency had me, coincidentally, back in Minnesota for that week. And thus, my inaugural ballgame of the year was tonight's Red Sox-Tigers game at Comerica Park.

And it was a good game for a Sox fan. Boston scored three runs in the 2nd inning and never looked back, winning 5-1. Looking at the starting pitchers, Beckett and Verlander, I thought it might be a pitcher's duel, but then I talked to a pair of guys sitting next to me and it turns out that Verlander hasn't been the no-hitter throwing Verlander of last year. So instead, the game itself was pretty non-exciting. My observation of the evening (which I'm sure I've made before) is that if the home team is never really in contention, the crowd is pretty blah leading to a dull atmosphere at the ballpark.

However, I did have some amusing snippets of conversation with the two guys sitting next to me. For starters, we bought our tickets from the same scalper official ticket booth, and they actually bargained the guy down $10 cheaper than I paid. Note to self -- never accept the first offer, even if it is cheaper than face value. Second, being a Red Sox fan pretty much sets you up to be hated outside of Fenway Park. (And arguably with good reason, but I'll not go there.) However, declaring that your first allegiance is to another Central Division team actually redeems you quite a bit. And being able to remember the name Archibald "Moonlight" Graham will redeem you even further.