Title: My name is Marcie, and I'm a baseball geek
Music du jour: The Dukes of Hazzard theme on TNN
Perl/Tk, screen and journal-surfing. This is my Holy Trinity for the evening. Especially screen. <UNIX GEEK MODE=ON> screen makes it possible for me to rack up serious geek time on my favorite BBS. I can run my telnet session from home (well, telnetting out from my server at snerk.net) and pick it right back up when I get to work in the morning. I absolutely love it. I NEVER LOG OUT ANY MORE. Muahahahahaha!!@#!
*ahem* Anyway. I survived the weekend with my parents, surprisingly. Ian's folks are still here; they'll be taking off to go hiking around the state soon, probably tomorrow morning. My parents took the nickel tour of the campus where I work, then THEY took off for Mississippi. They're supposed to stop off in Louisiana to see my little sister. That should be interesting.
Okay, so the weekend wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I admit to being silly; hell, I admitted to that before they even got here. I'm glad my fears were proven wrong. There's just something about being a woman (I'm generalizing here, so relax) and having your mom AND your significant other's mom (or step-mom, in this case) under your roof at the same time. Hell, just your own mother is bad enough. I've known college-educated, reasonable adult women who went into an irrational panic when their mother came to visit. Do you think it's some kind of weird competition thing? My English teacher in high school also taught Old Testament history as an elective class, and she used to always say that the reason Sarai and Ishmael's mom didn't get along was because they were two women trying to run one household, both being Abram's wives. This, she pointed out, was a recipe for disaster. Two women under one roof will always try to run things. Dismiss it as old-fashioned gender stereotypes if you like, but it might explain why my sister and my mom were like oil and water when Rachel was a teenager.
But, Old Testament marital squabbles aside, my mom and I managed not to kill each other, and we even had a relatively good time. Everyone went to the Rockies /Cardinals game Saturday, where my dad and I kept score and strategized:
"Runner on second, one out, bottom of the order coming up. I think he's gonna have him sacrifice bunt to advance the runner.""Yeah, but this guy is right-handed. He'll have to bunt it down the first base line to do any good -- otherwise they'll just throw the runner out at third -- and that's harder to do as a righty."
"True, true, but I don't think the manager wants him hitting away. Look at his average. .208? Please."
"You could be right. Let's see what he does."
My dad is fun. I got my head for baseball from him. Watching a baseball game isn't as much fun as playing, but it's a lot better if you know what goes on on the field and in the dugout -- behind the scenes, as it were. I used to play softball a few years back, and more to the point, I used to catch. There isn't nearly the complexity in girls' softball as there is in professional baseball, obviously, but the catcher still basically runs the show on the field. After playing a position like that, you can usually anticipate what's going to happen next by watching the interaction between the pitcher and catcher, and among the fielders. Baseball really is an incredibly complex game. It's still my favorite sport. Go Cardinals!
Mmmm... screen. Yeah, I'm still obsessing... so what. Deep Space Nine just came on TV, which is my cue to fall into bed and die til tomorrow morning. I gotta start sleeping regularly; they're actually expecting me to work this week. Heh. Later.
-- marcie.