Wednesday, 8 July 1998:
Mid-way Through the Season
Hmm, I seem to have fallen into the every-other-day habit of writing again. However, this time it's not due to lack of motivation (or of stuff to write about), but due to lack of time.
Yesterday, for instance, I spent the evening watching Baseball's All-Star Game, which turned out to be a pretty good game - the highest-scoring game in All-Star history. I find the All-Star Game generally serves its purpose as a "feel-good" game for the fans. It's never really weighty, but it's usually a fun way to kill a few hours.
While watching the game, I spent some time cleaning my apartment and writing a letter to my friend Bruce - pretty much the only person I have regular off-line correspondence with these days. Bruce and I met through APA Centauri way back when, and we usually try to hook up when I'm in the Northeast - see a Red Sox game, etc. Nice guy, always a lot of fun to talk to and correspond with.
Oh, and I also picked up my framed Raven maps from the frame shop, and found places to hang them in my apartment. Boy, are they big! They look nice, though. I'm glad I bought them and got them mounted.
Today I got together with some friends to play Bridge. Two of us had played before, a third had some minor working knowledge of the game, and the fourth knew nothing. It worked out pretty well, although Janet (the other "experienced" person) uses very different conventions from me. (She plays "strong two" bids, I prefer "weak two", for instance.) That made things a little exciting. Matt and Gene are semi-regular gaming buddies. Matt was really into the game, but I think Gene found it a little too complicated. Matt seems to think Gene prefers games with more random chance, while Matt likes pure strategy games - which would make sense, in this case.
Well, we'll see how things turn out. It was fun tonight, in any event.
Did I mention that I officially "gave up" in my fantasy baseball league this year? I made a big dumping trade, trading several of my good players to another team in exchange for several players who will be worth keeping for next year (my "good" players are expensive, while these keepers are fairly good and under-priced in what I'd have to pay to keep them). We'll see what happens. It could be a pretty exciting race for first this year, although the current leader extended his lead in the past week.
Well, I'd be pleased to finish anywhere but last!
For some reason, I decided to rejoin the DIARY-L mailing list today. The volume on that thing is astronomical, and the signal-to-noise ratio seems astonishingly low. Anyone want to make a wager how long I'll stay on before I give up? Well, maybe it will result in a little useful publicity for my journal (which will be promptly cancelled out by this paragraph!).
Late, late, late - time for bed!
Michael Rawdon
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