memelaina | roses and baseball

this was very good weekend for me. friday work was frustrating because i was trying to do a conversion and analysis on a bunch of reports, but the web site where i pull them was mostly down and supposed to be up again "momentarily" - so i ended up trying it every couple of minutes most of the day and trying to pull my reports in the "moments" when it was up. but after work, terry and kent and i went to a ballgame. terry's mother is visiting us for a while, and she is a huge baseball fan so we wanted to take her to one of our local minor league games.

going to a ballgame in colorado springs is like taking a step back into the 50s. the stadium is loaded pretty much to capacity but it's a nice sized local stadium with some bleacher seats and some theatre-style seating and a few boxes up at the top of the stadium - not the huge multistory ovals they use in the big leagues. kind of like a glorified high school stadium. it's v-shaped with the two wings covering the first base line and the third base line and we got second row seats about mid-way down the third base line. our area was full of dads and kids wearing baseball gloves and hoping to recover a pop-up foul ball. the weather was cooperating fully. the game was scheduled to start at 7:05pm and the sun went behind the edge of the stadium promptly at 7:02pm leaving us pleasantly shaded and with a brightly lit sky. they do the whole home-style baseball thing here. little blonde high school girl sings the national anthem. local corporate big-wig throws out the first ball while all his employees stand up in the bleachers and yell. between innings they have all sorts of crazy games (human bowling ball, hole-in-one, t-shirts slingshot into the stands) and they give elementary school kids a chance to play announcer and take turns reading the names and stats as guys come up to bat. naturally the home team won. and then they have the pledge of allegiance and a huge fireworks show. costs about the same price as a movie - but allows conversation, socialization, and a very old fashioned feeling of summer time adventure. not to mention they don't serve beer at the movies.

saturday morning fred (terry's mom) and i went out to a nursery to buy roses. last week we had just finished getting our fenced side yard, which used to be the dog run, landscaped. why did we do that? because where we live there are deer. LOTS of deer. and they eat ANYTHING that you plant in an unfenced area. and our &*!;&% covenants won't let us fence anymore of our yard than is already fenced. so the dog run is now a nicely landscaped and sodded side yard with two big raised flower beds for roses. it took us about an hour to get out to the nursery, which is out on the plains east of here. we drove through falcon, peyton, calhan, ramah, and simla (someone a while ago must have read a lot of kipling...) and then out on a gravel road into the praries. why the long drive? 'cause this guy specializes in high altitude and cold-hardened roses that will do well in our high plains weather. apparently he started off as a wheat farmer, plowing the acres that his grandfather had homesteaded at the turn of the last century. and he grew roses as a hobby. somewhere about the time he turned 60 he decided that roses were more fun than wheat and went into the nursery business full time.

it was really hard to limit myself, but i picked out six roses: westerland, carefree sunshine, winnipeg parks, hope for humanity, firecracker, and a "found" rose. i couldn't resist the "found" rose. the guy had found it at the site of an old abandoned homestead, where it was growing wild. it's a lovely little single petal pink rose with a wonderfully sweet smell. i can just imagine someone coming over the plains a hundred years ago with a little cutting from a rose "back home" and planting and nurturing it in their new home. so anyway, i now have six roses to plant out in my new raised beds, and i'll be doing that this week.

saturday night i got to babysit my grandbaby, anna. anna is not quite nine months old, and this is the first time that her parents have gone away overnight (it was megan and kurt's 2nd anniversary). so i went and spent the night and got to feed her and play with her and put her to bed and get her up in the morning. she did the bedtime part pretty well (i do that with her every week or so when megan and kurt go out) but she wasn't too happy to find me still there in the morning. we had a few caretaker diversity issues. nine months is not an age with a high appreciation for "different". but we managed, and mum and dad came home noonish, so that worked out well.

i'm reading DANGEROUS GAMES by Marta Randall. it's a sequel to her earlier book JOURNEY which i read years ago and loved, but somehow had no idea there was a sequel until someone on LiveJournal mentioned it. i've bought "HP and the HBP" but it will be a while before i read it because i still haven't started "HP and the OotP". guess i'm just behind the times.

oh, and an exceptionally evil woman introduced me to the game BookWorm on popcap.com. after only playing once on line i purchased it and now have it on both my home and work computers. it is an adicting time sink.