4.191 baseball, travel

Saturday 06/10/2023

In the morning I walked out to the farmers market and indulged myself, buying a few of what smelled like ripe apricots, a couple of seedless mandarin oranges, a gigantic bran muffin and my favorite, a chocolate hazelnut swirl. Toted all those back and ate portions of each for lunch. (The apricots were only so-so but possibly with a couple of days they may get better.)

Then off to the baseball, this is a “super regional” between Texas and Stanford to see which will go to the CWS. Stanford screwed the pooch. They were cruising along nicely going into the ninth inning leading 5-2. Noticing a few people heading for the exits, I said to the person next to me, “If this was the majors, I’d leave too. But this is the college game and anything can happen.” Stanford proceeded to prove me right. All they had to do was get three outs in the top of the ninth for the win. Instead by some poor pitching and a nightmarish dropped ball in the outfield, they let Texas plate five runs. Then they went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the ninth, losing 5-7.

Plus, despite using the 20-second pitch clock, it still took 3:30 to play a nine-inning game, and by the time I got home, the dining room was closing. Which was not a problem because I still had all my market goodies, plus the rest of the ciabatta loaf from yesterday.

During the boring moments of the game I was writing bits of dialog for the novel on my phone, and got a hot flash of how to make a dramatic improvement. I think. I will explore tht idea tomorrow. So the game wasn’t a total loss, although it confirmed for me that I will not renew my Stanford baseball season tix next year.

Back home I’m looking at various of the Youtube video channels I follow; one is a guy building a boat in Port Townsend WA. And he was promoting the annual wooden boat festival there in September, the weekend of 9/8-10. And it sounded neat and I decided dang it, I haven’t gone anywhere in three years, I’m going to that. So I did the familiar travel booking round that I haven’t done since 2020, securing a hotel, a rental car, and a flight. Just went ahead and did it, before I could have too many second thoughts.