Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Thursday I went to the Tiger game with Morris. This was his Father’s Day present for me. We had pretty good seats. We were high up, behind home plate. Our seats were in the last row that was in the shade, which was nice since it was a fairly hot day.

The Tigers played the Cubs. It was a pretty good game. The Cubs scored three runs in the first inning, but the Tigers came back and had a 6 to 4 lead. It started to rain in the bottom of the eighth and severe weather was in the forecast. We decided to leave. The Tigers ended up winning 6 to 5. I enjoyed going to the game.

We are walking back to the car, and when we are about a block away, I mention to Morris that this was the first time in memory that I went to a Tiger game and was not panhandled. A minute later a guy asked us if we had any spare change.

Friday I rode my bike to the zoo. This was a better than average trip. The weather was good, and the animals were more active than usual. The crowds were not as bad as they are on the weekends. This is kind of a hit or miss outing for me. This trip was a hit.

Last night we went to hear the Detroit Symphony Orchestra play at Metro Beach. This is normally a favorite outing of mine. For some reason though, it seemed a bit off this time. I don’t know if maybe the sound system wasn’t up to par. The program was all marches this year, basically music to walk to. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe the orchestra just wasn’t playing as well this year. Target, the generous sponsor of this event handed out bug spray and lip balm to everyone. Target should get more recognition for sponsoring events in this area.

We had the predictable 45 minute process of getting out of the parking lot. It’s always annoying but what are you going to do. I wish there was something they could do to improve exiting the park after big events.

Shannon is done teaching for the school year. Congratulations Shannon.

Recession friendly NY vacation – free lodging/use of my apt. and cats

I got this email from my daughter Shannon.

If anyone is interested, please contact me.

Hello friends,

I’ll be in Michigan from July 14 -22. My one bedroom Brooklyn
apartment and friendly cats are up for grabs for those dates to you or
anyone you’d trust to stay in your house when you weren’t home. Taking
care of the cats takes less than five minutes/day. Lola, the pug,
will be in Michigan with me.

Let me know if you or anyone you know is interested in staying here
part of all of the time. I can always ask my landlord or a friend in
the neighborhood to check in on the cats the other days if you only
stay part of the time. There’s free and easy parking right in front of
the house all the time in case you’re interested in driving out.

-Shannon

Keeping Busy in the Summer

I can’t get to sleep. It may have something to do with the nap I took this afternoon.

I’ve been busy enough lately.

I’ve been to going to concerts in the park. Thursday afternoon I rode my bike over to Southfield and saw a jazz group, GEQ. I enjoyed hearing them.

Tuesday Phyllis and I went to the Gazebo site in Southfield where we heard another jazz group, the Royal Garden Trio. There were actually five guys there that night, so they called themselves Royal Garden Plus. They had a cello player, which I found interesting for a jazz group. They played mostly gypsy jazz, and we enjoyed hearing them.

Wednesday night I rode my bike over to Birmingham, where I heard a country group called Arizona Sun, and I found them to be amusing enough. They’ve changed the location of the Birmingham concerts this year to the park at the foot of the hill on Old Woodward. I don’t care for that location as well. It is too hard to get up the hill once the show is over.

The web site that had links to current movies is up and running again. I’ve watched several movies there lately. Some were better than others.

We actually paid to see a movie over the weekend. Phyllis wanted to see “The Proposal”, which I could have watched for free online. It was a romantic comedy. To me all romantic comedies have the same plot. Two attractive people meet, and take an instant dislike for each other. They spend time together, and end up falling madly in love with each other. I hope I didn’t ruin the ending for anyone. Still, for what it was, the movie was well done, and was amusing enough.

Tuesday I went to the computer recycling place and did some volunteer work. It went well enough.

Wednesday I rode over the monthly luncheon for the retirees group. They had about a dozen folks this time. I wish the food was better at the Beefcarver, but I enjoyed getting together with the folks. There was no news to speak of.

After the meeting I rode to the computer club. The presenter talked about twitter and facebook. I have a facebook account, but I don’t find it particularly useful. I rarely make an entry. Twitter strikes me as totally useless and very annoying. I won’t be playing that game.

Cranbrook Trips

We made a couple of trips to Cranbrook last week, which is a bit unusual for us. On the first trip, we were joined by Morris and his dog Pera. This was a quicker paced trip than we normally do. The dog seemed to like the outing pretty well. Morris got some exercise by running up some of the steep hills there. He said that they seemed steeper that they did back when they worked out there when he was running cross country in high school, 20 years ago. We stopped for milk shakes on the way home.

A couple of days later, we went back to Cranbrook for a more leisurely visit. When we got there, there was some kind of event going. They dumped hundreds of plastic ducks in the water, and let them float down to a finish line, in a sort of plastic ducky race. It actually wasn’t as snappy as it sounds, but there was a small crowd there watching it, and I did see coverage of the event on the local evening news that night. Mostly we walked around and took pictures. It was very nice.

There was an art fair in downtown Royal Oak last weekend. It was the annual clay, glass, and metal art fair. We went. I thought it was a better art fair this time around.

Phyllis and I were talking the other day. Somehow the idea came up that we could sell the house and relocate if we wanted to. This idea caught traction with us, and we decided it merited investigation. Our thought was that we would like someplace with better weather, pleasant surroundings, reasonable costs, and interesting things to do.

So, yesterday we rode our bikes downtown Royal Oak. We went to the library and the Barnes and Nobel to look at books on places to retire. We found plenty of information on the topic. At this point we have not narrowed down the possibilities at all. Phyllis did well enough on the bike ride. It was her longest ride of the year.

Morris is Back

I woke up around 3:00am and couldn’t get back to sleep. On the whole though, I’ve been sleeping pretty well.

Morris got back from his fishing trip last weekend. He caught a lot of fish and had a good time. He had us over for a fish fry that just couldn’t be beat.

The weather has been pretty good lately, with the exception of yesterday when it rained all day. The web site where you can watch current movies is back online with a slightly different name. I watched a couple of them yesterday. It was something to do on a rainy day.

When the weather has been good, I’ve been riding my bike. I’ve been doing shorter rides lately, but I’ve enjoying the rides a lot. Phyllis has joined me on a couple of short rides.

There are a bunch of things I need to do, but haven’t made time to get them done. I need to work on that.

I volunteered at the computer recycling place on Tuesday. They had me removing hard drives from old computers. This of course involves opening up the computer case. You would thing that it would be a simple matter of taking out the screws and pulling it apart. However, different manufacturers have gotten very creative about this, and it becomes an exercise in problem solving just to get the darn things open. Once inside the case, getting the drives out became another challenge. Some of them were wedged in rather strangely.

I went to the computer club Wednesday. It was a fairly good meeting.

On the whole things have been reasonably ok around here.

Can’t Sleep

I can’t sleep. I haven’t slept at all tonight.

We’ve been up to a few things though.

I’m still volunteering at the computer recycling place.

Last week went to one of those author signing things at the local Borders. The book was the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. The author speaking was Annie Barrows. Phyllis convinced me that the book was about an underground group opposing the Nazi’s in WWII. When we got there the audience was about 95% female. I sensed that I’d been had. Ms. Barrows started by giving some background of her family, and in particular her aunt who wrote the original draft of the novel. That was amusing enough. Then she read selections from the book, which was less than interesting. There was a question and answer period afterwards. For the most part, a lot of dumb questions get asked, and I wish they would skip that part of the program. Phyllis liked this outing better than I did.

We’ve had a leak faucet in our kitchen since before we went to Florida. The drip, drip, drip was pretty annoying. We had it fixed last week. All is well.

We went on a short bike ride Thursday evening. We picked up stuff for a picnic, and dined in a local park. We also visited several garage sales. It seems like there are a lot more garage sales this year. We didn’t buy anything.

We went to Greenfield Village on Friday. It turned out that is was a big day for school outings there. Let me concede that Greenfield Village is a perfectly suitable place to take school groups. The kids may actually learn something there. I just prefer going on days with less hustle and bustle. Also, they haven’t started their summer programming yet, so there was less stuff for us to see. So on the whole the experience was just fair.

I rode my bike to the Chaldean festival in Southfield yesterday. I was expecting Chaldean food, Chaldean entertainment, maybe even some exhibits on Chaldean culture. That is not what I found. What I found was a carnival midway with rides, games, and food. Even though there was no entertainment was on the stage, they were playing very loud rap music over the sound system. None of this was to my liking, so I left after about five minutes. I was able to pick up a concert schedule at the recreation center, which I had been unable to find online.

I am still awake. I hope you are too.

Regis and Kelly Video

I was finally able to put this on Youtube.

I’m watching Regis and Kelly a week or so ago, and they are talking about how high horses jump in equestrian events. Nobody on the show seems to know how to look it up. It isn’t that hard, so I looked it up and sent them an email they read on the air.