50; No Softball

So here's a magazine cover from fifty years ago, on the day I was born...

Or if you're a little less highbrow, like me...

50. Yikes. So far it isn't really any different from my 40s. Except I can join the AARP and start benefiting from my advanced age. (And dammit, why can't I find a video of this Grampa Simpson clip?)

Anyway, if you've ever checked out my Twitter profile page you've seen what I wrote for a bio, at least since I began my job in October: "I may have a job now but I will still spend way too much time online, on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Oh, and blog. And play softball..." But I've made a change. It now ends with "...but not this year." The softball league's season begins this weekend, weather permitting. However, this year I'm not playing. I had been planning to, but there was a problem with my team's practice schedule that led to my not making it to practice. (We talking about practice! Not a game, not a game, not a game -- we talking about practice!) I won't go into the gory details; suffice it to say there was an exchange of negative emails and, had I decided to play, I probably would have preferred finding a new team.

But I got to thinking (which is always dangerous). If I did play I wouldn't be as effective pitching as I've been in the past. One of the things that spurred me to rejoin the league in 2008, after a 20-year hiatus, was the fact that I had been dieting and lost a lot of weight (eventually the total loss reached 50 pounds), so I felt more able to do things without overtiring. Unfortunately, since then, slowly but surely I've been gaining it back. And if anything, with the stress from my job schedule and commute to and from work, I've probably eaten worse over the last 6 months.

MixBlog 10-27-11

I need to put some content up here so the twelve or so of you who are actually reading this stuff (as compared to all the hits I get from people doing Google searches for pictures of shirtless guys*) continue to stop by, so here are some little observations...

Baseball: Right now I'm watching Game 6 of the World Series. It's kind of bizarre. It's 4-4 in the 6th as I write this and both the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals seem to be trying to give the game away with various displays of ineptitude. If they're this mistake-prone in Game 6, what happens if the Cards tie the series and they have to play the dreaded all-or-nothing Game 7? Update: 7-4 Texas in the 7th. Will this game end before I finish this post?

Hockey: Speaking of mistake-prone, I had the Flyers game on earlier. They were playing the Atlanta Thrashers Winnipeg Jets 2.0, who came into the game with a 2-5-1 record, at the Whatever-The-Bank's-Called-This-Week Center. Last night the Flyers lost at Montreal by a 5-1 score. The Canadiens were 1-5-2 before beating the Flyers and hadn't won a home game. So you had to figure the Flyers would be kind of desperate to put together a solid effort.

They fell behind 5-1 in the second period. I tweeted about it at the time and used these hashtags: #karma #apologizesimmonds (referring to this). After the teams traded goals, the Flyers then scored two more in the second and three in the first three minutes of the third period to take a 7-6 lead. I was worried that my tweet was serving as a reverse jinx.

Eye Yi Yi!

I was up much too early this morning because I had an appointment with my ophthamologist. Before we get into that, though, let's discuss our favorite public transit system.

My appointment was for 8:40 am. I got down to Frankford Terminal to catch the El around 8:10, giving me plenty of time to get to Allegheny station and either walk or take another bus to the office. However, when I got up the stairs to the El platform, there was chaos. It was filled with people waiting for a train, and some were getting quite disturbed. I got my phone and logged onto the mobile version of SEPTA's website to see if there were any advisories, and found...nothing. They have a Twitter account as well. I went on Twitter and found...nothing. (Later I checked and saw that their Twitter account hadn't been updated in 3 days until this afternoon, when there was an announcement about a book drive.) Thanks for nothing, SEPTA.

I thought about waiting to see if a train was coming from somewhere, but I saw that one of my fine Twitter peeps, PhilthyBlog (the actual blog is here) posted that he was sitting on a train that was stuck at a station for 15 minutes. So I left the El platform and caught a bus instead, and ended up only a few minutes late.

So, about my eyes...

I've been to the eye doctor's often over the last two-plus years.