Friday night was a casual cookout over at Ricardo's place that ended early because of my Saturday planned events.
Those events involved getting up at 5:45 a.m. to drive 90 minutes to Kankakee to be ready for batting practice at 7:30 and for our first game at 9. We started off on the right foot by winning game one and were hoping to make a run through the winners bracket, but we lost game two after an absolutely awful call by an umpire in the field turned an out into two and almost a triple play. Mentally we didn't recover and lost. We won our third game with a nice rally where we sent 12 or 13 men to the plate in one inning. Our last game was being played short-handed though as we lost one of our better players after he ran into the chainlink fence in the outfield, another good hitter pulled his calf muscle in the batters box, a third player (and probably the best guy on the team) was suffering from heat exhaustion and could only bat (though he was awful in that capacity as well) and a fourth good player got ejected after both umpires missed the other team's third base coach grab one of his players as he rounded third base to stop him from running into an out. What they were watching, I'll never know.
Anyway, it was a hot day and even though I had the Bears canopy deployed, we were pretty tired after four games. But the day was not over for me and LL. We headed back to the city, changed and headed up to swanky Winnetka for an engagement party for my buddy Sausage. It was a very nice party in his future in-laws' house. There were at least four servers catering to our needs.
Sunday provided just a little rest, but I was heading out to Naperville (about an hour away) to play in one softball game in a 40 and older league. I'm on the roster, but haven't made any games yet this year. I almost didn't make this one either. On the way out, while going about 70 m.p.h. on highway 55, I hit a bump in the road (a reverse pothole of sorts) and my tire blew. Fortunately I was able to navigate it to the very wide shoulder on the left side of the road where I was driving.
First I tried a can of Fix-a-Flat which partially inflated the tire. It got me about a mile and half to the next exit before the tire completely blew (big hole in it now). So I jacked up the car and took the old tire off not realizing I was on a slightly downward incline. You guessed it, the car rolled forward off the jack. Ugh. Nobody was hurt and I don't think the car was damaged, but time will tell. Now I had to jack up the car back closer to the rear tire because the jack would no longer fit under the front of the car and then slid the old tire underneath the middle of the car for support. That allowed me enough room to re-jack the car (this time with the parking brake on) and complete the tire change.
Finally we rolled into the softball game when they were in the fourth inning. The coach put me in right away and I proceeded to record only one of five putouts that I should have made as well as hitting two weak grounders, on the first of which I did a face-plant on my way down the first base line after stumbling out of the box. Not a great game.
We weren't done though! We came home after the game and went to a charity event at The Elbo Room where some bands were playing. Sometime around 11 or so, we finally rolled back home. What a weekend!!
1 comment:
That sounds exhausting! But it sounds like you enjoyed it, so that's good. I always get a little cranky when there is too much activity.
The third base coach interfered with the game and didn't get caught by the umps? That is insane! I don't think something like that would even happen at Kacey's level!
I hope Monday brought you some well-deserved rest!
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