Softball and Parkways

Thursday I went golfing in the late afternoon with Bill the Bear, Smitty and one of their co-workers, Nick (who I'm going to call Markakis for reason that make no sense). Markakis and I shoot similar scores as to Bill and Smitty, but Markakis has a much better swing than I do....smooth and effortless. He's pretty young and so he'll only get better if he keeps playing while I'm probably going to stay at the same level and then will drop off over the next 15 years or so.

Anyway, I shot well (an 80 with two birdies and 32 putts....2 or 3 fewer putts and I'd be well into the 70's), but it was an exhausting evening because of the heat and humidity. Afterwards, we hit a pub on the way home and had a few beers. A fun afternoon/evening!

Friday was going to be a hydrating day for me as I had a softball tournament to play on Saturday in more heat up in Crystal Lake (about 90 minutes away). Unfortunately, some work was going to be done on our dirt parkway on Saturday where we've been unable to grow grass or do anything that looks remotely attractive. Since I couldn't help out, I was going to be home to accept delivery of the materials. Here's what we were dealing with:

This is the way one side looks now, which is how the other side looked except for a small tree. Anyway, the dirt on the other side needed to be turned so I did that Friday afternoon, which didn't help with my dehydration. The dirt was all packed down and useless for pretty much anything. Just before I turned the dirt, Home Depot delivered 3 palates of materials!! Unfortunately we have no space for three palates of anything even if we could move them, which we really couldn't. The guy delivering them had a huge, three-wheeled forklift that looked like it it should have been part of the moon landing. Pretty sweet. It was too big to move the palates any closer than the curb though, so we were going to half to leave some of the stuff out over night and hope no one would steal it. Fortunately, nobody did.

So Saturday brought softball for me and we played at 9, which meant batting practice at 8:15 and that I had to leave before 7. Ugh. Getting up at 6 on Saturday is not my favorite thing. It was my first tournament at third base since my should surgery and it felt good to be back "home". The game moves too fast to think most of the time, so you have to compete on instincts which get altered if you switch positions. We lost our first game, won the next two and then lost our last game to a team we play all the time, Amish Mafia, 11-8. I think we were just tired as a team for that last game.

When I got home, still a relatively early 6:00 or so, this is what half to the parkway had transformed into:

Pretty nice huh? We're going to do the other side as well. All of the neighbors are raving about how good it looks, but truly, the bar for improvement was pretty low. We're going to put more green ground cover type of plants in between the rocks. It should look pretty nice when it's all done.

On a completely different topic, LL and I have been dating for 18 months today. We've come a long way from our first meeting at a Starbucks followed by brunch on a cold January morning.