Busy and Hot Weekend

It was a busy weekend starting with cooking ribs again on Friday. They were good, but I feel like maybe I rushed them a bit and should have cooked them a little longer to get that "fall off the bone" texture that we love. They were still good, just not my best. We watched a movie and then hit the sack as I had to get up around 6 to get to a softball tournament at 8:30 in Crete, about an hour away.

Even during batting practice at 8:30 you could tell it was going to be a hot muggy day and the weather did not disappoint. Whew! HOT and MUGGY!! We had lots and lots of water and we only played three games. Unfortunately we lost our first game, had an hour off, won our second game and then had another hour off before losing our third.

If you recall, I was 16-18 in first games of tournaments this season, but was a disappointing 1-3 on Saturday in game one, lowering my OBA from .888 to .809 (17-21). Still good, but a tough game one. The other two games I was 3-3 each game to go 7-9 for the day, a .777 clip. Pretty good since I was leading the team already with a .703 OBA. The games we lost though were disturbing for various reasons, not the least of which was that we had a pretty good team out there and we got run ruled in game one (lost by 10 after 6 innings) and only scored 9 runs in the last game even though we played on short fields (280'), in part because the wind was blowing in. A team has to be able to score runs efficiently regardless of the wind angle, but in the past we've struggled with the wind blowing in and it seems to still be the case. Hopefully we'll figure it out.

Saturday night we met up with Alexis (of Alexis in Amsterdam fame) and Rob (OH) for Indian food. They're staying in the burbs (near where I played league night softball last year), but we went to Devon Ave to Hema's Kitchen for Indian food (our favorite BYOB Indian place). The food and company were both grand and we were even greeted by Hema herself at the register when we walked in!! Nice! Unfortunately I forgot to tell them that it was BYOB, so I brought enough booze for the 3 of us, Alexis wasn't drinking of course, and libations were enjoyed.

After we dropped them off at their Metra train line, we headed to O'Donovan's bar for a 30th birthday celebration of a softball fan. It turns out her cousin is also someone that I do tax-law work with. One drink for us there, a shot for the birthday girl, and we decided to call it a night.