Cup of Coffee

July 29, 2013: Housesitting

65 Comments

Starting last night, the Milkmaid and I are housesitting for a co-worker of hers for a week. It's a much nicer place than most and there's a great pool out back. We've been pretty spoiled for the last couple of weeks, other than not seeing our kids.

65 thoughts on “July 29, 2013: Housesitting”

  1. I missed it last Friday because I was out of pocket, but Mick Jagger is now 70 years old. I hope to have half the energy he has at that age.

    1. Now we're talking.

      We've booked our anniversary trip to Hawaii, and Mrs. Runner and I are considering throwing some $$ and taking the LOST tour on one of the last couple days we're there.

  3. Gah. Got a flat at the end of last week, the rim got dented pretty bad (I hit a brick at 60 mph). So I brought it into the tire place I've gone before (and have been impressed with) on Friday. They looked at it and said they couldn't touch it that day, but could get me in Monday morning, after I let them know I needed it done by noon on Monday. I did not see the usual old shop guys hanging around, just a bunch of 20-somethings. Whatever, I scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday. I show up and they have no idea what I'm doing there. Finally they figure out they put me down for 8 a.m. "Well, ok, we'll see if we can get it done by noon. Our tire guy isn't here yet anyway, but should be soon." So... they had me down an hour early but the guy still hadn't shown up? Nice.

    I just got a call - "this rim is damaged. We can't put a tire on that." Um... you looked at it last week, no? You couldn't get it in on Friday because you needed to order the right parts... Gah.

    Again, not the usual guys, just a few 20-somethings. I'm wondering if we're looking at new management. Either way, this'll be my last visit to this shop.

      1. My luck with bikes might be even worse. I think the sedentary lifestyle's the way for me.

  4. Bittersweet post from Rob Neyer on finding Josh Gibson's grave in Pittsburgh's Allegheny Cemetery. While I love Neyer's way of paying tribute to HoFers at their final resting place, I don't generally agree with his suggestion at the end of the piece. Maybe the HoF could partner with interested parties in local SABR chapters to ensure HoFers' gravesites are kept up?

    2. I also disagree with Rob's suggestion. As an amatuer genealogist, I believe it's important for a person to be buried with their family or where they lived (one exception being for servicemen and women who are honored with burials in military cemeteries). I definitely think that the HOF should identify where all of the HOF'ers are buried, for those that are interested, and it should be the responsibility of local chapters of organizations to keep up the gravemakers (SABR is a good suggestion; local genealogy groups better know how to properly clean makers, though). Or, if the HOF really wanted to, a larger marker could be purchased.

      2. It's a half-baked idea, at best. Not all HOFers would be moved, only those that weren't taken care of. And just who makes that determination?

        1. Allan Huber!
          Bud Selig!
          In disputes, half the body shall be disinterred and relocated to Cooperstown, and the other half shall remain where it is.

            1. If the head ends up in Cooperstown, inner circle HOFer. If the feet, marginal HOFer.

    2. I don't know how many people have actually experienced watching a loved one die from a terminal illness. It's something you never forget, and it can be very life-changing. It was for me. I didn't enjoy reading those tweets, but I certainly understand and empathize with what he's going through.

      1. Yeah, I saw it there, too. My page views have been real inconsistent and I haven't figured out why I occasionally get huge spikes. I figured it was being linked to somewhere that I hadn't seen, but it could be that Yahoo! chooses to promote it more on occasion.

        1. For your health, I should probably not say.

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            1. I was actually thinking of you when I spoilered that. I know I should do the same, but train wrecks and all...

    1. Whenever teams claim to have lost money, I always wonder if they "lost" money or actually lost money. Walters phrasing seems to imply the latter, especially when considering the signings and the lockout.

      1. This.

        Seems as though the money in professional sports has always been in selling a franchise more so than in owning one. Somehow, owners manage all the time to complain about how they are losing money, yet when franchises are sold, the values always have grown substantially from the preceding sale. The Lords of the Realm does a decent, if somewhat inconsistent, job of tackling those issues. Here is an interesting discussion.

        Abstract
        The paper develops a quality adjusted professional sports franchise price index for North America based on a repeat sale method. This index reflects trends in the general price of sports franchises holding local market, facility, and team characteristics constant. The price index exhibits considerable volatility but no upward trend over time, unlike previous quality adjusted price indexes based on hedonic models in the literature. The lack of an upward trend in this quality adjusted price index indicates that specific franchise characteristics drives observed increases in prices over the past forty years.

        from the introduction, a problem statement that references the key work of Rod Fort in this area:

        Fort (2006) pointed out two important features of sport franchise values: First, the lack of audited financial data from professional sports teams in North America, coupled with incessant, hard to verify, claims of financial difficulties made by team owners places a premium on the analysis of observable data like actual prices paid for professional sports teams on the open market; second, franchise values increased dramatically over the past 100 years, outstripping the growth rate of the overall economy by a wide margin, and understanding why franchise values grew so rapidly is an important research question in sport finance. Even if the underlying flows of revenues cannot be observed, finance theory indicates that the price paid for an asset that generates a stream of revenues over time should reflect the present discounted value of the underlying flow of net revenues.

    2. Cheaptoy, I got you covered. I've been a slacker lately with all the off days on Mondays.

  13. It's official: Mike D'Antoni is a moron.

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    1. Following up on this, the story turns as to whether the Sux will trade Jake Peavy. Apparently, they are saying that they are going to build around Peavy. Is that a ruse to turn up the heat???

      Passan:

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      He's playing it well! Crafty! Very next tweet:

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      Ugh, that seems like a dumb idea... He went from crafty to too smart by half.

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