Cup of Coffee

May 7, 2014: Unfamiliar

124 Comments

My wife and daughters left early this morning for a five-day trip to Minnesota (for a wedding). I can't remember the last time I was alone for that long. Who wants to come over for a drink?

124 thoughts on “May 7, 2014: Unfamiliar”

    1. Did I miss the resolution of scorpion-in-the-kitchen-light? If not, Milkman, you're still not alone.

      2. That thing is still alive. Well, it was as of yesterday. I haven't seen it move yet this morning, but it's usually idle until about 5pm.

  2. NBA playoffs:

    Miami and San Antonio with easy wins last night. It's not surprising that either team won, but the margins were a little surprising. The Nets swept the Heat in the four regular season games that they played and the Spurs struggled mightily with Dallas while Portland had an easier time with a much better Houston club.

    Then again, the Heat and Spurs are not unfamiliar with winning in the post season.

  3. Spent a few hours at urgent care last night. My 7-year-old had a tag accident that resulted in three staples in his head. His first question: can I still play on Thursday?

    Thursday is opening day for the 1st grade Orioles, by the way.

    1. Tag accident? Might be time to buy a pack of these.
      Glad he's OK and not afraid of getting out there and grinding. Be sure to tell him that "rubbing dirt on it" is not for open wounds requiring medical care.

    2. We've avoided medical care for it so far, but my 7-year old has a tendency to lead with his head when he runs. Doesn't help that he wears glasses- we've had to replace about a dozen pairs of those.

      1. This is the third visit for head injuries between the two boys.

        I also had three head injury incidents that involved stitches when I was a kid.

        1. I split my eyebrow on a bar in our basement while rocking on a barstool watching cartoons on a B&W TV. My folks used the bar for sewing.
          (Dad was a tailor/haberdasher prior to becoming an electrician.)

          1. As family lore has it I simply ran into a wall at the age of two. I have a scar on my head that indicates this may be true.

            1. I managed to hit myself in the head with the claw end of a hammer when I was in high school.

              I had also sliced my hand open the day before, plus my sister ran into a mailbox that night, so we managed to have 3 ER trips for stitches in a span of 24 hours.

              1. If it makes any of you all feel any better, I have a lasting reminder of how hard the dash is in an '81 Monte Carlo on the bridge of my nose that I've had since I was about 4.

                    2. you've had a nose since you were 4? were you a mouth-breather before?

                      c'mon, man. It's wednesday. All down hill from here.

                    3. Not necessarily the nose, just the bridge. It was a weird time to be alive.

            2. I stabbed myself in the chest with a 1" exacto-knife trying to cut off an apple stem at work one day. Bled like a mofo but touched nothing of consequence.

            3. I have a decent-sized scar between my eyes from running into the corner of a shelf as a kid. When I worked at The Ground Round, the way the lights hit the scar and cast a shadow on it, apparently a few of my co-workers thought I had a unibrow for about a year.

            4. Got into a near-fatal car accident in high school* that left me with a pretty nifty scar on the back of my head. It wasn't really visible until I started shaving my head last year.

              * "No-fault" is so bogus. It was raining & the regular stoplights were out, so they were flashing red in all directions (mandatory four-way stop). I proceeded to cross the divided highway when it was my turn and I felt it was safe. Guy in a Ford Expedition runs the red light, T-bones me at 55+ right in front of the driver door, then nearly hits a cop car parked in the median before stopping. Too fast for conditions, speeding, distracted (on a cell phone, natch), failure to yield, who knows what else. Totaled my car, sent me and him to the hospital. No citation and my insurance had to pay for the car & hospital visit.

              2. I have a pretty wicked scar on the back of my head as well. Had a tumor removed from just above where neck meets the base of my skull - people never tired of asking if the base barber was drunk whilst enlisted (high and tight seemed to accentuate the scar).

                Also have a scar on my chin but hidden by my beard (snowboarding) and another one just above my hairline from when my friend's older brother shot him in the ass with a BB gun. He was holding a log in one hand and a hatchet in the other and dropped both. The log struck a blood vessel and, as head wounds are wont to do, bled like crazy - like Carrie blood. Poor kid thought he'd put the hatchet in my head.

                My brother has a scar on the bridge of his nose caused by a sharpened pencil. He was two, runs by (with pencil unseen in hand) and I whap him with a pillow in the back of his head; filleted his nose but missed both eyes. I don't think I understood my parent's horror until I was about 14. "What? It's just two stitches!"

                1. Poor kid thought he'd put the hatchet in my head.

                  When Pops was a little boy a neighbor kid threw a brick at him (the reason for which I no longer recall), striking him in the back of the head. For the rest of his life he had not only a scar, but a rectangular divot in his scull and scalp. Since Pops was pretty well near bald by his mid-twenties, he had to endure decades of questions from students who noticed the divot when he'd write problems on the chalkboard. Pops eventually started telling them he got in an axe fight with a cousin in his youth, and that if they thought he looked bad, they should check out his cousin. When Pops became a firefighter this story became even more hilarious (and even more likely to draw in gullible students).

                2. These stories remind me of backyard croquet-set baseball and a line drive to my mouth.

                    1. ... 7 and 8 year olds are playing a game with the implements at their disposal.
                      Basketball-Soccer got nixed very quickly.

            5. I was left in charge of The Boy as a toddler one time in our first house in Illinois. We had rather prominent baseboards (maybe a half inch wide and 1.5 inches tall). Naturally enough, on my watch, the kid took a header into the baseboards at an out-jutting corner (separating dining room from living room). He gashed himself on the eyebrow with a nasty, deep puncture wound. Had to take him to the emergency room, wait FOR EVER for the specialty surgeon on call to come in to sew him up, and had to see him strapped down for the sew-up because he was screaming bloody murder and thrashing throughout the procedure. One of the worst days of my life (luckily).

              At least he got a Harry Potter scar out of the deal.

              1. Well if we want to talk about scars on our kids... Aristotle has a 6" scar running from the top of her bottom up along the spine on account of surgery when she was 2.5 months old.

              2. When I was a toddler, I took a header with an old-fashioned hard plastic pacifier in my mouth and gashed open the right side of my upper lip. This-

                Had to take him to the emergency room, wait FOR EVER for the specialty surgeon on call to come in to sew him up, and had to see him strapped down for the sew-up because he was screaming bloody murder and thrashing throughout the procedure.

                - is nearly word-for-word the story my parents tell about it, except no straps. It took two nurses and my father (Navy Corpsman in Vietnam, he wasn't at all freaked out) to hold me down for my five stitches. Still have a teeny-tiny little scar in the corner of my mouth.

            6. My brother once managed to split open his chin so badly that he needed stitches in a spot that currently had stitches already in place. He also came home from the school bus one day with blood gushing out of his head that needed staples to stop the bleeding. To this day, he claims to have no idea how that happened and that he didn't even notice until my mom panicked when she saw him walk in the door. (I believe him because he was only in third or fourth grade, has never been in a fight, and basically no one rode that bus. Very bizarre.)

              Another brother (CoC, the one you know), ran full-speed into the dining room wall and took a chunk of the plaster out with his head during a game of tag. He also ran face first into a glass wall at my father's old office.

              I had stitches a few times from tag. I remember splitting open my chin and needing stitches when my brothers and I were playing hide-and-seek in the dark at church and I was hiding under a table (we were there late one day because my parents were frequent volunteers to help with the books, etc.). The most memorable part of that day was waiting at the ER at Abbott on Chicago/Lake that they eventually gave my brothers and me popsicles.

              1. In Sioux City, brother Coot hit me right above the eye on a back-swing with a hachet (around age 3). Nice scar, there.

                Same brother cut into the side of my ear with a pair of scissors. Nice scar, there. A pattern?

                Got a Yard Dart in the back of my head - your scalp bleeds profusely. Imagine my mother's reaction with blood streaking across my face as I ran into the house. /*zombie child */

                But the best one was I was climbing one of those metal shelves (that are supposed to have plastic inserts in the ends, didn't) to get at something above them - my foot slipped and my leg slid down the edge of the shelf-edge - huge scar, much blood, many stitches. But the dude abides.

                2. Jarts were the best! We used to throw them really, really high. Somehow, no one ever got impaled. Maybe the ballistic whistling warned us off?

          2. I smashed my left thumb between the door leading to the garage and the door jamb. It was a fire door, so very heavy and closed on its own on my thumb. I still managed to go to this doubleheader later that day. My thumb is still deformed. I can line the nails up side-by-side with my thumbs and my left thumb sticks up noticeably taller than the right.

            Also, my wife told me about how her sister once fell off a bunk bed and hit her face near her eye on the corner of the dresser. At the hospital, the doctors took her aside away from her parents to ask her how it happened to make sure there wasn't any abuse going on.

          3. I have a fairly unnoticeable scar about an inch below my right eye from being hit in the head with a pretty good swing from a softball bat when I was nine.

            I also have one on the back of my head from being pushed into a steel doorframe when I was eight. It's pretty small, but if my hair is cut really short, it's noticeable. I get asked about it occasionally when I'm getting my hair cut.

            1. I have a three-inch long lengthwise scar on my right wrist, obtained from a protruding wire from a backstop. I and a buddy were, for inexplicable reasons, climbing said backstop when I was maybe 10 or 11. On the way back down, I must have dropped the last few feet, and gouged myself.

              In certain company, I will sometimes joke that suicide attempts are best conducted with lengthwise cuts on the wrists, not cross-wise. Yea, I know, not really that funny.

              1. You know someone from the NSA/TSA/SCI is jotting down all of our scars into their files...

                1. This is happening.

                  BTW - this is great. If nothing else good comes from the staples in my son's skull, at least I will have a day spent reading WGOM head wound stories.

    3. When we lived in Indy, my sister and her friend were on our teeter-totter and I was swinging a stick around at the mosquitos (yeah, I dunno how I thought that was going to help either). Now, understand our teeter-totter wasn't your normal up-down teeter-totter, This also spun around the fulcrum, so the riders are making sine waves in three dimensions.

      Anyway, my stick/mosquito-whacker snapped, flew threw the air, and stabbed my sister square in the forehead. To hit her took crazy timing in the x-, y-, and z-dimensions. Of course, being a forehead wound, it bled like the Dickens. Mom was inside upstairs bed-ridden with a migraine (they run in the family). We were used to her getting them even as kids, so we knew to just let her sleep it off. My sister came inside screaming. Mom came thumping down the stairs yelling "Somebody better be bleeding!" Of course, someone was. Profusely. Mom was not happy at all to have to take a bleeding daughter to the ER mid-migrane. It took 5 stitches to get it sewn up.

      1. As for myself, I have three distinct stomach scars. The first is from pyloric stenosis when I was a baby. I have no recollection of the surgery as I was 3 weeks old when it was performed. (I may have, on occasion, told girls in bars that I got it being thrown from and gored by a bull I was riding. I may have worked, too.)

        Just to the right (my right) of that are three parallel scars about 2" in length. I got those from a tree I was climbing. A branch I stood on was (unbeknownst to me) dead and snapped under my weight. The remaining bit of the branch scratched me on the way by as I fell. I went inside quite upset. Of course, it was my sister's birthday(she was turning 5ish?). She was pretty pissed I stole her thunder.

        On the other side of my surgery scar is a single stripe about 3". I was climbing over our picket fence in Iowa and slipped. I nearly impaled myself, but I somehow only managed to scrape off a bit of skin. But I just as easily could have taken a stake to the intestines and died. One of my dumber scars.

        I have other minor scars too. One on the right wrist from a hike when I slipped on some rocks crossing a creek and smacked wrist on a sharp rock. Four stitches at the end of my left eyebrow from a racquetball incident. Keyhole scars from shoulder surgery. Bunch of dings and nicks in the shins and hands from rugby.

        1. In addition to my hammer-to-the-head story above, I've sliced my knee on the plug in an inflatable pool (6 stitches), my ankle on the metal rim of a large barrel that I was riding as a bull (5 stitches), my hand on a kitchen knife carving pumpkins (4), my other hand on a utility knife that jammed (4), and my forehead falling from a bunk bed (2). The most remarkable scar though is from the concussion that resulted in second degree burns on my, um... lap.

          1. Wow, I've led such a boring life. Total number of stitches = 0. I used to have a couple scars on my legs (fell off a bike; tripped on scenery during a play rehearsal), but they've pretty much faded.

            1. I'm not sharing my other stories.

              .

              .

              .

              .

              OK fine:

              • Chipped front incisor from my sister "bopping" the end of a glass bottle while I drank the dregs from it. It was prune juice (which I swear was sweeter in the early 80s).
              • 4" scar on back of my thigh (stitches) from backing in to a running snowblower.
              • They day I broke my hand when catching myself from a biking fall, we still went to see Turner & Hooch instead of the doctor.
              • So many little scars on my hands from my sister's pinches.
              • When EAR was EAP, she was visiting my family and walked into the plate glass from the breezeway at St. Mary's Catholic in New Ulm and cut both her purlicues, only needed stitches on one. We missed mass that weekend.
              • I nearly punctured toddler HPR's eyeball but ended up just cutting his lower eyelid in a biking accident with a Burley Bike Trailer when I didn't buckle him in and didn't have the screen down and came to a sudden stop. Lots of blood where the burley bolt hit his face. Half an inch further up and he'd have a glass eye.

          2. My brother broke both arms in the same calendar year: ice skating, and sliding into third (on an asphalt playground; nobody accused him of being smart).

            1. Speaking of sliding on asphalt, I forgot the time I wiped out on my little brother's new Diamondback. I hit a jump crooked (read: his friend cut me off, I swerved to avoid the collision, but was too close to the ramp and went off it anyways). I remember having time to think a) "This is going to hurt" as I was doing a 1/4 barrel roll to my left and b) to kick the bike away so it didn't land on me.

              So I hit the asphalt going pretty damned fast from a pretty good height. I landed on my left side with my arm outstretched* and slid about 5 feet. You could see where I went by the path I left in the debris (rocks, leaves , sticks and the like). I looked like I was stealing a base, only I wasn't. I ripped off a lot of skin.

              I went inside and laid on the bathroom floor bleeding everywhere while Mom and my sister took an hour and a half to get me to stop bleeding, then with tweezers - Mom on my elbow, Jill on my knee - get all the pebbles out of my skin and applying Neosporin and gauze. That was a Saturday morning. I spent the rest of the weekend horizontal on the couch. I spent about 10 minutes at my internship on Monday before I called upstairs to have Dad take me home because I got light-headed.

              That was the summer after my freshman year at Drake, so 10 years ago this July. I still have a dark patch of skin on my left ulna near the elbow and on my left knee just below the knee cap that are mostly scar tissue.

              *This is what I think caused my labrum and rotator cuff tear that I eventually had repaired. Or at the very list started the rip that something else finished off later.

    4. Oh, mama. The one day I'm sent on a long ass pick up deep into the bayou we have a scars discussion. Boo. I have a double chin due to footed pajamas. I was running down the stairs of a resort cabin near Lutsen, slipped, and bashed my chin on at least two stair treads. My old man stitched me up on site. I still have a fear of footed pajamas.

      1. I also have a deep tissue dead zone from a skating accident during my senior year at umd. I sold two prints, and promptly purchased new CCMs. Went out on the outdoor ice to skate and shoot on February 23, 2001 and promptly crumpled like a sack of potatoes. I hadn't skated on such sharp blades in almost ten years. On the way down, I kicked myself in the shin, and knew it would hurt bad in the morning. What I didn't expect was the russet sized hematoma that would be protruding from my shin. I've never felt discomfort so intense, and hope to not repeat the experience.

        1. Oh, and sweet potatoes are disasters waiting to happen. Twice I've sliced off portions of fingers, index and thumb, while chopping sweet potato for dinner. Both times I applied a bit of superglue to a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding and continued cooking dinner.

    5. The poor intern at HCMC lost count at around 600 stitches to my face and chin (about 8 hours of work). Toss in a mess of staples for the subsequent skull fracture surgery, and I win!

      Wear a helmet, kids.

    1. They should have a bug in the corner of the screen counting down the Yankees' magic number. It's gotta be like, what, down to something like 130 right?

  5. Morning game alert: New Britain hosts Trenton this morning at 9:35 Central.

    1. Why do some of these team play so early in the morning? Who goes to those games?

      1. A lot of times, it's some sort of promotion for schools to bring kids to games. Wish they'd had promotions like that when I was in school (not that I lived close enough to a minor league park to make it feasible anyway).

  6. well, MY wife (and her mother) are leaving tomorrow for four days in Minnesota. Maybe the Mrs and the Milkmaid will have a meet-up? 🙂

    actually, the Mrs and Nanny are heading to the Alma Mater to see the Boy perform in a play (David Mamet's Race).

    Oh. My. Gawd. That's just what I need, a waiter in the family.

    2. Mamet is a real challenge for most actors (one can see this by reading just a few pages of his work). I wish I could see that.

      1. me too. This is his first on-stage acting experience (discounting any horrors that may have been inflicted during his pre-school or elementary school days). With him playing one of the major roles (and there are only four parts to begin with), that's pretty much the definition of jumping in with both feet.

  7. I'm wondering why this took so long to emerge.

    Click the Reionize electrons button at the top of the page to generate a full page of New Age poppycock.
    The inspiration for this idea came from watching philosophy debates involving Deepak Chopra. I wrote a blog post about it if you're interested.
    After sitting through hours of New Age rhetoric, I decided to have a crack at writing code to generate it automatically and speed things up a bit. I cobbled together a list of New Age buzzwords and cliché sentence patterns and this is the result.

    1. That's nothing new. There's lots of rewrite programs out there that will turn an internet article and reword the article many different ways so people trying to direct traffic to their website can put out dozens of articles with links back to their websites and get higher rankings on Google searches.

      1. Sounds like academic writing in some disciplines...

        (They make similar rewrite programs for postmodern and post-postmodern theory.)

        1. My think that if it can't fit on a 2"x 2" sheet of paper, it's not worth publishing. Post-itmodern theory.

  8. I recorded the Wild game and watched it a little bit later after the small one had retired for the evening (what's with these early start times, eh?).

    Midway through the second period, I commented to my wife that just once I'd like to see the Wild win 4-0 and not have to bite my nails through an entire game. To her credit, even though she knew the final score via social media, she kept a straight face and gave nothing away.

    1. To her credit? No, that would have been if she had found a way to mess with you by replacing the 3 period video.

      Wait, 4-0 you say? Yes... To her credit...

    3. By the time I got home from footy practice and got the game on, the Wild were already up 2-0 in the 3rd. I was not at all feeling safe in that lead until it was 3-0, and even then it's always sorta in the back of your mind.

    4. Was at Roy Wilkins for the QOTSA concert during the game last night. For those unfamiliar with that area, the Xcel Energy Center, St. Paul Rivercentre and Roy Wilkins Auditorium are interconnected facilities all occupying the same 'block,' bordered by West 7th, West 5th, N Washington and Kellogg Blvd. It was probably the busiest I've ever seen downtown St. Paul. Headliners went on about 8:30 and wrapped up maybe 2 minutes before the end of the game next door. Spent the encore watching the score on my phone - waiting for an implosion that never materialized. Seeing as how I had to work today, I got out of downtown about 11:15, but man was it a great atmosphere. If not for the fishing opener, I'd definitely be headed back down to West 7th on Friday.

        1. Insane, even with the acoustics in Roy being questionable at best, they put on an absolute clinic. Start strong, play some fan favorites, play a new song or two, drink beer/whisky & smoke a cigarette between numbers, mix in some slower stuff, more new stuff, fan favorites, riffing with the crowd (sports fans? where?) and a rarity that was pretty cool, finish strong, head out for just long enough for the "encore" to waiver, come back out with piano solo that builds into another big song. Play a couple more songs and knock over the drum kit on your way out the door.

          You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, but I Feel Like a Millionaire / No One Knows / Avon / My God Is the Sun / Burn the Witch / Smooth Sailing / …Like Clockwork / If I Had a Tail / I'm Designer / Little Sister / Kalopisa / I Appear Missing / I Sat by the Ocean / Make It Wit Chu / The Fun Machine Took a Sh** and Died / Sick, Sick, Sick / Go With the Flow ENCORE: The Vampyre of Time & Memory / Feel Good Hit of the Summer / A Song for the Dead

      2. It was probably the busiest I've ever seen downtown St. Paul

        For me, this was 1987. We lived in Galtier Plaza in downtown St. Paul, had just been married in July, and were standing down on the street watching the Twins victory parade. Highlight was Kirby Puckett wearing a fur bomber hat.

  9. Say what you want about the G&TG podcast, but MLB apparently convinced Apple to drop it from iTunes. Talk about a dickish move.

    1. It's on iTunes this morning, albeit with a new title and picture. I guess this explains why they had re-named it "An Un-official Minnesota Twins Podcast".

    2. I heard it just wasn't G&TG but other baseball related podcasts as well. MLB sure knows how to reach alienate a younger audience.

    3. So what the difference between a podcast and talk radio? Is MLB going to shut down those too?

      1. I'd bet it's mainly a CYA thing, where MLB can't be officially related to a lot of these podcasts because they don't really have control over them. If anything, I'd guess it is primarily driven by sponsorship--IIRC, G&tG have some sponsors, and while those sponsors may or may not currently conflict with the Twins or MLB, at some point they could conflict without MLB getting a say in the matter. So as long as MLB isn't officially endorsing them (like they aren't officially endorsing talk radio), then MLB probably wants them out there, just like they want talk radio out there even when it is critical of baseball.

          1. In this case, I tend to lean towards Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Call me naive, but it's easy for me to believe that MLB had some lawyers out protecting their copyrights/trademarks/whathaveyou (which, as I understand, they technically have to be pretty aggressive about or they risk losing), and there was some miscommunication with Apple about what exactly they wanted done. I imagine most/all of the podcasts would have changed their image or put up some kind of "unofficial" disclaimer without a fight.

            1. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

              You wouldn't believe how many times I've had to invoke that phrase to my wife and her sisters.

    4. They should fight it on the grounds that only 35-40% of the content is MLB-related.

      1. Heh.

        They had their own, non-infringing name and logo. I don't have a copy of the description of their podcast, but I think it's fairly likely that it didn't infringe, either. This is just nonsense.

        1. Based on the letter from MLB, it sounds like iTunes had placed an MLB logo or something like that on the display to encourage people to purchase and that was what MLB was wanting removed.

      1. Disclosure SelectShow

    3. I was nowhere near, for some reason. I'd been doing well on these recently.

      Also, I really like the way that autograph looks.

  12. When live sports aren't on, we keep my DirecTV at work tuned to ESPN because of the lack of objectionable content. I cannot wait until the NFL Draft is over, because it's been nonstop draft talk for a week now, as the NHL and NBA have some of the most exciting playoffs they've had in years.

    1. we keep my DirecTV at work tuned to ESPN because of the lack of objectionable content.

      This, of course, depends on one's definition of the term "objectionable content".

    2. More seriously, it won't matter when the NFL draft is over, because they'll spend the next two weeks talking about who the winners and losers were in the draft, followed by nonstop coverage of minicamp, followed by the buildup to the pre-season. It apparently works, because if there's one thing ESPN knows it's how to make money, but it sure can be annoying.

      2. Yeah, I know this leads directly into draft analysis (I accidentally typed that as "daft analysis" at first...Freudian!!!), but I'm desperately trying to look on the bright side.

      3. There are other channels on the TV machine. Right now, I'm spending a fair amount of time watching TNT. They have been showing these sporting contests involving very tall men and an inflatable orange ball. Very entertaining.

          1. Bingo. I watch as many of those tall-man contests from work as possible. Unfortunately, I work a lot of days and the live stuff doesn't happen until 4pm here.

      4. I occasionally meet up with colleagues and former students at one of the student unions, and in the main beer-serving area there's a TV always tuned to sports. A good 85% it's sports talk, and the talk is always football, even when there are day baseball games being played. Really ticks me off.

        There are a few bars in town that don't regularly have their TVs on (or, better yet, don't have TVs). Of the ones that do have TVs on that I visit semi-regularly, the programming is either TCM, Wisconsin hockey, a CFL game, or fishing. I can handle that.

      1. Typos are fun- that's Pablo Sandoval, nicknamed Kung Fu Panda 'cause he's kinda roly-poly.

        edit: and Mag's link is perfect for it

          1. My kids have been watching Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness on Nickelodeon. Not bad for a spin-off series.

            1. I will admit to watching that as well. As you said, it's not bad. Obviously, for cost and turn-around considerations, the animation isn't as well-developed, but the writing and voice-work are pretty good.

      2. And now I notice that you bolded the "r" because you were aware that was the typo. Oh well, it's not the first thing I've explained to someone that didn't need it.

  14. Hola desde Madrid! (Hello from Madrid!)

    We've got a day left in our Spanish excursion, so I've decided to start staying up a little later to help me get back on Central time. Segovia was ridiculously impressive. The Romans built aqueducts that last approximately 200 times longer than our bridges. Thanks a lot, Obama. All I want to do when I get home is play a whole bunch of Civilization.

    Here's the MLB cap count (thanks to spoons for introducing me to this way to people-watch) so far (3 days in Sevilla, 1 in Toledo, 1 in Madrid, and 1 in Segovia):
    Yankees 10
    Red Sox 1
    Blue Jays 1
    Twins 1 (on a random Japanese tourist in Toledo, I didn't know how to ask him if he liked Nishioka)
    Mariners 1
    Nationals 1
    Phillies 1
    Cardinals 1
    Giants 1

    1. I didn't spend nearly enough time in Madrid, and one of the days we were there was a national holiday and everything (and I mean everything. We walked around for 4 hours before we found an open bar) was closed.

      I make it a rule not to visit places twice (Ireland excepted), but I almost don't consider having seen Madrid. I'd love another trip to Spain to see Madrid properly and some of the south of Spain. I'd just not go to Barcelona again.

      1. Being in the middle of planning a euro trip; Moar thoughts on Barcelona would be appreciated.

        1. Barcelona was amazing. If you're at all considering it, I highly recommend you go. Stupid self-imposed travel restrictions.

          Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions and I'd be happy to to my best to help out.

        2. Barcelona is the one spot in Spain I wanted to visit but couldn't squeeze into the trip. You can't go wrong with Segovia/Toledo/Seville. Madrid has been fine, but it's mostly museums rather than buildings that had a practical purpose many years ago.

          We know it's going to be touristy, but we're going to Botin for our last dinner in Spain tonight. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, it's the oldest restaurant in the world. I'm going to order me some suckling pig.

      2. I was looking for a "c__ksucker" joke, but couldn't find it. Nicely done, Bootsy

Comments are closed.