77 thoughts on “April 27, 2016: Yesterday Giveth”

  1. Seriously though, I had an interview yesterday which went well, but for a position that might not be a fit from my end. I got home to find another one scheduled for a phone interview tonight (for a position I have a lot of questions about, but that could be very cool), and another looking to schedule in a couple weeks. So, all told, things that were good, but a lot of time and energy invested in something that probably isn't a fit.

    Add in that we're probably selling our house in fairly short order, and we have baby #4 due in 2 months, and I'm still reeling from my nephew's death, and there are all sorts of year-end school things (including for Philosofette, who is finishing up her student teaching/licensure/education degree)... well, I feel some stress as of late.

    1. That's quite a bit to have going on all at once. May your sleep be of the highest quality for the duration.

  2. Continuing discussion about intelligent Twins discourse...

    I used to go to a bunch of sites for that. Two of them were Scot's and Will's, and now they just chat here. Two were Seth Stohs and Nick Nelson (and the other Nick), and they are now both at Twins Daily. Seth usually had a civil comments section, though Nick's was filled with Tribbies. I tried to follow Twins Daily for a while, but something about the way the site is organized just doesn't do it for me.

    1. For a while I had an RSS feed for just the authors I was interested in reading, but a site redesign messed it all up. I enjoy Derek Wetmore and Phil Miller as long as I skip the comments.

      1. I use NewsBlur, which allows users to "intelligence train" individual feeds. In effect, it allows you to filter your RSS feeds for things like authors, tags, and title keywords. Don't want to see articles written by a particular author on a multi-author site? Just give the author's name a thumbs down and NewsBlur hides those articles. Want to prioritize your reading? Give a thumbs up to authors, tags, or keywords that you like, then use the "Focus" mode, which only displays posts matching those criteria.

        For example: On my Fangraphs RSS feed I've given thumbs up to Jeff Sullivan & Tangotiger, as well as posts tagged "Twins'" "Padres," & "Rockies." I've given thumbs down to any post tagged "Yankees" or "Red Sox," so I never see those unless there's a thumbs up to trump the thumbs down.

          1. The Twins' front office renders the team practically invisible at BP, too. I do a lot of skimming as a result.

        2. Twins Daily must not provide author metadata. I can train the reader based on publisher or title. Other sites I can train by author. Cool idea though, I've been using Feedly since google reader went away.

          1. Yeah, the training is dependent on the publisher using metadata consistently. A couple of my higher-volume feeds don't, which is annoying.

    2. One thing working against Twins talk in particular is the relative lack of quality from the most prominent voices. If people are taking what they hear from Dick, Bert, Jack Morris, Berreiro, Dazzle, and Souhan...ugh, I'll just stop there.

      1. The thing is, many of us suspect that much of what some of those prominent voices say gets fed to them by Twins management. So, perhaps that's where part of the problem lies.

        1. Yes indeed, and that's going to create a natural rift in the community between two sides that will probably never see eye-to-eye on a lot of topics.

          It also doesn't help that the team has stunk, it is easy to get cranky and drawn into an argument.

          I have tried to be more mellow, there have been a few times lately that I decided it wasn't worth the time to go on and on about the front office again.

    3. I wish there were more posts containing intelligent Twins discourse here. A lot gets buried in the Cups or game logs and those are harder to share elsewhere and attract new people.

      1. Even if we had dedicated posts to capture our discourse, it might not help attract new people ... our attentions/discussions do have a tendency to wander.

        1. But it's something that's easy to share. The post itself would have some ponderings and then the discussion would have the intelligent discourse. The post gets people to visit to read something interesting and then the discussion (may) keep them.

          2. It seems to me, that when I first found the old site, what drew me in was some very intelligent Twins talk with lots of sabermetric talk (miss you ubes!) What hooked me into coming back was all the other cool conversations about music, food, etc. Would love to see more Twins talk here other than game logs (which are cool) and Minor League info (thanks JeffA).

    4. Of course, it's not easy to find intelligent discourse about sports generally. Or come to think of it, about a lot of other things.

    5. intelligent Twins discourse

      I have been noticing a lack of this. I stopped writing mostly because of real life, but at the time there were so many Twins blogs worth reading it was difficult to for me to write anything meaningful (about the current team, at least) that hadn't already been covered by 10 other writers who most of the time did it better than I could. The landscape seems to have changed a bit over the years, not for the better. I do, however, spend much less time staring at a computer screen during baseball season, so that might be good...

      1. I genuinely miss your blog for the stuff I can't find anywhere else; intelligent discourse about the first Nationals team

        2. I also loved your site. The one thing I loved writing the most was about forgotten organizational history, and you had that nailed.

    1. Black is the new Claret.
      Green bag is the new Green bag.
      Halfway down the block, I actually turned around to walk through Cancer Survivors Park.
      (I should study where the apostrophe goes. IIRC, the February holiday is "Presidents' Day", "President's Day", or "Presidents Day", depending upon the state. I was surprised to learn that it's "Mother's Day" and not "Mothers['] Day".)

  4. Bad news: Today's going to be a crappy day.
    Good news: I took today & tomorrow off.
    Bad news: I took two days off to do something I'm not looking forward to doing.
    Good news: I had 19 days to use or lose before July 1, so it's better than losing them.
    Bad news: I'm going to be tied up most of the day with a lot of unpleasant paperwork.
    Good news: I slept in until 8am.
    Bad news: I have a gallon of GoLightly waiting for me in the fridge.
    Good news: At least it's not the two gallons and 48 hours without eating they were planning on making me do?
    Bad news: Today's going to be a crappy day.

    3. I found that it wasn't as bad as I'd been led to believe. It's a nuisance, but that's all. Good for you for doing it.

      1. This is my third or fourth since Pops' diagnosis. It's better than not knowing, for sure.

    1. I loved "St. Louis O'Baseball" -- spent a night there in a B&B on our honeymoon. It's tucked into the mountains with an opening towards the ocean where the breeze blows in. Wonderful old mission there.

    1. He's averaged 11 a year over his career. Assuming he gets only six more this year and gets 11 a year over his contract and then retires because the Twins won the World Series, that leaves him at 160 total. Coincidentally he would be tied with Killebrew at 39th.

  7. I'm very excited for Berrios to start tonight, but I remind myself that every time he's been promoted, his first start at the new level was not very good. That's not a prediction about tonight, but I'm just saying that if he doesn't pitch well it really won't mean much of anything.

    1. Unless you're a Stribber. Souhan's column will be titled "Hype isn't all it's cracked up to be" and will suggest that our high organizational prospect ratings over the years are worthless garbage, much like the prospects themselves.

    2. Yeah, I remember Liriano's first MLB pitch was hit about 500 miles. Matt Garza got lit up in his first MLB start, which is probably the last time Twins fans had a pitching prospect to get this excited about.

          1. This way, if he's solid to great, yay! If not, don't worry about it. It means very little and he's here now. However, I really want him to do well right away so Twins will be less likely to send him down when Santana and/or Gibson returns.

        2. Yeah, I remember Liriano's first MLB pitch was hit about 500 miles.

          I was there! That is true!

          I was there too! My brother dvr'd the game and we watched ourselves whiplashing our heads to see where it landed.

      2. Garza gave up 7 runs on 8 hits in 2.2 innings for a 23.62 ERA in his first major league debut. I remember watching the game and thinking that no human being could possibly spit as much as Garza.

  8. The Milkmaid, Skim and Sour Cream will finally arrive in three days. The long road trip started today and they're all pretty choked up about leaving. The girls have never had trouble making friends, but I certainly hope their month at school here is good to them.

    1. Tough stuff. We moved three miles over a year and a half-ago and the kids still bring up the old neighborhood. Not often, but it still tugs at the heart a bit. Just this spring they've added a couple more groups of kids to their go-out-and-play network, even though they've been around all along, and not at all far. I've been insufficiently bold about coordinating with other parents, though I don't particularly want that to be how relationships are made.
      They also tend to recall primarily the positives of previous neighborhood, school, etc when they're down about the current moment. Things are good, though.

      1. My kids love where we live right now. Love it so much. I am devastated about almost certainly having to move.

        I trust they will love the next place too?

        1. I should add, my kids are younger than, say Zee's and Spooky's, and so I am heartened by those of you who have been through such shifts. I am terrified, but also encouraged, largely thanks to those of you here who have shared stories of moving with kids.

          1. I think my kids would take a bigger move OK, so long as it was still in MN (so grandparents and aunts stayed within a couple of hours).
            They're homeschooled, that's a huge help. They lack for really close friends, yet the seem to make new friends at every new activity they start.

            One of CER's best friends is my first cousin (my dad's little sister's daughter), who is about 4 months younger than her and her doppelganger. They live in Iowa, and we see them once or twice a year.
            But they are pen pals. Snail-mail type.
            CER was devastated when they had to cancel Easter plans because her doppelganger's little sister got the flu.

            Her mom (my dad's sister), is only 7 years older than me, used to babysit my sister and I. Her time living in Alaska is what brought my sister to the state. (My brother-in-law is what kept her there.)

      2. We stayed in the same neighborhood (but are now away from the one through street and have more immediate neighbors; all friendly) and the new house is more than twice as big and more space-efficient (so it feels about 3x bigger), has A/C, functioning windows, a better view, a driveway and front yard they can play in, 4 times the toilets and showers, fewer spiders, a dining room that more than 4 can eat in, a dishwasher, a kitchen that more than 1 can cook in, less cottonwood tree litter after each stiff breeze, a pond, a wooded lot contiguous to ours. Yet the two that are old enough still pine for the old house (where they shared a bedroom) at times. The younger two remember the fun they had when we went back there to fix it up after the renters let it fall into disrepair.

        HPR claims that he's going to buy the old house when he's old enough. I hope he gets a big enough loan to add on the kitchen we got an estimate on before we decided we'd have to move. It had vaulted ceilings, so adding another story was impossible.
        I'll admit the old fireplace, wood floors, and wood trim and doors (where not painted over) were nicer, and the garage was much bigger. (I think our current garage is 1.75 cars? We wouldn't be able to fit another vehicle in it unless we ditch the lawnmower and bikes. Even now just those preclude me from using the workbench without moving items into the driveway for a day.)

  12. While listening to the Rochester-Buffalo game this afternoon, it occurred to me that with Buxton, Kepler, and Mastroianni, the Red Wings have a much better defensive outfield than the Twins do.

    1. The IT meeting I was live streaming out of Omaha got cut short when everyone had to hit the tornado cellar. There's apparently one spotted there currently.

        1. My knucklehead uncle called from Fremont (40 minutes away) to tell my grandpa (who is up here visiting) that his house is gone. Such stupidity.

    2. If it rains out, do the Twins start Berrios on Friday or do they keep everyone on rotation and make him sit around for several days?

  15. As a team, the Atlanta Braves have a slash line of .227/ .299 /.280 /.579

    holy cows.

    For reference the Twins look like this .241/.315 /.388 /.703

  16. Folks, I just made mashed sweet potatoes to go with dinner (braised seasoned pork chops & garlic roasted cauliflower) and they were stupendous. Maybe my favorite part of the meal.
    1/2 cup half and half, 3 Tbsp butter and 2 Tbsp brown sugar brought to simmer, then removed from heat.
    Pealed & diced the potatoes, boiled for ~25 minutes, drain & return to pot, add liquid mixture and mash until smooth. Mix in a tsp of kosher salt and (on a whim I added) Garam Masala.
    Sweet, warmly aromatic and just a bit spicy. I'm sure it's an actual recipe somewhere, but man was I more than pleasantly surprised.

    1. Mashed root has been in high rotation at the slaughterhouse since we left minnesota. We make combination sweet potato, parsnip and carrot mash with goat cheese and cayenne. I've found that sweet potato fritters are also a delight. Mix your left overs with some sharp shredded cheese, roll into balls, dip in a beaten egg, roll in panko, (bake if healthy) shallow fry till golden brown. Great for breakfast.

      1. Oh how I wanted to. Alas, I killed the maple on pancakes last week and couldn't bring myself to use the kids' "syrup".

    3. Yum! (On some other day at least. An stomach bug running through our house means nothing would actually sound good to me right now.)

      I usually run a whole nutmeg over a micro plane grater a few times to add a little spice and earthiness to my sweet potatoes. Once I started doing that, I started wanting sweet potatoes a whole lot more often.

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