Mental Meanders or Through the Looking Glass

This is a weird day. It's more than peculiar, it’s weird and it’s barely begun. When I started this, I had no clue, no vaguest hint of what I would put down or where it would go so let's see what happens.

I woke up early, about twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off at 4:45. For whatever reason, when I stopped sleeping and my brain kicked in, I felt a sense of foreboding. Like something momentous and not so good is going to happen. It makes me a bit nervous. It's nothing I can pin down, nothing I can point to. Just a weird feeling that something is not right or something won't be right. It's like the heavy weight that is the prelude to a massive thunder storm.

Since I did get up without injuring myself, turned off the alarm without incident and made it downstairs safely, it’s none of those things. I didn’t electrocute myself when I turned on the coffeemaker. So it’s not that. I turned on my computer and nothing bad happened there. So far, so good.

Well, we’ll see. In life, at times like this, I find it’s best to hunker down in my seat and just be a passenger. What will come will come and que sera sera.

The good news that's going to be widely heralded today is the Warriors win over the Cavaliers last night. Even though I don’t follow, watch or (sorry everyone who does) care at all about basketball, congratulations to the Golden State Warriors! It’s been a long forty years since they won a championship and I’m delighted their drought is over.

What is a very pleasant surprise this morning is that the team’s fans didn’t burn down half the city in celebration last night. Oakland is a blue collar community with a history and reputation as being ‘rough’. Kudos to the residents for not getting stupid and ruining a great party.

Upon checking, it doesn’t look like the Chicago Blackhawk fans did anything silly in Chicago, either, which is also great news. But I guess they're kind of used to it, three Stanley Cup wins in six years. I guess they're a bit blase these days.

The reason I sound cynical is because when sports teams win something important, like a title, it seems that some fans take that as a sign to riot. I think a lot of people expected something bad to happen in Oakland if they won, and it didn’t, and that’s great. Particularly since the Oakland Athletics are doing so poorly. The juxtaposition between one team and the other this year is stark.

Last year, the Warriors got into the playoffs but got knocked out. This year they won the championship

Last year the A’s looked like they might get to the championships, except things started to fall apart with trades and injuries in the last third of the season, so they missed. This year, after trading away some of their better players last season, the A’s, in a word, suck. The poor players can’t catch a break even though most of them are playing their hearts out, but management, through its trade decisions, gutted a very good team.

Now I don’t know why they made the choices they did because I wasn’t in the room when things were decided. Perhaps the players were unhappy. Rumor has it that Josh Donaldson said some pretty inexcusable things to the manager, and that’s why he’s gone. No one with whom I’ve spoken understands why Yoenis Cespedes was traded, though. The guy was a solid outfielder and downright amazing at the All Star Home Run Derby two years straight but pffft off he went. Maybe he asked for the trade? I don’t know. Perhaps the team management just thought someone else might do better in those positions. Perhaps it was a combination. I don’t know. All I know is the result. Last year the A’s had walk-off after walk-off and they looked really strong through most of the year.

Oh! Excuse me for being rude. For non-fans, when a team is trailing or tied in the last half of the last inning and they win, it’s called a walk-off.

The Giants did that to get to the World Series last year – if someone had written a script for that team in the playoffs – start to finish – it would have been laughed at by a potential agent or publisher and pitched in the bin. It really was, in a lot of ways, a fairytale.

Travis Ishikawa, who hit the game winning walk-off in the bottom of the ninth inning against the St. Louis Cardinals to get the Giants to the World Series had talked about quitting baseball altogether before being signed by the team. Then he does this (it's short and it's great because there is such a feeling of tension and then - jubilation):

And the Giants go to the World Series, which they won.

Thanks Warriors and Giants. I feel better now.

 Have a lovely day!

Best~

Philippa

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A Little Music and Quiet Happenings in a Quiet Life

May I suggest you play this marvelous piece in the background while you read this? It's not hip hop, rock, country or one of the typical genres. It's just a fantastic instrumental piece. And when you get there (if you get there), trust me - it's worth it. Besides, listen to one minute (it's a ten minute piece) and if you don't like it, turn it off. What have you got to lose?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNdlWXlTAK8

Anyway, here we are at another Saturday and I’m whipped into submission by the week. Tired, even with the caffeine, and not quite sure which end is up.

It was a good week, a really good week, actually. No bad happenings on the roads. Got a lot of things going at work that will, I hope, open other doors. Of course, I’m still struggling with that stupid database.

See (no worries – I’ll be very short but I have to vent), I don’t want just the form that’s linked by the two tables to reflect the information. Doing that is a piece of cake but I want to be able to see a bunch of records all at once, and the table view is the best. Therefore, I want the ID I assign to the record and the associated field to show up in the other table so I know without a lot of hard thinking what I’m looking at. Then I can I enter all the pertinent information that explains why I want them there in the first place.

The problem is, I’ve tried everything the books say and it still doesn’t work. But, since that’s the only shadow on my week I’ll call it good and leave it.

I did get started on a new template form for another project and I think that’s going to make the folks for whom I’m doing it sit up and take notice. Just suggesting having over-writeable fields was exciting. Now, when we sit down next week and I can show them off… Yay, me!

Other than that, things muddled along. It felt like summer for two days but we’re back to spring today. Fog and cool, which I love. It feels good against my skin.

 Last night, getting home, I was less than pleasantly surprised to find that my husband had done a bunch of laundry and it was will hanging on the line. He doesn't work. He stays home and takes care of his elderly mother so it was a bit disconcerting to get home to a pile of laundry waiting to be folded.

You know what, though? It was actually a good transition. Folding laundry (unless it's a fitted sheet) isn't precisely rocket science. It was a pleasant evening - not hot with a soft breeze - and I had a perfect excuse to be out in it instead of inside fixing dinner, taking care of Sam, or doing some other must-do. Halfway through the process my husband showed up with a glass of wine.

I don't drink a lot - I prefer not to because I don't like the way it makes me feel, but I won't say no to a little. A bottle of beer or one glass of wine is almost always enough. So it was very welcome and added a nice touch to the peacefulness of being outside, doing a simple task in a lovely evening.

After getting the laundry off the line I sat down on the deck steps and relaxed - something I never do - and that was nice, too. I need to do that more often because it set up the rest of my evening in a good way.

By the time we finished dinner, the Giants had won their game against Philadelphia and there was nothing worth watching on TV, so we popped in a disk from the 'Odd Couple' series and watched a couple of episodes of that.

This morning we'll have Giants baseball (they're only 1/2 game back from the Dodgers!) and tonight Blackhawks v. Tampa Bay (Go 'hawks!).

The Warriors are playing in the NBA finals against the Cleveland(?) Cavaliers. I am not at all interested in basketball. I've never been able to get excited by it, but I do feel terrible for the Cavaliers who lost one of their key players to a fractured kneecap. Now that is one injury that makes me cringe just thinking about it! Just how does one fracture a kneecap? Never mind, I don't want to know. So he's out for three to four months.

Just quiet happenings in a quiet life around here. Nothing bold, nothing exciting, just being and getting from here to there.

I hope you enjoyed that piece of music - have a lovely day!

Best~

Philippa

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