Diamond doings, etc.

Making up for some fallow weeks earlier in the spring, I'm getting assigned a lot of umpiring of late. Mostly that's good, I can certainly use the extra money in this age of Felon47’s economic sabotage. But it does cut into my TV time, and I'm just getting around to finishing the latest season of For All Mankind (not its best season, to put it mildly, but FAM remains a great show) so I can start on the first season of its companion show Star City. I still haven't gotten around to The Testaments, either, and need to find time for Spider-Noir sometime despite it being an Amazon property. (Is it kind of ridiculous to be singling out Amazon as an evil corporation these days? I mean, SNW returns next month on Paramount and I'll still watch that despite the CBS/Paramount takeover by fascist enablers.)

But the umping has been fun this week. Since the ugliness at the end of last Sunday's shift, I've had three nights calling games and they were all positive. Tonight I only had one or two familiar faces among the four teams on my schedule, but Monday's and Thursday's slates included a lot of old faves. Last night, in fact, included a championship game that was won by a team that goes by the name "Jeans," as several of them wear jeans or jean-shorts as their "uniform"; when I handed Robin, their captain, the team's winnings (a voucher for substantial bar credit and a discount on their next signup), he asked why they weren't getting the typical nothing-prize of league-branded wristbands again. It was sarcasm, as those prizes are pretty lame, but I hadn't been given any to hand out. But, as I was packing up the equipment bin, I found a stash of prize wristbands left over from previous seasons, so I handed some of those out to Robin and his team. He then led his team an a "Tim! Tim! Tim!" chant as they put on the wristbands and jumped around. It was goofy and made me laugh.

Tonight's only issues were with spectators. There were two versions of a peanut gallery in the seats behind the plate: the 8:00 game had the small children of some players doing cheers and chants for everybody; it was cute for two innings or so, then it was very much NOT. The 9:30 version was the boyfriend of one player and a friend of his that were drunkenly heckling me on nearly every pitch. Hard to say which version was more annoying. (Wait, no, it's not, the kids were way more annoying.)

The nights I didn't work this week were spent playing with the Spuds (Wednesday) and taking K & E to the Mariner game on Tuesday. That M's game vs. the New York Metropolitans was a fun one; we had terrific seats and the Mariners won handily to extend their winning streak to eight games (where it stopped, as they've dropped two straight since then). I don't know if their expenditure matched what I spent on the tickets or not, but K & E bought our concessions, which were plentiful and included the biggest soft-serve ice cream cone I'd ever seen, let alone eaten. It's three days on and I think I still feel some of it in my gut. Sure was tasty, though.

Another thing about these full-up weeknights is that I've been consuming less news than usual, but I still get the headlines and a few stray articles. This, from John Scalzi's newsletter today, I thought was worth sharing because schadenfreude. Felon47’s grift-scam "Freedom 250" event in DC has lost most of its star power as every musical act it had advertised as participating has either bowed out or insisted they were never going to be there in the first place. Except for Vanilla Ice and Lee Greenwood. Per Scalzi: "Trump is now having a rally on June 26th, where his aimless meandering mouth pooping will be occasionally interrupted by Lee Greenwood singing 'God Bless the USA,' or some such. If you attend, you deserve what you're going to get, and that's all I have to say about that. Greenwood's own reputation as a musician will not be notably dinged for his appearance; being hauled out for a single moment of performative patriotism for politicians who actively hate the majority of Americans is what he's been known for this entire century. I hope it pays well."

OK, I need something to eat and perhaps I'll start on Star City before calling it a night.