Dave’s Midlife Blog

It’s a beautiful Friday afternoon. There’s another hour until my German I class begins. Because our school had a strange schedule today, due to an eighth-grade career-day event, there is a Latin I class in my normally empty classroom.

These kids are restless, excited, eager for the day to be over. They’re having trouble concentrating on their work, and they’re counting the minutes until the end of the day.

I have to admit, I feel the same way.

This evening I’ll be going to the first Washington Nationals baseball game in the city in 2006. The Battle of the Beltway will kick off with an exhibition game between the Washington Nationals and the Baltimore Orioles. I have a great seat behind home plate for this game; and two days ago I received my season tickets,a 20-game mini-plan, which are also great seats behind home.

This particular game has really captured Washington’s imagination. For 34 years, the nearest baseball team was the Baltimore Orioles, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. Tom Boswell in today’s Washington Post argues that this rivalry is likely to be a friendly one, because both Orioles and Nats fans have a common enemy, the Orioles’ owner, Peter Angelos. Washington Nationals fans have a beef with Angelos because he kept baseball out of the city for so long; the Orioles’ fans have an axe to grind with him because he has mismanaged their team for so long.

Since my “plan partner” (the guy with whom I’m sharing the 20 games) only wanted two of our three seats, I will have a single seat for all 20 games of the plan. I’ll be watching a lot of baseball this summer.

It’s hard for me to explain my youthful giddiness about having season tickets to the Nats. I feel like a “real” baseball fan for the first time in the last 25 years. Last summer, the Nats were a novelty, and my family and I rediscovered the joys of baseball. This summer we have a lot of games entered on our calendars already. We’ve scheduled some aspects of our lives around baseball games.

My wife and I have two season tickets in Washington, DC: to the Nationals and to the Shakespeare Theatre. Shakespeare and baseball. Two pastimes whose appeal is subtle and rather esoteric.

There are now 100 minutes until the last bell of the day. See? I am literally counting the minutes until I can go to the ballpark.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc, midlife

One other reason I haven’t been blogging a lot lately is that I want to try to migrate my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

I’ve downloaded the WordPress software, and I have my own domain and my own hosting space. When I publish on Blogger, it goes to my domain, davesmidlife.com.

I’m just deathly afraid of losing all my blog posts and comments when I move everything to WP. I’m going to just have to bite the bullet soon and jump in.

I’ve figured out how to use Blogger pretty well, which means I’ve bumped right up against its limitations. I’m ready for something that will give me a bit more control, and I think WordPress is it.

I’ve gotten a little bit of help and advice from Simran in India, who has moved his own blog to WordPress. Maybe I can get him to guide me along the process in the next few days.

Categories: blogging, blogger, wordpress

I don’t know whether any of the four of you who read this blog have wondered where I am, but I’m assuming perhaps so.

As the title of this post suggests, I’m feeling that I have too many irons in the fire. This English idiom implies that I have too many projects going on at once, and one source suggests it has to do with blacksmithing. In any event, it means you’re trying to do too damn many things at one time.

That’s how I feel lately. I’ve been podcasting like crazy, keeping on with The Word Nerds week after week. We don’t have any sponsorship or advertising revenue yet, but we are hopeful that we may start making gasoline money soon. We have not missed a week since March 21, 2005, so we recently celebrated our first anniversary as a podcast. And we are happy to have a nice-sized worldwide audience.

I’m also teaching like crazy–three schools, three different administrations, three different sets of faculty meetings, and so on.

And the baseball season is about to start. There is an exhibition game in two days between the Washington Nationals, my hometown team, and the Baltimore Orioles, our rivals from the other league, 45 minutes up the road from Washington. The Orioles have a storied history, having won the World Series in 1983, and having fielded a number of successful teams until recently.

Luckily for the hapless Nationals, the Orioles have fallen on hard times, and even in spring training games, the Nats have beaten the O’s several times. After an unexpectedly strong first season in Washington, chances are pretty good that the Nats will suffer and bounce around the bottom of the division standings this year. No matter. I have good seats behind home plate.

I have a ticket for the Battle of the Beltways (Washington and Baltimore) on Friday of this week. And I got an email this morning telling me my season tickets for the Nats are on the way! They even gave me a tracking number! Life is good! Spring has sprung!

Categories: baseball, podcast, language, midlife

If you (or anyone on the internet) is reading this post, it means that my problem is solved.

I recently set up my own domain for the purpose of containing my Blogger blog. I set my account in Blogger to send files to my new site via FTP. Happens automatically every time there’s a new post, an edition, or a comment.

Problem is, nothing shows up on the old Blogspot address after the date I moved to the new domain. That makes sense: I moved everything over to the new address (davesmidlife.com), so no new posts went onto Blogger.

Anyway, this afternoon I was trying to figure out a way to post a redirect notice on that latest post on the Blogger blog. To do that, I assumed, I needed to change my Blogger settings to publish at the blogspot.com address, and then (so my plan was) I would go back to FTPing to my new site.

Now nothing seems to publish. I have my login settings for my own website set correctly (I triple-checked), yet Blogger always gives me an FTP error (login incorrect) whenever I try to publish.

So I’m writing this post mainly as a test to see whether I can publish to my own blog once again.

I am truly about ready to migrate this whole thing to WordPress, like the rest of the world seems to be doing, so I don’t have to deal with the bizarreness of Blogger anymore.

Grrr!

(Later on I find that my problem was a DUHHH… problem: I kept entering the wrong password for my FTP login. There seems to be a rather steep learning curve for me when it comes to blogging, but I’ll get it sooner or later…)

Categories: blogging, blogger

This morning’s Washington Post has a report of a plagiarism trial involving Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. (I have railed against this lazily written book before in these pages.)

According to the report, Brown was called as a witness in a lawsuit brought against his publisher (not Brown himself) by a couple of writers who claim he lifted the structure of his story from their non-fiction work. He finds their claim “absurd” and says he drafted the outline himself in 2001 in his parents’ laundry room.

I cannot tell from this report what the merits of the case might be. I observe, simply, that plagiarism is a lazy tactic often used by lazy and unoriginal writers. I have observed this in my 20 years of college and high-school teaching.

And, of course, I’ve earlier argued that The Da Vinci Code is a very lazily written book. I’m not saying he lifted the plot from Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh’s work–I have no idea one way or another. I’m just saying I would not be at all surprised if that turned out to be the case.

The Post Style-section article, by Kevin Sullivan, has the rather sarcastic and bemused tone of so many Style-section pieces, and seems to assume that Brown is the victim of money-grubbing star chasers. I guess this is to be expected, since Brown and DVC are the flavor-of-the-week (flavor-of-the-decade?).

Too bad. It would have been much more interesting to read a bit more about the merits of the case, rather than Brown’s “exasperated” answers to “a line of questioning as compelling and clear as a toaster warranty.” Kevin Sullivan describes the attorneys and the judge as “[wearing] … august black robe[s] and … white wig[s] with Shirley Temple curls.” Yeah, well, it’s a British court. They’ve dressed like that for centuries, Kevin.

Sullivan must not have observed many trials. Legal inquiry, to someone outside of a case, is usually stultifying. That doesn’t, however, make it invalid.

Categories: religion, books, law

The Washington Post and the AP report on this lovely Sunday evening (when the Oscars are on the TV upstairs) that Major League Baseball has signed the lease passed last month by the DC City Council.

There will be baseball in town for a long time!

Those of you in non-baseball countries might not get this, but baseball is the national pastime of the United States. It was created at about the time of the Civil War, in the 19th century, shortly after this little experiment in republican democracy nearly failed forever.

The capital of the United States had been without a team for 34 years before last summer. Then the Montreal Expos were moved from Montreal (where nobody went to their games) to Washington (where 2.7 million people went to their games).

Thanks to Maury Brown of Baseball Journals for keeping all us Ballpark Guys up-to-date on the status of this ordeal throughout the winter. Now I can buy a new Nationals cap that fits properly, without fear of its becoming obsolete in a year.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc

Got my poor, bashed Prius out of the body shop last Friday. I must say, Pope’s Auto Body of Fairfax, VA, did a genius job on it. When I picked it up it looked and drove like a new car.

I picked it up about 5:30 PM on Friday, drove it straight to my house, and parked it on the street at the curbline in front of my house (in a quiet suburban neighborhood). Didn’t move it overnight at all.

Saturday morning I got up and drove to a supermarket two miles from home. An uneventful trip.

When I got out of the car at the Giant supermarket at looked at the rear of my car, the left side of the rear bumper had been scraped by an inattentive or drunken driver overnight. In front of my own house. By friends/guests of my neighbors who always park right in front of our house, even though there is plenty of curbline in front of their own home.

So my spanking like-new Prius did not spend even 12 hours in that pristine condition.

Well, it’s not a new car anymore. In any event, it drives like a dream. And I will no longer be deferential or courteous to my neighbors’ guests when they park in front of my house.

Categories: prius, hybrid,toyota, car, accident

Well, the Washington Nationals are in spring training. I have bought a mini-plan of tickets, with wonderful seats right behind home plate, and I have even found another family with which to share the plan, so we’ll be going to 10 games this summer (which is about the right number for us to fit into our schedules).

I am ready for baseball.

And the Nationals are getting ready for baseball, too. There are daily reports from spring training: Alfonso Soriano, the star second baseman we acquired several weeks ago, might not agree to playing outfield. (He was acquired for his bat, after all.) We got a new pitcher, Pedro Astacio, who may or may not be ready to go when the season starts. My two favorite players, Brian Schneider and Chad Cordero, are playing in the World Baseball Classic.

Yet the status of our team remains somewhat in limbo, because Major League Baseball has not yet decided whether to accept the DC Council’s lease agreement. MLB has to know that this is the best they will get from this city council in this, the most attractive market that had no baseball team before 2005. Yet they drag their feet.

It drives me crazy. Well, at least I’ll see 10 games from section 417 this summer.

Categories: baseball, washington-dc