Dave’s Midlife Blog

A week ago, March 30, it was cold and cloudy in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, Barbara and I dressed warmly and went down to Nationals Park for the official opening game of the Nationals’ 2008 season. Although it was around 49 degrees all day long, we got to the park at 3:30 for an 8:15 game, because the President of the United States would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. Security lines would be forbidding, we were told, so it was a smart idea to get there early.

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After our arrival home from Florida on Wednesday night, Thursday was a free day for me. I decided I’d go downtown into DC and take a look at Nationals Park.

Looking back at the archives of this blog, I am astounded to note that it has been a whole year since I was last down at the ballpark site with my camera. I have been following the progress of construction on the construction cam (to which I won’t link, since it might not be online for very much longer), but I haven’t seen it in person since March 17, 2007.

I expected it to be different–and it was. Where there were once deep pits in some blocks of the neighborhood, there are now high-rise buildings emerging.

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Well, I’ve not been here. I notice that the last post I wrote was right after the Blacksburg shooting. Since then, my daughter has matriculated at Virginia Tech, my house has undergone a major renovation, and I saw a lot of baseball games.

Nothing much that many people will be interested in, I guess–but plenty has gone on.  Baseball has consumed a lot of my attention this summer. The Washington Nationals had a much, MUCH better season than anybody predicted, finishing with a record of 73-89. That doesn’t sound so good, unless you consider that the major sports press predicted before the season that the Nationals would be “historically bad.” For example, Gary Graves in USA Today compared the Nats with the 1962 Mets. (more…)

Two weeks ago, I walked around the neighborhood of the new Nationals Park with Bob Wright of the Baseball History Podcast. I posted a few pictures back then that I took without knowing much about what I was seeing.

Today Jacqueline Dupree, the pre-eminent documenter of the development of Near Southeast DC, led a walking tour of the stadium neighborhood for anybody who showed up.

Although it was very windy and temperatures were in the 30s, the front of 20 M Street SW, a building owned by Lerner Enterprises, showed a temperature of 58 degrees.

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I’m not an official Baseball Blogger (see the navigation column at the right for some good ones), so I have to get my information from those other guys and gals.

Today the Nats released a wonderful animated video tour of the new baseball stadium. NBC4 has it posted on their website. (Sorry about the possible commercial right before it; they’re a commercial TV station, after all.)

Thanks to the generosity of the contractor who did some work on our house, I got to see the Nats play the Baltimore Orioles from the club level of Oriole Park at Camden Yards last June. The club level in this video (with the nice bar, opening out to the picnic-table seating) is very similar to the one in Baltimore. Nice!

Prompted, I am quite sure, by the stunning photos posted on Dave’s Midlife Blog two days ago, NBC4, the local NBC owned-and-operated TV station, took a crew into the stadium site to photograph its progress.

I have to admit they got better pics than I did. But then, they were allowed to crawl all over the upper deck, while I had to peer in from outside.

I just got back from meeting my podcast buddy Bob Wright, producer of the Baseball History Podcast. He’s in DC for a conference, and we met (for the first time face-to-face) and went down to the new stadium neighborhood, where I took some pictures. Here’s “your game announcer Bob Wright” (more…)

Today is a third day off from school. All the sleety snow that fell on Tuesday night is now frozen hard. My own street still has a sheet of ice on it.

I’ve had about enough of the house. I was concerned on Tuesday that we might lose electricity, but that didn’t happen so much in Northern Virginia. (Maryland is a different story, however.) Since we had power, I had Internet. I am now one with my computer, and I’ve almost made a complete migration of three websites to one new server.

About midday yesterday I had to leave the house. So what did I do? Like all good Americans, I went to the mall.

But as you can see, not a lot of other people made it to the shopping cathedral. It’s still quite cold, and after a warm January, folks may be in shock.

The Washington Post reports that the “wintry mix” is paralyzing the DC area. Over at Wonkette, folks who grew up in snowier places than the U.S. southeast are harumphing and growling like 80-year-old curmudgeons that these wimps in Washington can’t deal with a little “frozen water.” Makes ‘em feel superior to the yokel natives, I guess.

Whatever. Washington, DC is not New York or New Hampshire, for God’s sake. I’ve made this argument for about 25 years. Why would a community that hardly ever gets any snow invest tons of money on snow removal preparations? The fact is, the side streets are still slippery and dangerous to drive on.

But the point of this post is to talk about the solitude I’m experiencing today. My wife is running a large week-long national meeting in DC, and is camped out in a hotel in town. My daughter has gone in to work with her for the day, since she’s not at school.

Therefore, I’m at home alone, still unshaven and unshowered at 12:30 PM, wasting hour after hour customizing a couple of blog sites and drinking coffee.

I find that I’m tyrannized by my solitude. My school district has already cancelled school for tomorrow (the only responsible thing they could do, Wonkette, if there’s ice and snow on the roads the school buses travel). Therefore, I have nothing pressing me to come alive, really. My neighbors are already busy shoveling their sidewalks while I’m blogging and taking photos. Guess I’d better go out and be responsible now.

I believe that by the end of this two-day forced vacation from teaching I will have had enough of snow days. Let’s get back to our regularly scheduled life now.

In the DC area we live right at the ice-snow line. North and west of us they get snow. South and east of us they get rain. Where we live we get the ugly, nasty mixture of sleet and freezing rain cutely referred to as “wintry mix.” Heavy ice accumulates on power lines and trees. Sometimes at my house the power goes out for 36 hours or more.

So they didn’t call off school this morning, but they sent us home two hours early. My commute home, which normally takes about 40 minutes, was well over an hour.

Some places get real blizzards, like in this video by a Canadian graduate student. Not us. We get slush. And then a hard freeze.