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” Continue reading ‘Stadium tour with Bob Wright’
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.
Well, they did it again. The weather pundits, who had been waving their finger
s and warning ominously as recently as Sunday that the DC area would get maybe 10 inches of snow, once again missed it completely.
This morning, Tuesday, there is not a drop on the ground. No snow, no sleet, no wintry mix. Nothing. There may be some during the day today. This means, of course, that we will go to school today and either drive home in a nasty, dangerous mess, or not at all.
I have to remember, when these kinds of warnings are on the horizon, how absolutely, dramatically wrong the mass-media weather prognosticators can be.
The sign is from Monument Realty, the company developing the area closest to the new stadium. It’s going to turn a grungy neighborhood street into a snazzy retail-and-restaurant strip.
This Metro station is at Half and M Streets, SE, in Washington, DC.
As I write this, the station is actually closed for expansion, to accommodate the thousands of baseball fans who will come through it in 2008.
The stadium is one block ahead of you, at Half and N Streets.
Well, no, actually, today in the Virginia suburbs of DC it got up into the upper 70s. On our deck, when the sun hit the thermometer, it read 96 degrees at one moment.
But there’s no baseball in the newspapers. No baseball news on TV or the radio.
The St. Louis Cardinals’ great infielder Rogers Hornsby, “The Rajah,” summed up true baseball fans’ feelings when he said:
People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.
Yeah, that’s how I feel right now. Spring training starts in Florida in mid-February. Then the spring will eventually come, and baseball will be back!
During Christmas week I drove into Washington and took pictures of the construction site for the new baseball stadium:
My favorite part of this picture is the tiny bit of upper deck, on the left, where the cheap seats are being built. That’s my neighborhood, baby !
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