Baseball been bery bery good to me

It has been so warm here these past few days—in the high 80’s—very unlike October. We have been running the air conditioning since Thursday. No wonder those bugs showed up at the ball field. If you listened to the New York stations, it looked like the bugs only landed on Yankees and not Indians. Our hitters and pitchers and fielders all had to deal with the same thing. If you read the New York Times, of course it's all Yankees. You had to go to the Taipei Times to get a sympathetic story.



My son in Georgia and I “watched” the game “together” for a while on the phone. He had a six second delay because of DirecTV, so when something would happen I would react and then six seconds later, he would react. Then I realized I could bet him on the next pitch and see it before he did. He didn’t fall for it, though. Ann and I used to watch the Indians and White Sox games “together” too, when she lived in Chicago.

Today is Family Fun Day up at church. Kathy and I are going up for all the action. Last year we had Max with us and he thoroughly enjoyed himself, even winning a raffle prize. We used to have a big parish picnic in July, but attendance fell off over the years and squabbling between different parish groups finally killed it. Now we have Family Fun Day.

When I was growing up, we had four and five priests at our parish and one of the associates always did the homily, but if you saw the pastor get up to speak, you knew he was going to talk about money. This was the weekend for the financial report for our parish. Since our pastor is still in the hospital, we heard different members of the Parish Council deliver the bad news. It seems we run six thousand dollars in the red every week. They have been covering the shortfall by dipping into savings and using investment income. We owe the diocese over $600,000 in “assessments” that must be paid over the next year. (The diocese takes 13% of the collections as assessments for their own expenses.) Years ago, our pastor at the time somehow managed to get the bishop to forgive a similar amount, but those days are long gone. There are ways to generate more income, so they are encouraging everyone to help out.


Remember “Calvinball”—the game that Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” created, where he changes the rules to suit himself? Max has a version himself that he was playing in the driveway here this week. It involved a soccer ball, a soft football and sidewalk chalk markings that only he understood. Needless to say, Shane and I “lost” and Max “won” every time.

Work is getting busier and busier. Kathy says I spend too much time helping other people with their work so I wind up not finishing mine. She may be right, (but don’t tell her that). Friday was the last day for the guy who has been taking care of our web site, so now it falls to me to do it. I’m really pleased, though, because it’s something I always wanted to do anyway. He also handled all the emails coming to the office address, so I’ll be doing that too. He was a good guy who was always willing to do whatever you needed done and he didn’t give you a lot of grief about it either, so I’ll miss him.