Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Just call me Anonymous

 I just realized that my comments on your blogs have been showing up as Anonymous. I don't know when or how this happened. So just fyi - I have been reading and commenting. 

Other news. I'm still dragging around here.  I've pulled up websites for animal shelters and rescue groups, but I just feel like I'm violating something by thinking about another dog.  Time will heal me and lead me in the right direction. 

News about the new apartment. The Prom King and Queen often meet outside in the evenings, and whoever walks by usually stops to talk. I try to join in for a little while every day or two, and I'm slowly getting to know some of the people who live in our area. I've also tried to walk a circuit around the complex twice a day, so I'm getting to recognize some of the faces from other courtyards. I've always depended on Buddy to keep me up and mobile (and social), so I'm learning to do that myself. 

I have not taken advantage of any of the social activities I was looking forward to trying.  I asked a few folks when we were gathered last night about playing dominoes; they passed, but they did invite me to play poker.  I passed. Then we got into a discussion of the card games we used to play growing up. That was a fun "remember when" conversation. There are so many good card games to try again if I don't find someone to play dominoes with. 

I've seen a lot of my kids since moving here.  My son comes by pretty regularly at lunch, and my daughter has been over once; I've also been back to her house every couple of days for one reason or another, so the location is working out fine. 

More later ... 




Thursday, June 19, 2025

Reading for the Baseball Fans

 


I saw this Book, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What's Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix It by Jane Leavy while I was entering contests on Goodreads.com. I know some of you are baseball fans (Margaret), so I am sharing. 

Description from Goodreads: 

Lifelong baseball devotee, legendary sportswriter, and New York Times bestselling biographer Jane Leavy takes listeners on an epic journey through the game that baseball has become—our once “national pastime,” now striving to catch up with the times—and proposes ideas that will invigorate fans and enhance the game’s cultural a comic, deeply reported, historic, and heartfelt manifesto.

Jane Leavy has always loved the game of baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium—the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players in Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored by establishing a pitch clock and altering rules to speed up the game and amplify the action. The league is investing in developmental youth baseball programs in disadvantaged communities where participation and fandom have plummeted. No one yet knows how to keep pitching arms healthy but Leavy has some ideas.

Yet the questions how much have these efforts helped and how much more can be done to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to those questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, Alex Bregman, Yu Darvish, Marquis Grissom, stadium architect Janet Marie Smith, statistical guru Bill James, fantasy baseball creator Dan Okrent, ageless pitching raconteur Bill “Spaceman” Lee, and the entertainers behind baseball’s social media phenomenon The Savannah Bananas. What Leavy uncovers is not only what’s wrong with baseball—and how to fix it—but also what’s right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew. 

Information about Author: 

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Last Boy, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called “the best novel ever written about baseball.” Her latest book is The Big Fella. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to1988, first in the sports section, then writing for the style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics for the paper. She wrote features for the style section about sports, politics, and pop culture, including, most memorably, a profile of Mugsy Bogues, the 5’3″ guard for the Washington Wizards, which was longer than he is tall.

Before joining the The Washington Post, she was a staff writer at womenSports and Self magazines. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, and The New York Daily News. Leavys work has been anthologized in many collections, including Best Sportswriting, Coach: 25 Writers Reflect on People Who Made a Difference, Child of Mine: Essays on Becoming a Mother, Nike Is a Goddess: The History of Women in Sports, Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Sportswriting by Women, and Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism and Writing.

She grew up on Long Island where she pitched briefly and poorly for the Blue Jays of the Roslyn Long Island Little League. On her parents first date, her father, a water boy for the 1927 New York football Giants, took her mother to a Brooklyn College football game. She retaliated by taking him to Loehmanns after the final whistle. It was a template for their 63-year union. As a child, Jane Leavy worshipped Mickey Mantle from the second-floor ballroom in the Concourse Plaza Hotel where her grandmothers synagogue held services on the High Holidays.

Jane Leavy attended Barnard College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she wrote her masters essay (later published in The Village Voice) on Red Smith, the late sports columnist for The New York Times, who was her other childhood hero.



Thursday, June 12, 2025

Alfred Hitchcock all around me

I went to the River Oaks Theater with J&M, my daughter and her partner, last night.  We went to see The Lady Vanishes, a black-and-white movie released in 1938 and directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The cast was incredible, and the story was simple but cute. 

It was the last movie Hitchcock made in England before moving to the US.  His first US movie, and a big one, was Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.

The Lady Vanishes was adapted from the book "The Wheel Spins," written by Ethel Lina Whitea very popular English author at the time.  As an Agatha Christie fan, I think I'll check to see if the library has any of White's novels. 

Coincidentally, the River Oaks Theater opened in 1939 so this movie could have been one of its early showings.  

Just a week ago, I watched the Netflix program "Hitchcock" with Anthony Hopkins playing Alfred Hitchcock. I thought he was terrific, and the entire cast did a great job. 

The theater will show Vertigo next month, followed by Psycho in August.  J&M have monthly passes, so we have already purchased tickets for those two movies. 

Then last night I was movie surfing and saw that Netflix has quite a few of Hitchcock's movies available.  I might watch a few more. The Birds is still my favorite Hitchcock movie, but I didn't stop to see if it was being offered.  

More later ... 



Tuesday, June 10, 2025

I'm Settling in My New Apartment

I've made the move to the new apartment with only a few more things to pick up from my daughter's house - mostly plants.  That will require the heat to settle down first, so we're probably looking at December. LOL. 

Researching online, it looks like this complex was built around 1975.  It's quite a few years old, but it appears to be well-maintained.  We have numerous apartment complexes in and around Houston, and converting them into 55+ communities seems to be gaining popularity. I'm assuming this was an apartment conversion.  I don't think they had 55+ back in '75, but I may have been too young to notice at the time.  

This is a pretty big complex compared to the others I have lived in which is actually great because it gives Buddy and I lots of sidewalks to stretch our legs.  Each square section has its own little courtyard area.  They have been redoing the courtyards in cute ways, but while I wait for them to get to my section, I have lots of room for my plants where I can see them from my window.  We also have a fair number of squirrels and birds, so I did bring bird food with me. However, as I mentioned, it's too hot to spend much time outside arranging feeding platforms for the different bird species' requirements.  

I've met about half of my neighbors.  Two in particular are very nice and often sit outside in the evenings, which encourages me to sit out also.  I'll call them the Prom Queen and King as they both seem to be genuinely kind and friendly.  The Prom King has a medium-sized dog, which I have been around several times.  Last night, however, Prom Queen and I were sitting outside, and Prom King and his dog came along.  I reached out to pet the dog as I always do.  I have no sense of safety when it comes to dogs, so I hold myself totally responsible for the dog snapping at me.  He did break the skin, and I put Neosporin on it.  

Shortly afterwards, I took Buddy for a walk and stepped on a large screw, which, because I wear thick-soled shoes, only stuck in the plastic and did not go through.  That got me thinking that I couldn't remember the last tetanus shot I had gotten, so I found an Urgent Care that was still open and ran to get a tetanus shot.  Luckily, all apartments require up-to-date shots here, so I wasn't worried about anything more than "what can go wrong" type of thinking.  Anyway, picked up the antibiotics the doctor called in, and most likely all will be well.  

I felt like that was two warnings from the universe about being careful, so I'm going to start paying more attention to what I'm doing—or not doing—in the sense of my diabetic care.  So caution is my current middle name - no more cruising through yellow lights either.  

Other than that, I think I'm really going to like it.  I was late signing up for water aerobics, and the class was full for this week, so now I know to sign up early next week.  They offer a nice selection of activities, including a weekly bus that visits HEB, Walmart, a nearby Presbyterian church, and a special monthly outing.  Since I am still driving, although without air conditioning, bless my heart, I probably won't be using these bus trips. I am also going to sign up for some of the stretch and sit-type exercise classes. 

Buddy is happy.  He moves from bed to bed as he used to do and has gotten the hang of walking in the evenings and sitting by the front door when he needs to go out.  Bless his little toothless head. 

More later ...