Spring is in the air

Sorry for the long delay in postings. I've been really lazy. My bad. Anyways, as always, a lot has happened in the past month that I haven't posted anything. Actually, a lot of the same has happened. I've just been working and doing my thing and getting ready for spring training with the Long Beach Armada. Wait, spring training has already started. I'll give you a quick rundown of what we've done.

Last Saturday, May 9th, we had a team meeting and physicals at Blair Field in Long Beach, which is where we'll be playing our home games. Since the Cal State Long Beach won't let us use the field for spring training, we had to find somewhere close that wouldn't charge us an arm and a leg to use their field. Thus, we ended up at Cal State Dominguez Hills located at the wonderful Home Depot Center. We started Sunday morning, Mother's Day, at 9am and started with the usual stretching and warmups to get our bodies loose. After we played catch we took what we baseball players call an "innie outtie"; otherwise known as an Infield/Outfield to you non-baseball players. After our innie outtie we went into batting practice. Now batting practice with 3 groups can be long if you're a pitcher (and believe me I know how long it can be), but we had 5 groups to get through since there were about 50 guys in camp. After batting practice we took a lunch break before heading into a 12 inning intersquad game. They made two teams with 10 hitters each and halfway through the game switched in guys who hadn't started. I played the first half of the game in right field. I went 1 for 4 in my spring training debut with a single and two strikeouts. Of course, who else would I face in my first at-bat but salted Major League veteran Jose Lima and of course I struck out.

Although my spring may have started on a sour note on Sunday I turned it around on Monday going 3 for 4 with a single, double, and home run. Tuesday I went 0 for 3 with 2 K and yesterday I turned it on again going 2 for 3 with a single, double, and walk with 3 RBIs. I've made the first round of cuts for position players, which is quite exciting. I think I'm gaining the respect of my fellow players because of the way I've been hitting the ball. I think a lot of guys who knew I used to pitch thought that I wouldn't be able to hit the ball as well as I have been, but I've definitely suprised them. It makes me feel good to know that all the hard work I've put in for the past year is paying off in dividens. The manager, Gary Templeton, told me today that I've been doing a hell of a job so far. That means a lot to me and makes me want to work harder to earn a spot on the team.

It's always fun to have guys with Major League experience out on the field because not only do they know how to have a good time, but they give valuable advice to us young'uns to help make us better ball players. Lima is no exception. He's a fun loving guy who loves to be out on the field. He's always telling a story or making the team laugh, which is a vital thing to have in the clubhouse. There's one on every team and Lima is our guy.

I did it!

FINALLY! It has happened! I got myself an invite to spring training with the Long Beach Armada. I went to their one day tryout this past Saturday, which was a VERY long day I might add, and received an invitation to compete for a spot in the outfield. This is the culmination of a year's worth of hard work and I couldn't have done it without the support of my friends and family. I love them and thank them for all their support. I feel vindicated. By that I mean that I feel like somebody other than myself sees my potential as an outfielder and believes that I can compete professionally. As hard as it is to get into pro ball, it's even harder to switch positions and compete at the professional level. I've always felt that I was an excellent hitter, but never had the chance to show anybody because everybody thinks that pitchers can't hit. Well guess what? They can!

As happy and elated as I am to get a spring invite, I still have a lot of work to do. I need to come into spring training and show them that I deserve to be on the team. I hit 3 days a week and workout the other 2 and play on the weekends. I think for me it's just a matter of getting at bats and seeing as much pitching as I can. I'll be competing against guys who have much more experience than me so it's important that I do well. I know they bring a lot of guys into camp and dispose of them pretty quickly, so I definitely have my work cut out for me.

The pay isn't going to be any good, but I already knew this. Independent ball probably, scratch that, DOES pay the worst in professional baseball. Guys with little or no experience make less than $1000 a month. Some as little as $500 a month, which is by no means a living wage. We don't play for the money, but for the opportunity and love of the game. Confucius said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." My journey is about to begin and I've got a long way to go. Wish me luck.

Random ramblings

So last weekend I went to see I Love You, Man with my wife, Stefanie, and let me be the first to say that you MUST go see this movie. I thought it was absolutely hilarious. It had me laughing the whole time. I can't say it was the same for my wife, but she was laughing at certain moments. The acting of Peter's wife was a little cheesy, but the rest of the acting was great. There are so many one liners from this movie it's hard to pick my favorite. Jason Segal and Paul Rudd were fantastic together, as they have been in previous movies, but never as the lead characters.

I've got a tryout coming up on Saturday for the Long Beach Armada of the Golden League. This tryout is a one day tryout, unlike the Orange County tryout, which was a very long two days. I'm assuming they're going to run it like a usual tryout, but I was told they were going to make the first cuts in the middle of the afternoon, which means they might have two games. If by chance I don't make the team there is another tryout is Phoenix on April 5th for the Yuma Scorpions. Their website says they have an unusual amount of roster spots to fill, but that doesn't mean anything. If I don't make that team, there's another chance that I might get invited to a tryout with the Tucson Toros. I've emailed them and am waiting for a response.

I've also joined the Twitter world. I figured Facebook wasn't enough of a distraction during work so I setup a Twitter account. So far I have 3 followers. I know. I'm popular. There's not really much to Twitter. It's basically a Facebook status update and that's about it. The only difference is you can follow pretty much anything or anybody from friends and family to websites such as PC World and Engadget. Updates are called "Tweets" and are limited to 140 characters. That's pretty much it. You can follow anybody and search for anything, which is pretty cool.

Dale, thanks for the shout out on the Century Club post. We should hang out again soon. I'm on Twitter now so don't be afraid to follow me.

I think that's all the random thoughts going through my head at this point. I hope everybody is doing well.

Back to work

I know it's been a while but I finally have some free time to write. Anyways, the honeymoon is now over and it's time to get back to work. Work right now is really slow for me and it's hard to get on a job for more than a few days without having to take a day off due to no jobs going on with the shop. It looks like the economic slowdown has hit PCC with full force. Since I've been back I haven't worked a full week, with the exception of last week and it looks like this week won't be any different. I was over at Warner Brothers for a few days and out in LA for a few days as well. It seems like our ailing economy will never recover, with all these companies cutting jobs and putting people out of work. I did read an article today on my phone that was saying how people who have been jobless for almost a year now are actually enjoying their time off by spending more time with their families and learning new hobbies and such. I know what it feels like and after being off for two weeks on my honeymoon I felt like I was ready to get back to work. It was nice to have a few days off work when I came back though. Anyways, I digress.

Getting back to baseball and stepping in the batter's box after 5 weeks off definitely felt weird. Although I didn't do as bad as I thought I would, but I did strike out twice in my first game back with the Redbirds. I also walked twice in that game and stole a base. After embaressing myself I decided it was time to see Craig again. For those of you who don't know Craig is my hitting coach. He's worked with many big league hitters and used to be a scout for the White Sox as well. We fixed something that he had seen that had to do with my back leg and hips. Needless to say the problem was fixed and I was anxious to get back to the field to try it out but low and behold mother nature had something to say about it. She refused to let me play this week and from the looks of it she's going to have a repeat performance this upcoming weekend. I'm also sad because this coming weekend is the Annual CLU Alumni game. I don't know if the Alumni game has ever been rained out but there's a strong possibility that it might be this week. There is also a chance that I might be playing this summer with the Orange County Flyers of the Golden League. If that doesn't work out then there's also a possibility that I might be playing in Marion, IL in the Frontier League.

Oh, some new exciting personal info, I got a new router and it works like a charm. Before I had an old junk Microsoft router that was unsecured and open for business to the public. Anybody who wanted to connect to it could because there was no password to connect to the network. This new one I got yesterday at Best Buy is a D-Link and is primarily built for gaming. The reason I got a new router was because the old one for some reason or another kept dropping my wireless connection. Ever since AT&T came out to fix our internet that wasn't working when we got home (go figure) the router had been acting up. The guy told me that my router was very touchy and sensitive and had a tendency to drop the connection. It would literally do that every 15 minutes or so. This new router since I hooked it up has been awesome and hasn't dropped the connection yet. It seems to be a pretty popular router wand was a PC World Magazine top choice in 2007. That must mean it's the BEST! Did you catch that sarcasm there? I thought so. All in all I'm just happy to have a router that acutally works and to have my internet work the way it should work, not being slow as molasses. YES!!! Anyways, that's about all I got right now. Kind of disappointing I know but hey, that's what you get when its 11:50pm and I'm staring to fall asleep in my bed sitting on my laptop writing this blog. Maybe next time I'll be a little more exciting. haha just kidding. I'm always exciting if you hadn't noticed. I'm just rambling on now. Alrighty. One more thing. I'm actually curious to see how many people are actually reading this thing so for my sake I'm going to ask you guys a favor and just leave me a comment if you happened to read this blog and let me know what you guys think. Hell, you could even give me a topic to write about and I'll fire on all cylinders and give you what I got. Dale, I know you got something. haha. Alrighty, I'm out.

The End Is Near

We're back in Madrid now and we leave in two days. We took a day trip to Barcelona yesterday and boy was it a long day. We woke up a little after 5am to catch our 6:30am train ride. The ride took just under 3 hours, of which we used to catch some more Zs. Upon our arrival to Barcelona Sants station we found the tourist information booth and bought two tickets for an all day bus tour around the whole city, which included 44 different stops. Albeit, a lot of the stops were pretty close to each other, the tour did take us around the entire city. There were two different routes, the red route, which covered the northern part of the city, and the blue route, which covered the southern part of the city, which was longer. We started our journey on the blue route and toured most of the southern part of the city. We decided since we were limited to time that we would only get off on stops that looked interesting or had something interesting to tour. There were 3 stops that we were going to get off for sure and if we saw something else then we would stop.

Our first stop landed us in the middle of the city at the cathedral, which was under construction. We were about to go inside but turned away after seeing beggars line the enterance to the cathedral begging for money. We decided to eat lunch, which took an hour, and then head out to catch the bus at one of the stops. Lunch took forever because there was only one waiter and two other people running the entire place. We ordered our favorite dish, fideguay, and enjoyed a few tapas of potatoes while we waited. On our walk back to the next pick up point we noticed that there were TONS of people walking around, much more than in Madrid. Granted it was Saturday, but we hadn't seen that many people walking around in Madrid. We headed for La Pedrera, a museum dedicated to the mastermind architecht Antoni Gaudi. It was his masterpiece that he created over a century ago and to this day remains one of the finest works of modern architecture in Barcelona. There were two more buildings created by him that we would eventually see after our visit to La Pedrera.

We hopped on the next bus that passed by and were on our way to another one of Gaudi's masterpieces, La Sagrada Familia. La Sagrada Familia is a gothic church dedicated to the Sagrada family. To this day the church has yet to be completed, even after over 100 years of work. The interesting thing about this church is that it has been privately funded by anyonomous donations since it's inception to this current day. I know now after visiting why it has suffiecient funds. The entrance fee is 11 Euro per person. It's bad enough to have to pay 11 Euro to get into the place but if you want to go up to the second floor that'll cost another 2.50 per person. Oh, did I mention that there's a line to go up as well? While we were there it was a little over 30 minutes. Anyways, so as soon as we entered the church we noticed there was nothing to see because the WHOLE THING was under construction. Construction of this church began in the late 1800s and probably won't be completed for probably another 50 years at least. It is definitley a sight to see and a very beautifully designed church. There was a museum as well underneath the church in which we toured as well, so at least we felt as though we got our money's worth and we were at least contributing to finishing the project.

Instead of taking the bus all the way around city to get just a mile away we decided to walk back over to Gaudi's third piece of architectural mastery entitled Casa Batllo (pronounced bought-yo). He lived in this house for a while and we decided to venture through it to see what it was all about. First of all, he doesn't use straight lines in any of his work; everything has a curved surface. The concepts and designs that he came up with are mind boggling. To think that this kind of work was done 100 years ago is quite fascinating. The house itself feels like you're walking through a house at Disneyland. One design aspect of this house that I found intriguing was that there was an inside patio with a sky light. The walls were tiled in blue as well. But here's the interesting thing; the higher up on the wall the darker the blue tile and the smaller the windows were. The lower you went on the wall the lighter colored blue the tile was and the bigger the windows were. The reasoning behind this is the darker tiles up near the top were used to absorb more light, thus leading to smaller windows. Gaudi was big on natural light and used nature as his teacher. The lighter tiles toward the bottom reflected light and therefore leads to bigger windows to allow for more natural light. It's hard to describe, so I'll just post some pictures.

After our walk through Casa Batllo we headed back for the train station to catch our 9pm train back to Madrid. We decided to walk, which was a little over 1.5 miles. Our feet were tired and my shoulders were sore from carrying our backpack all day so it was nice to sit down on the train and just relax on the ride home. We were supposed to go to Toledo today but we woke up this morning and ate breakfast and were still exhausted from yesterday, so we decided to skip the trip and just relax the rest of the day. I think today was the first time we actually weren't traveling or doing some sort of tourist attraction. It was actually nice to just lay in bed and watch tv. We decided to file through our pictures and get rid of the ones we didn't like and or want. So far, after deleting all the pics we didn't want we still have almost 2,000 pictures.

Stef and I were talking about it today and we were both saying how we were ready to go home. It's been such a great trip and I think it's just worn us out. We've been on the move for 10 straight days and we've been walking everywhere and doing and seeing as much as possible. We're ready to get back into the swing of things at home and ready to settle down and start our journey through life together. We also miss our puppies too. haha. We leave back to the states on Tuesday and I'm excited for the flight home, as weird as that sounds. I'm excited to fly business class again, which will make the perfect ending to our honeymoon. Until then I bid you adieu and my next blog will come to you back in the states. Enjoy these last pics from Spain.

La Pedrera - Museum dedicated to Gaudi

Stef and I in front of La Pedrera

La Sagrada Familia church

La Sagrada Familia from further away

Casa Batllo - Gaudi's home