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

Driving in Spain...Oh boy!

After our stay in Sevilla we had a rental car waiting for us at the train station via Hertz. I knew it was a stick and that it would be like riding a bike. Once you learn you never forget. It took me stalling a few times before I picked it back up and we were on our way to Marbella. We decided that since Marbella would probably not have anything to offer us in the realm of tourism, other than seeing expensive cars and homes, that we would drive through the city of Ronda. Driving through the back roads of Spain was absolutely AMAZING! The views were truely breathtaking. Fields of lush green grass and olive trees as far as the eye could see decorated the mountainous landscape.

Upon arrival in Ronda, which is famous for the Puente Nueva bridge, we parked, got a map, and started being tourists. The city itself is built on a huge hill and the views from the bridge were spectacular. We couldn't really get a feel for how big the bridge really was until we hiked down this trail to where we could take pictures. You see how big it is in the postcards but seeing it in person is a whole different story. We found our way down the trail and headed down, which took about 15 minutes. Upon reaching the bottom, we were taken aback at the true beauty and size of this bridge. Pictures don't do it justice.

After an afternoon meal at McDonalds we continued our journey down to the Beverly Hills of Spain, Marbella. The second part of the drive reminded me of driving up to Big Bear. The road was very windy and trees covered the entire mountain. We arrived at the Hotel Guadalmina Golf in the mid evening and felt like we were at a 5 star resort. Upon entering the room, we went to our balcony to see the ocean staring us in the face with its waves crashing down on the beach. We looked up restaurants in the area and decided on Trader Vic's. Since we didn't want to drive we took a taxi, which took less than 10 minutes. We truely felt at home when he asked for the 15 Euro fare to take us a few miles down the road. Trader Vic's is like a mix between hawaiian and chinese food. More of a fusion type restaurant. We had an excellent meal and then caught a break only paying 13 Euro for our taxi home.

After breakfast in the morning, which overlooked one of the holes on the golf course along with the ocean, we set our sights for Granada, home of the famous Alhambra. The drive there was great...until we got into the city. For some reason, the GPS decided to take us on the scenic route through the city, instead of going the easy way and wrapping around the city to our hotel. I'll get to that a little bit later. Apparently, our GPS was set to take us the shortest possible route, not the the fastest route. So, as we were driving through the city admiring the sights, my GPS told me to enter a roundabout and take a left exit. Well, I went straight instead and ended up in the middle of the city in the Taxi and Bus Only lane, with taxis and scooters riding my tail. I guess once you drive the streets enough you get a feel for them, but let me remind you this was my second day driving in Spain and I was most certainly NOT comfortable driving these streets just yet. After making some more wrong turns and circling the city twice we ended up at the Hotel Alhambra Palace. It was a beautiful hotel that sat atop the hill, right next to the Alhambra, with a spectacular view of the city. After arriving at the 2nd floor we looked at the door and got a little giddy because we had a view of the city. The first thing we did was open the door and stand out on the small balcony and admire the beauty of the city; along with take pictures. Yesterday we had our tour of the Alhambra, which took about 3.5 hours, and then toured the rest of the city with a very nice Australian couple we met on our tour. From the time our tour started (around 10am) until the time we got back to the hotel (8pm) we figured we were walking around for about 10 hours. Needless to say our legs were tired.

This morning we awoke and left for Cordoba to return the rental car and to see La Mezquita. Two hours later we arrived in Cordoba at our hotel. I remembered to put on the "Fastest Route" setting on our GPS so I wouldn't be driving through streets as wide as the car and making impossible turns that would make me stall (like those in Granada). We returned the car (late of course) to Hertz and walked over to La Mezquita, which is a huge mosque. We had a bitter taste for the city in our mouths after an argument with the Hertz woman, who forced us to pay for an extra day for returning the car late. They'll be hearing from us! Anyways, on our bitter walk to La Mezquita we decided this city sucks and that we were giving them none of our business. Stef is a life saver and let me tell you why. Way back in Sevilla, she thought it would be better to spend an extra day in Madrid because she heard there was nothing to do in Cordoba. Also, our little Spain tour book said you could do Cordoba in one day. We were scheduled for two nights here, but luckily, Stef booked us back in Madrid a night earlier and we'll be gladly leaving this city in the morning via the high speed train.

We booked ourselves a day trip to Barcelona on Saturday while back in Sevilla, so we're really looking forward to that. I think so far our favorite city is Madrid. There's just so much to do and see and it's a more lively city. Sevilla and Granada were beautiful and historic, but we think Mardid has both of those qualities, but is also young and alive and not so touristy. Anywho, we're back in Madrid tomorrow for four more days before heading home next Tuesday. Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

A lake on the drive to Ronda

The Puente Nuevo bridge from the bottom of our hike

The view from our room in Marbella

The view from our room in Granada

At Saint Nicholas Square in the Albacin with the Alhambra in the background