Good chats with Mom and ex-boss Paul B, dog walked, and now waiting for Viv to get her car from the shop prior to a stroll through Value Village in search of some specific cast iron.

I tried the Shoreline Goodwill a couple days ago, which used to be my favorite North End thrift store. But they recently remodeled and tidied up so there’s less chance of a random score there now. Good for them, bad for me.

I was surprised at first to find, literally, not a single piece of cast iron. The did have what appeared to be a pair of steel-clad aluminum core Italian-made dual-sided uh frittata maybe pans for $14, which seemed like a fair price for what amounted to two high quality ten inch crepe pans. But not what I was looking for.

Awesome. As I was writing this a kid drove by blasting “Thrift Shop” at top volume.

Hm, I really need to bang on the comments here, it’s a shame that they don’t display on older entries.

Rummaging through old entries here last night I realized I haven’t been updating the blog nearly as much as I did even two years after moving into this house.

The obvious place to start is my renewed interest in baseball. I’ll talk about where it came from later. For now, I want to talk about this year.

In January 2013, as in 2012, Ken and I attended FanFest at Safeco, and planned ahead to compete in the Family Feud-style trivia panel that awards caps to all participants and a pair of upper-level tickets to winners. Our team won, so we both came away with caps and tickets.

Partway through the day we noticed Iwakuma doing his stint at the M’s Twitter booth and I was able to greet him and say a few words of appreciation.

I was also happy to be able to show David Eskenazi my curious Cuba jersey and a printout of the mystery Griffey ukiyo-e.

Between then and now I have been trying to plan my season in advance so as not to spend as much time chasing tickets on craigslist as I did last year. I picked up a 6-game share of a season ticket on third base, and three sets of two-ticket $50 gift packs, so ten games so far, twenty tickets, average ticket cost a bit over $25.

Last year I attended about 30 games and my average ticket cost was just over $20, so I feel like I’m heading in the right direction. BECU is sponsoring $10 Mondays and Tuesdays this year again, and the only premium priced games I want to get to for sure are Opening Day and the Sunday 6/30 game against the Cubs, so I think I can assemble a budget plan to get to that $20 level again.

The Pirates are here this year too and I have vague memories of following them for a couple seasons in the early 1970s, memories which I need to excavate.

(Repurposed from this thread.)

On March 13, 2013, Google announced the imminent shuttering of Google Reader to universally harsh backlash, my voice included.

After a couple of days I became curious about my use history and first grabbed the current, if flaky, stats from my GR account.

“From your 61 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 2,079 items, clicked 35 items, starred 2 items, and emailed 5 items.
Since March 5, 2009 you have read a total of 299,990 items.”

When this whole fracas broke out the total count was over 300k. And that ’09 baseline date seemed wrong too, so I hit this blog looking for clues.
I evidently first looked at using GR in 2005, and at that time contemplated a future migration by circa 2007, which appears to have occurred, with the driving motivation being multi-device-and-platform statefulness. The Symbian mobile OS incarnation (presumably rendering within Opera) appears to have been more satisfactory than the experience of using Reader on a Treo.

I have vague recollections of installing one or two PalmOS RSS clients that relied on cable sync back in ye olde Precellular Era; as I recall they would fill up the device with cached content very quickly.

Incidental to my use of GR, 2005 (and specifically October of 2005) marked a milestone in my life: Viv and I signed the purchase papers for our house the very next day after that ’05 post.
2007, the year of the next post, also held a major event in our lives: Rocket came to live with us on January 27 of that year.

I’m somewhat bemused by the relative frequency of my posts in that year; I had thought moving into the house here more or less just hit my mute button.

I wonder when I actually started using Twitter?