Benchmarks

There hasn't been much to report since we've returned to Louisville, and I have dutifully failed to report. Liz and I have been taking care of business old and new, between filing insurance claims, re-establishing our relationship with the US Postal Service, obsessively checking presidential poll aggregators, and so forth.

The weather has been spectacularly good here, and I became strangely obsessed with rehabbing some outdoor furniture we brought here from Salt Lake that had been sadly ignored. It got a few days of attention, and looks a little better, anyway. I've been working on the bike and feeling better, although I do need to lie down for a while after a ride.

And there has been baseball. I grew up a Phillies fan (it used to be a congenital condition, as no one with any sense would adopt them as a favorite), back when they were still working off the 77 year-long interval before winning their first World Series. When I was in grad school, living in Chicago, it was fun to play hooky on the occasional summer afternoon and take the el down to Wrigley. This was a few years before they put lights in, so all the games were afternoon games. The bleacher seats were $2, the beer was cheaper than that, and a few of my heroes from the 1980 Phillies had been traded to the Cubs. I'll spare you any further details, but it was easy to fall in love with Cubs, especially in 1984. Never mind what happened then. Or that other thing.

So I do have to say: Cubs win! Cubs win! And attribute it to Jack Brickhouse, although it may go back further. He was gone by '84, but a bit easier to take than Harry Caray while I was trying to comprehend the finer points of principal components analysis.

I'm thinking that I will make it a goal to be alive for the next time the Cubs win the World Series. On second thought, that might be setting the bar a little low, since those guys could do again next year. Maybe the Phillies, then. That's definitely a reach.