Late Pass Wednesday: Dodger Game

Wow. This a real throwback. In July we were down in southern California to take part in the epic Morris/Ross wedding & to visit my Grandparents. On a whim we bought some tickets to a Dodger game and set out to see what Dodger Stadium was all about.
I have to say that we absolutely loved the atmosphere. It is a truly great baseball venue.
Of course no baseball game is complete without capturing Manny Ramirez scratching his nutsack in between innings. Boy oh boy did Zeb's extreme long range lens come in handy. And to think, I once told him that there was no way we would ever have a use for such a high powered telescopic lens. Man, was I wrong.
And to top it all off this is the view over LA from outside Dodger Stadium. Breathtaking.

Late Pass Wednesday: Christmas Light Obsession

If you know Zeb, you understand that he doesn't really do things halfway. If he's a baseball fan, he's going to be the most maniacal Red Sox fan you've ever met. If he's going to coach, he's going to spend every waking moment planning drills, dissecting his roster and running stats. And if he's going to put up christmas lights, he's going to put up the most damn christmas lights in the neighborhood.

The display pictured above was his first draft of this year's christmas display. Bear in mind, that picture was taken while it was pitch dark outside. I saw a jogger run by and say to his jogging partner "look how bright that house is, I almost ran off the curb looking at it." Yup, that's before he bought 4 more sets of net lights for the shrubs, strung a giant christmas tree with a color changing star on top on the front corner of our lot, and borrowed a projector from our neighbor to project a huge image of Santa Clause on the side of our house. Yeah, I said it.

It became a sickness really. He would drive around the neighborhood to make sure that there were no other houses with more/better lights displays than his. I had to talk him down off the ledge several times when he insisted that he "just needed to buy a few more strings of lights!!"

But you know what? If it makes the guy happy, I'm sure there could be worse hobbies.

Late Pass Wednesday: Vegas

Some may know that we spent a 5 days in Las Vegas with the team for the Las Vegas Bowl. You'll quickly realize that this post has nothing to do with the game, because frankly nothing about the game was noteworthy.
We stayed at the Palazzo, which is a newer hotel connected to the Venetian. The entire place was beautiful and incredibly nice, but the 1 thing that took the experience to the next level was the 22" Flat Screen HD TV, IN THE BATHROOM!!! Unfortunately Zeb's photography skills lacked the foresight to include said MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE OF THE ENTIRE TRIP. So I photoshopped to help you out. It was agreed upon by everyone, that this was a life changing experience. Do you know how much more productive my morning routine would be if I could watch the Today Show while simultaneously blow drying my hair? I can't tell you how many morning minutes I have wasted sitting on the edge of the bed in my robe watching the latest updates on that missing housewife from Utah & the Tiger Woods Saga. By the way, I swear I used to think that The Today Show talked about actual news. No, turns out it is only about .003452 steps above E! News. But I digress.
Kinda cool for anyone whos never been to the old downtown Las Vegas. They took us up to Fremont Street which is this open air area covered in a video screen ceiling. The positives of Fremont Street: Cheap Drinks & "loose slots" (Thats What She Said,) The negatives: Lots of Bums. A bum asked my boss for his leftover steak from the Outback Steakhouse Buffett they had set up for us.
We checked out the Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens for their Christmas display. It is somewhat difficult to understand the scale of these displays from the pictures, but they are huge, and nearly everything is made out of plants.

We especially liked the Polar Bears made out of white carnations.
Another team function was a trip to see the Terry Fator show. Yeah, if you reaction is "who the hell is Terry Fator," that was my reaction too. He is a ventriloquist/singer who won America's Got Talent. My favorite shtick from his show was his impersonation of Michael Jackson, but I could have done without the red neck puppet. This guy has a 10 year contract with The Mirage hotel, and he get's paid 10 million dollars a year. Bizzaro.
To me no trip to Vegas is complete without watching the Fountains at the Bellagio at least once...or 5 times.
Zeb wanted to get sketched by this street artist.....
But why did it look so much like The Joker?

Late Pass Wednesday: Pitching Machine Fiasco

I know I haven't posted much on it this year, but Zeb is coaching 13/14 year old baseball through the Boys and Girls Club of Corvallis again this year. He had high expectations for the year with several kids returning this year that he coached last year. At some point in the middle of the season, with the team slumping at the plate, Zeb decided that the only way for his team to take it to the next level was if they had a pitching machine to hit off of everyday in practice. I did my best to dissuade the man, but he had already ventured too far into what I will from this point on refer to as "Zeb-Deals Mode" I will outline this phenomenon in a soon to come blog so that you may gather further information on "Zeb-Deals Mode," such as symptoms and possible prevention strategies.

Zeb somehow managed to find this pitching machine as pictured above from a college kid living in Medford. Apparently it is a $2000 machine, which Zeb somehow convinced the kid to sell it to him for $350 - and then Zeb somehow convinced the parents of his team to all pitch in money toward the cause. So really all that ended up coming out of my pocket was $10 and the gas money it took to get to Medford and back.
As much as I put up a fuss about Zeb spending money on such funny thing, it turned out to be a lot of fun. We've gone out to the baseball field and taken a few buckets of balls on some Sundays (Even Ollie got the run around the field and shag balls - he actually did bring a few in from the outfield, but I think he took more out there than he brought in,) which was fun as hell. And the kids on Zeb's team absolutely think it is the coolest thing in the world. All in all I guess it was worth it. We like to joke around about tearing down the fence we share with one of our neighbors (basically Zeb's soulmate, the husband of the family is a baseball coach at CHS, a Red Sox fan & about as crude & blunt as Zeb) and building an ajoined hitting cage in our back yards. Complete with field lights for the nighttime. Yeah, I really don't think we would have any problem getting that passed by the Home Owners Association.

Late Pass Wednesday

It's been a long time since the last Late Pass Wednesday, but it is worth the wait, this one is a a doozey guys...

We're buying a house! It's been a crazy, stressful, exciting and scary few months leading up to this, but yes, we are actually buying a house. Like most first time home buyers this is the biggest purchase we have ever even thought about making, but we've searched long and hard (thats what she said) and I think we've really found the right place for us. And it's cute right?!

Zeb has really worked hard doing the majority of the research for the house, talking to the realtor, mortgage broker and doing various other leg work. It has been tough, and there has been more than one occasion that I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. I can't lie, there were nights when we waited to hear back from the seller on our offer that I could barely sleep with anticipation. Now that the closing date is almost here it is nice to be able to relax a little and look forward to the future.

The house is 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath, obviously a little bit too big for just 2 people. And no, I'm not pregnant. So we decided to ask Damon to move in with us, occupy a room and help us with our new mortgage. You, Me & Dupree - here we come! At first I was a little nervous about this idea, but if nothing else it should be really good for the blog because I'll have endless ridiculous stories, probabaly lots more polls to settle household debates, and pet antics involving Ollie learning to co-exist with Damon's cat Apollo.

Late Pass Wednesday

The one thing I really wanted Zeb to do during the moving/unpacking process was hang our pictures on the walls. He's better at it than I am, and usually he makes the pictures straight, which i usually can't gather the patience to do. For whatever reason he found it nearly impossible to complete this task for me within the first 6 months of our living back in Corvallis, so one day this summer I finally did it myself. Notice that I even hung a shelf on the wall, which is if you didn't know, universally agreed upon to be the most difficult type of wall hanging device to install. Go me.

Late Pass Wednesday

I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but this should more than make up for it. Let me set the stage for you:

Me = watching the world series in our bedroom in Bozeman, with handy camera phone. Zeb = watching the world series down stairs. Red Sox win and chaos ensues. enjoy.

Late Pass Wednesday - Tire Blowout

Here's a doozey for ya. A few weekend's ago we rolled out to Springfield to kick it with Emily & Chicken and just so happened to have a tire blowout on our way. See the thing about it was that about ohh...10 minutes prior to our little accident we had passed a Hummer parked on the side of 1-5 with a blowout and a Les Schwab truck there working on it. Zeb gave a little smartass honk on the horn and we preceeded to comment how ridiculous was it for a Hummer to get a flat tire on the freeway, and how much that would suck. Fast forward and it's us on the side of the road. Instant tire karma.
Zeb was actually really impressive with his tire changing skills. I'd say he had us back on the road in about 12 minutes flat. No thanks to Damon standing there in the back looking on. (hehe, just joking Damon)
As you can see in this picture there was quite a bit of rubber from the tire still wrapped around the....axel? or whatever part of the car that is. Either way - it would have been a pain in the butt to try to get that off.....
.....that is if Zeb didn't have a handy buck knife in the glove box! See the funny thing about this is that we joke every single year at Christmas time when my Dad gives Zeb some variation on a pocket knife. Dad always makes some comment about how a real man should always have a sharp knife in his pocket - I can't agree more!
There's what remained of Zeb's tire. For some reason I felt bad to just leave the poor thing on the side of the freeway.
Wow! Later we realize, it's a good thing that Damon brought Zeb this Dale Earnhart Jr. Amp energy drink before we left, NO WONDER he was so good at changing that tire!

Also, I learned a valuable lesson that day. When life gives you lemons - blog it out!

Late Pass Wednesday

With all the blog slacking that I've been doing since we've been back in Oregon, I'm sure you can imagine that I'm starting to accumulate some really great Late Pass Wednesday materials. This one goes all the way back to Bozeman; its a cute little prank that my former Grad Students at MSU pulled on me during the last week at work. Over the course of the year they had become known for various ambush office decorations, mostly commemorating the various staff members birthdays. Since my birthday fell over the winter break when they were all gone I had slipped through the cracks, and bragged about this fact to great lengths. The Monday of my last week at MSU I arrived at work to find two of our Grad Students sitting outside of my office. This was odd since they usually didn't get there that early in the morning. So I was immediatly suspicious. Well, this is what I found:

My office filled up with 300 (give or take a few that popped) orange balloons. They had actually taken the time to write on each balloon a reason that I should stay or a funny inside joke or saying among the staff.
Naturally since one of the Grad Students was a big "The Office" fan, a few nods to the show were involved.
Well, I carefully read each one and popped them all that morning. I think the girls were a little bit disappointed that i popped them so quickly, because they felt it necessary to provide an encore performance the next morning.
So on Tuesday I decided to give them a little bit of satisfaction (I really didn't want to have an office filled with balloons for the third day running) So I ended up leaving the balloons as long as I could tolerate them. The rule was, if a balloon made its way out of the office it had to be popped, they ones that stayed in could live. I packed up my book shelves and most of my desk all the time working around the balloons. The girls accused me of trying to kick balloons out of the office so that they could be popped. I made it until just after lunch time when I started feeling a little chlostrophobic and staticy and popped them all and went on with my day.

As much as I complained to the girls about and and acted like I hated it, it was a really cute prank, and it did make me feel like I would be missed. It will definitely be something that I won't forget soon.

Late Pass Wednesday

Several weeks ago I suffered a quite serious injury to my eye. I was packing for a road trip and inadvertantly lodged the corner of a cardboard box in my cornea. Don't make me explain how, its really irrelevant anyway. Let it suffice to say that I was in quite a bit of pain and seriously considered wearing a pirate style eye patch. Consider below, some picture evidence.

Exhibit A) The Good Eye - A Reference Point

Exhibit B) Bad Eye
Exhibit C) Bad Eye Day 2
So to make matters even better, I headed out on a road trip the very next day. I woke up with one gnarly looking eye. It was very sensitive to light and began oozing and watering with the slightest stimulus. I did pretty well on the airplane, because i closed my blind and slept the whole way. However, the harsh lighting of a basketball areana, combined with the strain of watching 12 girls and 4 coaches go through a practice proved to be more than I could handle. I was miserable. Luckily enough, when we finally arrived at the hotel that night, where I was staying with one of the assistant coaches, the coach and I decided to venture out to a nearby mall. I was in the market for the biggest, darkest pair of shades that money could buy. Well, being the dead of winter, sunglasses were not well stocked at many of the fine retail establishments. I did find a lovely bargain rack at Vanity at the very reasonable price of 2 pairs for $10.

Travel Suit Chic - This classy look is the pair that I sported for the majority of the time, including: watching TV in bed at the hotel, breakfast in the hotel restaurant, in the elevator, in the mini-vans, & at practice.
Gameday Glam - Gameday requires a certain level of sophitication and sass, captured perfectly in these shades. When I picked these out, my objective was to find a pair of glasses so ugly that they were funny. I wore them during pre-game taping just to give the girls a laugh and keep things loose. No - I did NOT wear these to day game.

Late Pass Wednesday - 2 For 1 Special

Late Pass Part 1) The Plant

A long time ago. July I believe, we got a plant. We found it at Costco when Damon was here visiting and it was love at first sight. We sorted through about 10 plants that all looked nearly identical and found this one. The best one. We brought it home and named it "Fenway". We're trying to gradually increase the number of living things in this household. This makes it 4. Me, Zeb, Robinson (the fish, who will be discussed later) and now Fenway. I guess it's weird to name a plant. But.....oh well. What's done is done. It took me forever to find the kind of pot that I wanted to plant Fenway in. Since Zeb was working full days while Damon was here, and I was only on half time, I forced Damon to accompany me in finding the perfect pot. I do feel pretty sorry for him, because I think we spent upwards of a few hours debating in the home/garden section of several retail establishments in Bozeman. But it was all worth it, because Damon was actually the one to finally find this pot and convince me that this was the one. But he was right. Now he knows what Zeb goes through on a very regular basis. Sorry Damon.

Fenway is doing very well in the house, and the odds that we will continue to keep it alive are in our favor.

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Late Pass Part 2) The Fish

The fish has not been doing well lately. He got all lethargic, and never wanted to eat. And to make matters worse, Zeb broke his lovely fish shaped living space while washing it.

evidence article 1

evidence article 2

So we were forced to get a new bowl for Robinson. We opted for this larger bowl (about 2 gallons)

Along with this interesting decoration. We were hoping he might want to swim through it, you know, give him some extra entertainment. He really seemed to enjoy his plastic grass, so we really thought this would be a hit. But it wasn't. Still just floating at the top, not eating. And no, he wasn't dead.

Through much google research, Zeb determined that Robinson was either constipated (huh?) or had a fish mouth rot caused by too cold of water. We bought a beta remedy solution to put in his water to make him healthy, got a smaller bowl (pictured below) for him, and have been trying to keep him water warmer by using an electric heating pad next to the bowl sometimes. He seems to be doing much better. At times we thought about just flushing him and getting a gold fish, but we are very committed to this fish. So, I would say that his odds are looking better everyday. Keep your fingers crossed.

So there you have it, I know I need a late pass for my late pass this week, but it's finally here. Make sure you share your own late pass information too!!!

Late Pass Wednesday: Bobcat Football

A couple weeks ago Ali was visiting and we decided to check out some of that Bobcat Football. It was actually the first game I have been to since I have lived here, so it was a new experience all around. Pretty good atmosphere for a smaller venue. And, as luck would have it, my season tickets are directly behind about 8 maniac 'Cat fans who don't know football from their butt. Love it!

Late Pass Wednesday: Elton John Mania

Sooooo, yeah. Elton John is apparently going to be performing at the Fieldhouse (my work) at the end of this month, and believe me, this has caused quite a ruckus. Here's a picture, forgive my shoddy camera skills, but I was trying to take a picture of this crowd lined up out side of my work without being too obvious. So these people actually set up a tent and spent a night and two days waiting for their chance at tickets. Crazy!

Late Pass Wednesday: Air Show

Wow. I can't really even remember when we went to this air show. I think it was in July, but I know that it was during one of the hottest streaks of the summer. The Air Show is held out at the Airport and it got pretty miserable standing around on the blacktop with the sun beating down. We ended up leaving after only a few hours, but I would say that we definitely got our fill of planes.

The Blue Angels

We liked this plane because it was Beaver Colors.

Once again, as is often the case at public events in Bozeman, just a little too much patriotism here.