Sonicrusk Blog

During my trip to Massachusetts, I sent out postcards on two separate occasions: From Cooperstown, New York on June 17 and from Massachusetts on June 20.

Some people were sent both, and others only the card from MA. No offense should be taken; I wrote the HOF postcards on the bench outside of the Hall. I had the wrong pen, the ink smeared, and I had to use the pen at the post office across the street where I bought stamps and mailed the cards to rewrite some addresses. In MA, I had an appropriate pen, some fitting Ben Franklin stamps, an address list, peace, time, and a blue mailbox within walking distance.

People are barely getting these cards in the past day or two, if at all. Some people received the NY, but not the MA cards. Since when did it take 9-12 days for a piece of mail to get from one coast to the other? Did they forsake flying mail across the land and instead took up driving it in a personal auto? I’m pretty sure I could drive to Massachusetts and New York in less than nine days.

It seems like the USPS is going to crap, at least in my experiences recently. Remember when they took five days to get a letter across Bakersfield to my house?

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I TiVoed the 10AM Dodgers-Twins game today and watched it this afternoon. Los Angeles lost again, although they didn’t get whomped on like the previous two games where they lost 8-2 and 9-2. Today, it was only 6-3, but Minnesota still swept them. They were also swept a few weeks ago by Oakland, and lost 2 of 3 against Seattle if I remember correctly.

Charley Steiner, the play-by-play man who does all of the Dodgers road games with “Psycho” Steve Lyons (Scully does home games…alone), mentioned several times how poorly the National League (NL) is doing in interleague play this year. The American League has a 117-70 record in interleague games. 117-70!

The NL is doing so crappy that it is starting to become obvious. Jon Miller and Joe Morgan were talking about it during the Sunday night game. Today, during the Red Sox game on ESPN2, the play-by-play guy was talking about the three top teams in the NL this year: the Mets, the Cardinals, and the Reds. At the time, the Mets were getting their butt kicked by Boston 10-2. The Cards are on an eight-game losing streak. The Reds..gimme a break! The Reds have the third best record in the NL, but they would get squashed to dust next to any of these powerhouse AL teams.

The NL has a history of getting sand kicked in its face. Since 1996, they have only won the World Series three times (1997, 2001, 2003). Since 1990, and including the 1990 World Champ Reds, only five times (add in 1990 and 1995). That’s five wins in fifteen years for a .333 average. Hey, my math might be off, but you get the point.

Then there is the All-Star Game. Not counting the 2002 “tie”, the AL has won every All-Star game since 1997.

I am an NL fan, but why are they such turds? The NL has been swept the past two World Series.

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Once upon a time, a young college freshman was taking a class on Human Lifespan Development. He had a paper to write….so long from now. So long that it was due in another lifetime it seemed. So he spent the semester chasing girls and drinking beer.

The night before the paper was due, he copied and pasted Piaget’s Cognitive Development Theories onto a Word document and turned it in, fucking over students for years to come.

In school, whenever we wrote a paper, we were required to use between 3-5 journal articles among our credited sources. For each of these papers, we had to print off in paper form each of these 6-10 page articles and turn them in along with the written assignment. If you ended up using enough journal articles as sources, this could add up to 50-80 pages. So, you could either print them off at home, zapping through an expensive ink cartridge, or pay 10-12 cents (was in school so long the price actually went up) per page for a total of around ten bucks. Just to show that these articles exist and you did not create them out of a vivid and remarkable imagination.

Instructors, God bless them. They would scare the bejezzus out of you with plagiarism warnings: “I don’t care if it is accidental or not, you plagiarize, I’ll make sure you’ll receive an F and get kicked out of the university.” So you wrote these papers quoting like a mofo and substituting bland words for the original, more intriguing ones. All for paraphrasing and all in fear that you would accidentally fuck up and forget to put a page number next to the quote, or that you would daydream for a second and accidentally slip in some common sense description as your own.

This last school term I had a doozie of an assignment. Not only did I have to write the term paper complete with 12 photocopies of different journal articles, I also had a computer assignment requiring me to answer about 40-50 questions on childhood immunizations. The instructor wanted us to print off a copy of the webpage where we found every answer. Since some of these questions were multi-parted, some of the answers were part of an Internet article. I am still using the 100+ pages of myriad immunization facts as scratch paper on my computer desk.

Another funny thing was when I had the nursing intervention “Suggest a food referral.” The instructor wanted a rationale for this. I went to my old Nutrition book.

Rationale: “A well-chosen array of foods supplies enough energy and enough of each nutrient to prevent malnutrition” (Sizer & Whitney, 2003, p. 2)

Perfect citation!

Plagiarism witch-hunts are ridiculous. Then again, how many lazy students would’ve cheated their brains out on that computer assignment? I knew some people that didn’t start it until the morning it was due.

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Dusty’s inquiry into a Cooperstown post prompted me to write one and show some pictures. I can’t show all of them; it turns out I took 129.

It all started on a rainy day on the Massachusetts turnpike with its fifty tollbooths. I had to stop at four tollbooths along the three-hour, one-way trip. That meant four stops on the way back too. I forgot to get a ticket in the self-serve lane right at the beginning of the I-90 portion so that when I got to the state line with New York, the lady charged me $3.60! Without that slip-up, I would’ve only paid $1.40, all to the State of New York.

You take interstates through green hills and mountains along Interstate 90 in Massachusetts and New York until you merge with Interstate 80 north of Albany. You stay on that road for just a few miles until you see a sign prompting you to turn onto a route 20 in order to get to Cooperstown. Route 20 in N. New York state is a boring two-lane road that traverses through about a half-dozen small “villages” for a good fifty miles. You then turn onto a route 80 and go another twenty miles deep into the mountains. Cooperstown, New York seems way off the beaten path. The only reason the Baseball Hall of Fame (HOF) is there is because that is where, according to lore, Doubleday supposedly invented baseball.

After parking in Cooperstown, I walked down a street filled with tacky souvenir shops. You see these places at all tourist-laden spots: Cannery Row, Venice Beach, etc. It still has aspects of an old village, the post office is right across the street from the Hall. After the Hall, there is nothing more west on that Main Street.

The HOF is a three-story building. You enter with an air of mystique because you have to go through two thick, solid oak doors that show nothing of what’s inside. Once inside, there is a large lobby, admission booth to the left, and the staircase to the upper floors. You start the self-guided tour on the second floor.

The second floor is a series of walls dedicated to super-star players of the past like Ty Cobb and Cy Young. Babe Ruth, being the Giant of Baseball, has his own section off of the main room dedicated specifically to him. I didn’t get to go in because it was packed with people. It also has the past uniforms of major league teams, and lots of historical artifacts and history of how the game was played in the past.

Next, you go to the third floor. This area has some crazy stuff, like every program for every World Series ever played, baseballs from every no-hitter/perfect game ever pitched, a little shrine encased in individual lockers for each individual team with information on each, something on international baseball, and a display with all of the World Series rings. Basically, these two floors have every interesting piece of history you can think of.

The self-guided tour ends downstairs in the “gallery.” The Gallery is where the bronze busts of every Hall of Famer in a large hall. It reminded me of the USS Arizona monument in Hawaii.

Then it was off to the gift shop. Do you like postcards? The HOF gift shop has postcards featuring the bust of every single HOFer. I don’t usually utilize gift shops, but I did buy a few things at this one.

I tried to take a picture of every single interesting thing I saw at the HOF, but even with 129 photos, I still missed a lot of stuff thinking about it a week after the visit. The HOF was a very fun place and one of the most fun visits I’ve had anywhere. 

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Considering it is going to be 101 degrees today, I had planned on running my errands for today during the off hours for heat. Alas, here I am writing a post about my moody dog and will run my errands during the hottest part of the day. Too smart.

I came back into Bakersfield yesterday after visiting Massachusetts for eight days. I brought all of my stuff in but didn’t see my dog in the yard.

After getting things somewhat situated, I started to wonder where the hell she was. I went into the back yard and saw that she was lying on her side under the fan, trying to beat the afternoon heat.

She acted surprised to see me. She ran around for a few seconds, and then was timid when I called her. She scooted over to me submissively. I thought this strange.

Later on, I ordered a pizza and called her over to give her a piece of cheese from a slice. She meekly scampered over to me with her ears tucked in and took the offering. She acted kind of strange all afternoon, lying in strange spots of the house and thumping her tail whenever I passed. Eventually, she was back to her old self after I spent some time with her.

Dog owners leave their pets during vacations all of the time, and eight days is not ridiculously long. My dog was watched over by family members and had basically the same amount of human interaction and comfort. Did my dog think I had abandoned her? If so, do all dogs go through this when their owners go on vacation?

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As you know, Father’s Day just passed. Most fathers I know never make a big deal out of the day. My friend Al wanted to just hang out at home and enjoy the day, but was guilttripped into going to his grandparents-in-law’s house. Even then, only half of the invited fathers showed up.

My dad has never made any mention of an impending Father’s Day. A couple of years ago, my sister and I went in together and bought him some T-shirts as a gift because like a lot of fathers, he needed them. We were careful to pick only solid colors such as blue and gray, no vibrant colors like green or yellow for Dad because we knew he wouldn’t wear them. We did stray a little and buy him a red shirt, but as far as I know, it wasn’t his cup of tea as I have never seen him wear it.

My dad was a hardass as a kid. I do not say that with any malice at all, I love my dad very much. What he said went, and there was no tantrums or whining. Sometimes, if you had a strong argument, he could be swayed, but if you were 8-years-old and wanted to watch the special on Satanic cults and sacrifices on Oprah, the answer was a firm “No.” This kind of parenting was par for the course in 1980’s Bakersfield. Parents ruled the roost and weren’t pussies like a lot of parents seem to be nowadays.

My dad has mellowed over the years. He and his girlfriend have a small dog. Dad’s dog has free reign over the house, with doggie doors providing convenient access to the back yard and permission to climb on any surface that she can climb on including beds, couches, and loveseats. I have a small dog too and I consider her pretty spoiled. She has a bed in every room, and is allowed in the house whenever I am inside. Sometimes, if she wants to, I’ll even leave her inside by herself if I am only going to be gone for a short while. But she is not allowed on the bed or furniture without permission. I figure she has three damn beds, the couch and bed are my space.

My dad and his girlfriend combined households a few months back. My dad could not move his extensive DVD collection or other implements of his computer over to the new place immediately because there was no room. He had some of this stuff stored over at another family member’s house.

One of the rooms at my dad’s new house became free when his girlfriend’s son got married at the ripe old age of 18 and decided to join the military. I was driving around with my dad one day and we were talking about his DVDs. I use his DVDs to make movie chumps for the blog. My dad told me that “Melvin,” the recent groom, has almost out of his old room since he recently got married, although he had been staying at his fiancee’s house for quite a while beforehand.

Melvin is a cool kid. I have nothing but good things to say about him. However, I told Dad,

“Dad, when someone gets married, they lose their old room at Mom’s immediately. Time to kick that boy out and claim your space.”

So there it was - a milestone. I passed Dad on the hardass scale.

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Happy Father’s Day to all the dads.

I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday in Cooperstown, New York. I’ll wait to post more about that back at my home computer in California. I have pictures on my digital camera, but can’t access them because this computer doesn’t have a compact flash card reader.

Having graduated nursing school, I now have to pass the NCLEX-RN which is a test one must pass in order to receive a RN license. NCLEX stands for National something something Licensure Examination.

I brought along a massive study guide for this test that is published by a company named Saunders. I hadn’t cracked it before my first day out here. I didn’t want to put the cart before the horse, studying for the license exam when I still had nursing school to finish.

Upon cracking it open, I decided to start studying Maternity Nursing first. Someone I know that just took the test last December said that there were so many of these types of questions on the exam that she felt like a midwife. Plus, that is kind of a tricky part of nursing - a very complicated area.

I opened the book for a bit and already felt over my head. For this section, the study guide had questions on female hormones, contraception, female reproductive anatomy, complications of pregnancy, prenatal care, stages of labor…I forgot how complicated this area is. I studied a small snippet for about fifteen minutes, got most of the study questions wrong, said, “Fuck,” and decided to study when I got back to California when I can concentrate better. At least now I know the potential breadth of the exam. Still, I wonder what I have forgotten in the other areas.

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For the first time in three days, I outlasted my hosts. They are already in bed and I am fooling around on the Internet.

I guess I have been revving it at a high level recently, or jetlagged, because I woke up today at the alarmingly late time of one in the afternoon. I took a shower and drove over to Dunkin Donuts for world-famous cup of coffee and a couple of donuts. I then drove around some crazy roads in East Hampton, Holyoke, and Hadley. I also drove down to Connecticut to see what was down there. There is a Six Flags amusement park just inside of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has some confusing roads. They don’t name them. They are called by “route numbers.” So, I made sure to memorize the route number I was on in order to find my way back to the Interstate. Also, there are rotaries and extremely low speed limits. It seems like every route has a speed limit of 30 MPH. But one thing about MA is that it is extremely green. Some parts of it remind me of Germany with large verdant fields. The folks at Castle & Cooke would have collective hard-ons over some of these fields.

I ended up going back to Dunkin Donuts to buy some grounds for tomorrow morning, and also another large cup of ready-made stuff. It is quite good; too bad there aren’t any in California. After that, I still fell asleep for about an hour right before the NBA Finals.

So who knows how late I will be up.

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That’s the good thing about blogging, you don’t have to sit at one exclusive desktop or station necessarily. I write this to you from Massachusetts at 6:45 EST. By the time most people read this, I’ll be eating lunch.

My day of flying yesterday was one of my better ones. I had no delays, the airport at Salt Lake City was nice and comfortable, and the layovers were just long enough to stretch your legs.

However, my layover in Columbus, Ohio was lousy. The airport in that city smells like turds and is dreary. I spent the whole fifty minute layover waiting in line at the gate to get my boarding pass. There was some snafu with my itinerary, so they ticket lady just let me go through, calling out a seat assignment verbally as I walked out the door to the plane as the flight was about to close.

All was well once I arrived in MA. Grabbed some McDonald’s and had my only meal of the day. At Chris’s, I met his little blonde boys and charasmatic wrinkled cat. We started watching a pitcher’s duel between Curt Schilling of the Boston Red Sox and Johan Santana of the Minnesota Twins. I didn’t get to finish it because I fell out. I had to leave so early for my flight yesterday that I just went ahead and stayed up all night. The only sleep I had got in 36 hours or so was sitting up in an airplane seat.

I need to rent a car today and buy a map. Then I might just drive around aimlessly.

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Cindy’s Restaurant on Auburn and Oswell is one of my favorite restaurants. Growing up on the south side, I didn’t get a chance to eat at this establishment on a regular basis until just a few years ago. It has an old-fashioned, 1970’s feel to it. It is an old diner and the atmosphere reflects that. It’s one of my favorite places to go if I need a hearty meal that doesn’t involve fast food grease, or if I am out late and hungry. Cindy’s is open 24 hours a day.

I have three favorite dishes at Cindy’s. I will often eat one of their breakfast dishes: ham and eggs, country breakfast with biscuits and gravy, or the two-egg breakfast with beef patty. All three are sufficient enough to provoke a nap afterwards from satiety. I also sometimes eat the turkey melt or the hot roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes.

Which is what I ate today. Cindy’s must take pride in their product because everything I have eaten there has been hot, well cooked, tasty, and satisfying. They don’t overdo it on the gravy for the roast beef and potatoes, dolloping just enough. Everything is in perfect proportion and it isn’t slopped on your plate.

The biggest complaint I have about Cindy’s Restaurant is that they sometimes have some annoying kooks that visit and sit at the bar. That is where I sit when I eat alone and they bother me with one-sided conversation. Also, Cindy’s suffers from Expensive Drink Syndrome. If you eat there, you might want to ask for a large glass of water for your beverage.

The prices are a little high and they don’t have any rock bottom specials like some of the diner-type chains, but it’s worth it. The food looks, smells, and tastes great.

Sorry I couldn’t get a better picture. To photograph the front of the restaurant, I would’ve had to stand in the middle of Auburn or in the middle of the gas pumps at Fastrip.

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