Month: June 2014

Photos: Minor League Baseball in Kodak, Tennessee

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I chose to visit Kodak kind of on a whim.  Initially, I was planning on making Asheville a day trip, where I’d go straight back to Atlanta in the wee hours of the night, but when I found out that the Mississippi Braves were playing against the Smokies, I decided to make my one day trip into a two day one, because Kodak is just 90 miles from Asheville, as opposed to driving the 290 miles back to Atlanta.

Despite the fact that Kodak is a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere, I was still really excited by the idea of going there.  There’s something ironically amusing to me about small towns in the middle of nowhere that I look forward to.  I guess I like the experience of seeing what those deep out into the country are like, and if they can handle when an English-speaking Asian guy comes romping into their towns, trying to see what’s up.

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Photos: Minor League Baseball in Asheville, North Carolina

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So, Asheville.  I was looking forward to visiting this place more than about any other place I had thought about visiting throughout the 2014 baseball season, because to my understanding Asheville was a town known for interesting dining, lots of local breweries, and it happened to be a place within reasonable driving distance that had a minor league ballpark I’ve never visited, AND they just so happened to be giving out a bobblehead, AND they were also playing against an Atlanta Braves affiliate.  Needless to say, it was the no-brainer of no-brainers that I would be looking forward to this particular trip.

Much to my expectations, Asheville was a lovely place that I enjoyed a great deal.  The drive to get there wasn’t the least bit difficult, and it frankly just felt good to get in my own car and drive somewhere I’d never really been to before.

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I hope Armageddon hits the next time I take a vacation

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I don’t really like to talk about my job too much, because when the day is over, there’s really nothing at all that interesting about it.  It’s about as Office Space as it gets sometimes, to be perfectly honest.

However, this week has been particularly arduous.  One of my colleagues is on, has been on, and will continue to be on an extended vacation, thus leaving my department a little short staffed.  Suffice to say, things have gotten a little hairy in their absence, and it dawned on me that such seems to always be the case whenever this colleague of mine goes on vacation.

Naturally, as easy it would be to declare such intentions as deliberate and malicious, we all know that it’s just completely freak coincidental that shit hits the fan whenever this person takes off.  Nothing against them at all, in the least bit, I like them very much quite the contrary.

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Embracing the hipster nerd I truly can be

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For pretty much the last 20 years, my eyes have been problematic. A lifetime of playing video games, watching too much television and an career pursuit and occupation that requires me to look at computer screens for way more than I’d like to admit, have rendered my eyes in pretty bad shape. My vision is poor, I have perpetually dry eyes, and when things are really bad, light sensitivity, ranging from mild annoyance to being incapable of being outside on a sunny day.

Needless to say, I got glasses at a pretty young age, but by high school I was wearing contact lenses, and have been wearing them pretty much ever since. Because I was a dumb teenager with erratic sleeping habits, I fell asleep with my contact lenses on way more times than any person really should, which led to exacerbating my eye problems at times.

Since then, I’ve done well enough in caring for my eyes, as far as staving off infection or bacterial problems; as well as I can considering my job requires me to be staring at computer screens all day long. But there are still bad times like when I play too much LoL and/or don’t get enough quality sleep, where wearing my contacts isn’t always the best idea.

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Scoring a goal in the World Cup has to be one of the greatest feelings ever

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Considering the fact that South Korea had been considered one of the worst teams to enter the 2014 World Cup, I’ll take a draw against the much more favored Russian squad.  One point is better than zero points, although I really had my hopes soaring for three points, when the Koreans drew first blood and scored on Russia first.  Unfortunately, the defense couldn’t solder on for the remaining 15 minutes, and they allowed the equalizer just minutes later.

Regardless, a tie is not a loss, and the last thing I want to see is South Korea get bounced unceremoniously out of the group stage.  In spite of monumental bias and criticism from global media outside of South Korea about how weak of a squad they should be, how they didn’t score so much as it was Russia’s goalkeeper fucking up, and how they probably won’t make it out of the group stage; Korea’s already put their stamp on the World Cup that they’ve come to play, and if at least anything at all, had at least one moment of glory to bask in.

Seriously though, are there many better feelings in the world, than what it looks like to score a goal in the World Cup?  Goals in general are excruciatingly rare as it is in the game of soccer to begin with, but to score one for your home country, against the best squads in the world, on the grandest stage of them all, while somewhere around a billion people are watching in the stands and on television sets all across the entire planet?

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Order has been restored in the NBA

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It’s no secret that I’m not really a fan of the NBA. I often cite things like the emergence of thug-like behavior of many of today’s players, the fact that so many players are greedy and no longer care about winning as long as they’re getting paid top dollar, and the presence of primadonna pretenders that completely derail what a team sport like basketball is really supposed to be.

And then we have incidents like the Donald Sterling racism scandal and subsequently the completely misguided fake support of the Los Angeles Clippers to put way too bright of a spotlight onto the NBA, but the NBA naturally doesn’t care; and they didn’t mind, because exposure equals dollars, and fake or not, people poured an influx of cash into the Clippers, regardless of reasoning.

However, in spite of my indifference towards the NBA, there’s always been one thing that I’ve remained a fan of throughout the years: the San Antonio Spurs. As clichéd as it sounds, it’s because the Spurs play the game in a manner in which I respect and admire, and win in spite of the ever-changing (for the worst) environment of the league around them by doing such. They’re often cited as being a boring team, but frankly I don’t care; I love the way Tim Duncan has banked in ugly jumpers for the better part of the last two decades, and the way Manu Ginobili regularly deceives the opposition almost for no other reason than the fact that he looks white (he’s Argentinian).

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The weekend I’d been looking for

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Prior to the start of the baseball season, this past weekend was one particular weekend that I had mentally earmarked as one of weekends that I was looking forward to the most.  Sure, I have ambitions and plans of grandeur when the summer arrives, and in a perfect world, I make every flight, the weather is never an issue, and I’m able to tackle four new MLB and six new MiLB ballparks before the start of July.  However, things haven’t worked out so kindly throughout the span of the last few weeks, and be it poor weather, unlucky flight conditions or both, a lot of my trips have been derailed and ultimately cancelled, leaving me kind of distraught, and with more time to brood and go crazy.

But this past weekend was undoubtedly the one weekend I was looking forward to immensely, because it combined several things going for it that if they all worked out, would lead to a successful good time.

Fortunately for me, with the weekend now a time frame in the past, I can say that basically everything did work out, and it was a successful good time, and I’m quite pleased with it, to the extent that it’s worth writing about, because frankly, I think a lot of my posts throughout the last few weeks have kind of had an undertone of disappointment or an unhappy sentiment to some of them.

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