Gail discovered that the Diamondbacks were coming to Baltimore to play the Orioles on Monday, the day before the game. We talked about it, and I said we didn’t have the time, or money, to go. She pouted and begged and pouted some more, and finally went to bed. Tuesday morning I figured ‘what the hell’, and ordered tickets for the two of us. I got our friend Christy to watch the kids (thanks Christy!!) and then called Gail about 3:15 to tell her we were going. She was very excited.

I’m glad we left when we did because the traffic around the beltway was horrendous. It usually is, but when you’re trying to get somehwere in a hurry it’s twice as bad. When we finally got up to Camden Yards, we had about 25 minutes before first pitch at 7:05. I’m glad we had that time left because we had to park about three-quarters of a mile away. Gail started walking very fast, and it was all I could do to keep up. When we got to the Will Call ticket booth, my shins were burning. Guess it was a good workout.

Unfortunatly, because of AOL’s great spam filters (insert sarcastic tone there…), I never got the tickets emailed to me as requested. You’d think they’d whitelist the MLB’s ticketing agency, but noooo…so we had to go wait in a line to get it all worked out. And when they finally let us into the stadium, the first pitch had happened. We were also on the complete opposite side of the stadium from our seats, so that by the time we found them, the side had been retired and it was the bottom of the first.

Regardless, when we did find our seats, we were pleased to see we had an excellent view of the field. The weather was absolutly perfect, and the game was a blast. Randy Johnson was pitching, and he went 7 innings with 4 strikeouts and only one walk. Final score was 8 to 1. The Diamondbacks killed them basically. We were one of the few people cheering, but hey, this is my hometeam we’re talking about! Of COURSE we’re going to cheer! And Gail cheered louder than me…she finally got to see her beloved Diamondbacks with Johnson pitching.

I have a wife who loves baseball. How cool is that?

This is just a test entry that I’ll close out after I figure out what’s going with the comments.

It appears I’m having some commenting issues on some of the entries here. Can’t figure out why though, as the comments are enabled by default in my settings. So I’m basically posting this to see if the comments appear here, or not, or do something totally weird.

Thanks to Allen for pointing it out…

If any of my neighbors looked out their windows around supper time last night, they might have seen my wife leaving my house…in the back of a cop car.

Yes, you heard me right. My wife was taken away in the back seat of a Loudoun County Sheriff’s cruiser.

And that’s about as dramatic as I can make it. No, she wasn’t being arrested or anything like that. No spousal abuse, no domestic disturbance, and no, she didn’t short circuit after having finally finished her mid-term and term paper. Let me tell you the story…

Right about supper time last night, I happened to notice a kid walking through the neighbor’s yard. At first I thought it was a neighborhood kid and made the comment about how I couldn’t believe he’d have the brass to walk through their yard, as they have some rather large dogs who can be over-enthusiastic. A couple of minutes later, I saw he was in the back yard of Debbie’s house, a different neighbor. It was obvious this wasn’t who I thought it was, and even more obvious that he was mentally challenged in some way.

I walked out to keep an eye on him while Gail left to start combing the neighborhood to see if anyone was out looking for him. The poor kid was in a pair of sweats and long sleeved shirt, but that was it. No socks, no shoes, not even a coat. And it was cold and drizzly. From my admittedly uninitiated observation, it appeared he was autistic: he had a stuffed cat that he had by the tail and was twirling it around non-stop. I tried approaching him once to see if he wanted to come into my house to get warm, but as soon as he saw me, he turned and went around the backside of Debbie’s house.

Not wanting to lose sight of him, I walked around the front and then just kept him in sight. He went to another house and tried to get in the front door, which was locked. Then he went around the back, tried the basement door, then climbed the deck and tried the door there. Both were locked and he found a swinging chair to sit in.

Gail showed back up at this time and said that she thought his name was Andrew. I called up to him and he did seem to react to his name. Gail, having experience with these types of kids, walked up the deck and simply picked him up. He held on to her willingly so she brought him back out to the street. About this time the sherrif’s deputy had arrived.

Gail had found where he was from, so she and Andrew hopped in the back of the cruiser and the deputy took Andrew home. Turns out he’d wandered away from his sitter, and they were all out looking for him. Luckily, Gail had found one of the people searching, who in turn told her what house to go to.

So all’s well that ends well. Andrew was home safe, hopefully with some socks on to warm his feet, and we now have his parents phone numbers, as well as his sitters.

I just wish I’d had my camera when the deputy left with Gail in the back of the cruiser.

The reason for the slow progress of this site has been the continuing work on my other site. I had decided I wanted a drop down menu for the main menu bar, and spent way to much time looking around at scrips and such. Well, thanks to Xin over at YXScripts, I now have a drop down menu that works.

It’s composed of CSS and Javascript, but it loads quick, is easy to configure and does what I want. So I’m happy with it. I originally wanted a horizontal bar (like I have now) with a horizontal sub-menu, but my wife said it was too confusing to navigate. So I went for the straight drop down. You can see a preview here

Now, with this in place, my interface should be complete. I’m hoping that in between doing taxes and updating my resume, that I find time to impliment it this weekend, and put my site back online, especially after such a long hiatus. It’s even more urgent that I get it done ASAP now, as the weather is warming up as well. Once the weather is nice enough to ride, there’s no time for web!

Other Bits:
If you’re an Apple user, whether it’s Macintosh or iTunes, or a Pepsi drinker, (diet or otherwise , I’m sure you’ve heard about the 100 million songs Pepsi and Apple are giving away. My buddy Joe just came up from the cafeteria here in the building with an interesting tidbit.

You probably have figured out, if you’ve taken a glance at any of the bottles, that by tilting it at just the right angle, you can make out some of the letters under the cap. If you see the word ‘again’, you know you haven’t won. If you see a mish-mash of letters, you have a winner. Well, Joe noticed that when you pull the bottle out of the cooler, the kind with the florescent lights on the inside of the door, you can hold the cap to the light and see the letters a lot better than just looking up at the lights in the ceiling.

I haven’t tried this yet…but really, with a 1 in 3 chance of winning, it’s not tough. And I’ve won 9 songs so far!

Just got email that says our team needs to be around this weekend in case they need help in getting the latest client out the door. Guess my weekend, if it wasn’t shot by doing taxes and resume before, is now.

Well, obviously I’ve messed something up with my right side menu. Now it’s below all the entries. I was working on getting the comments to be viewed the same way last night. I had a friend come over, and when she got there, I neglected to wrap up what I was working on. Gail got home and we sat up and played some cards for a bit, and I totally forget I was in the middle of something.

Now it seems to be all screwed up. I guess my plans for tonight were just cemented…need to sit down and figure this out.

I’ve also been debating about whether to go with a “liquid” layout (as I have it now, where you can resize your browser window and the content expands or shrinks to follow) or a static, centered layout (See SimpleBits and Veerle’s blog for excellent examples).

Any thoughts?

Ok!

Looks like Shad’s Pad is slowy coming back online here. I’m using a new journaling tool, and hopefully, it won’t get taken down as often as Greymatter did.

Throughout the next few weeks, the look will change as I play with the templates and css stuff. For now, this is the default layout.

So…welcome back!