The Big DumpTruck

Man oh Man, I love Leominster during baseball season! Kicking ass and taking names we have the following status on Tournament Titles:

Jimmy Fund Massachusetts Division 3 Tournament Winners
North Leominster 12s
North Leominster 11s (Willie Sinclair Tournament)
North Leominster 10s
[The North Leominster 9s did a great job as well - barely missing the top in their championship game to Pepperell.]

Stacey Bradley Tournament Winner
North Leominster 8s

Babe Ruth All-Star Tournaments
Leominster 14s - Western MA Champions
Leominster 13s - play Wednesday for the New England Championship and a spot in the Babe Ruth World Series

Basically North Leominster owned these tournaments, and I'm very proud of each and every kid who played this summer, and of the ones who didn't make the teams but cheered on their friends and teammates just the same. You kids rule.

Labels: baseball, Leominster, Little League

Congrats to North Leominster, winners of the newly-formed Massachusetts District 3 12-year-old division 2009 Jimmy Fund Championship! The team beat Athol 10-4 at Winchendon on Monday night to win the tournament. The local papers of course haven't had any coverage of the game, so I thought I would at least mention in here, in case anyone was doing a search looking for info.

I understand that the local papers have fired most of their staff and just hope for the best when it comes to these stories, but it's still disappointing to the kids to see other games getting full coverage with nary a mention of their winning the tournament (regardless of how few teams were participating at the 12yo level). So I am writing this for them, because they worked just as hard as every other team in Jimmy Fund this year, raising over $1200 for the Jimmy Fund in the process.

Labels: baseball, contest

The bad news is that I'm not going to have time to do any car shopping this week. The good news is that I'm done shopping and pick up the new hotness on Tuesday. The mom-mobile will be traded in to find love with some other family. Now that it's mostly just me and the boy in the car, I didn't really need a 7 passenger mini-van. I'm back to a sedan, and I'm actually pretty happy about it. I loved my van (a Sienna LE) but it was just tooooo big to a commuter car. I will keep you in the dark until I have a picture of the new wheels.

The boy is also scheduled for some Jimmy Fund baseball games - 6 between now and August 1st. So practice tomorrow and a game on Thursday. And my nephew's All Star game is tonight, so it's a Very Special Baseball Week. Oh, and the dentist on Wednesday. They are going to yell at me for not taking Junior to see an orthodontist, but you know what? The kid hasn't lost or gained ANY new teeth in the past 2 years. He's waaaaaay behind and they aren't going to do anything for him. But I promise, this summer, we'll go see someone. One of you remind me, okay?

So that's about it for the sort-of-mundane portion of the post. I'm sorry it had to be like this. I did play a rousing round of frolf last night. Wait, you don't know what frolf is? Do you have a GameCube or a Wii? You do? Okay, go find this game. It's called RibbitKing. It's a strange little game that at its peak was pretty much only ten bucks. It is one of my favorite games ever. It's sort of like golf but it involves aliens hitting things that make frogs fly. There's more too it but I haven't had any coffee yet. Actually, here are links to the Playstation2 version of the game and the GameCube version of the game.

Labels: baseball, fun, games

This is my 7th or 8th year of doing NaNoWriMo, and every year I go into it with a slightly different attitude. This year I was looking forward to it for the past two weeks (of course - when I wasn't allowed to type a word) but this morning there was very little if any excitement. And I had things that needed to be done today that did not allow me to sit and write, including spending 5, yes 5, hours at the baseball field while my son played his game AND the one that followed, because they didn't have enough kids. He was psyched because the 2nd game was far more laid back and he got to try catching for the first time. He caught for two innings - the first and the last, and definitely did better the 2nd time. Maybe it won't be a bad thing for him to try to pick up, although personally, I would never want to be a catcher. Way way way too much pressure. That kind of stuff doesn't seem to bother him, though.

So anyway, I hit the minimum word could for today (the words I'm typing here don't count. D'oh!) which is good, but really, I should have been able to do much better. The first day of Nano you should be like a crazed monkey, just typing until you pass out, especially if the first day of Nano is on a weekend. I feel like I did not take advantage of the free gift of November 1st falling on a Saturday. Oh well, too late to do much about it.

For the record, the first few pages of the novel are kind of a young adult thing, because I realized that my son and his friend are going to want to see what I've done with the names we all came up with for my characters. I don't know if I'll be able to carry this through 30 days, and there are no clear plot ideas yet (unfortunately for me, I actually try to NOT think about my Nano novel prior to November 1st because that feels like cheating. But that means I don't have any idea what the hell I'm writing about for the first couple of days. We'll have to see how that goes.

Labels: baseball, nanowrimo

It's gross out. It's the kind of day where you feel like knitting a scarf because you know you're going to need it, possibly later in the day. It's the kind of day where you start to think about things like hot cocoa and fireplaces and how it sucks that your favorite fall fairs only come once a year because in bad weather, you either miss it entirely, or you go but you are miserable and wet and you regret going when your nose starts to run. Is the Bolton Fair worth that? Hmmmm.

I'm kind of in that space right now. It's not actually raining at this moment, but everything is soaking wet with no hope of it drying off. I think it's likely to start raining again at any minute, but I'm not a meteorologist, now, am I? They have not called to cancel Junior's baseball game, so it puts a major cramp in any plans anyway. I liked the first week of fall ball because his game was at 9am. It didn't occur to me when we signed him up that afternoon games would totally screw up my fall fair schedule.

P.S. Added my Twitter feed over there on the right. I wish I could figure out how to make it be any color other than that shade of blue. I may have to use something else to post it, like from Twitter directly. There's a thought. I think it might be time to redesign the whole site anyway...

Labels: baseball, fairs, fall, weather

Had fun at the North Leominster Little League annual banquet last night. It would have been fun anyway, but Junior getting 2 trophies plus a sponsor-supplied City Championship sweatshirt (thanks, Piper Electric!) was really icing on the cake. No, wait, the icing on the cake was winning a $50 Il Forno gift card during the raffle portion of the evening.

Junior had a great year. Can't say what next year will hold - there are a LOT of really good players in his age group, but they can't take the glory of the 2008 season away from him! Hopefully, he won't pull an "Uncle Rico" and spend the rest of his life dwelling on it, though... if I go 4 wheeling with my boyfriend and break something and ask Junior to take care of my grandchildren Napoleon and Kip, you have permission to shake me.



(So that raises the question - what happened to Napoleon and Kip's parents that they were living with their grandmother? Not that it matters - it's still one of the single greatest movies of all time. Somebody go build me a cake or something.)

Labels: baseball, movies

Junior plays in the City Championship for Little League Baseball tonight. I think it would be REALLY cool if they won. I mean, who doesn't go into these things hoping for a win. I've never been on a team that won a championship. Thinking back to my Lassie League days, I was on the team that got stuck with all the strays. There was one girl who quite literally could not figure out how to swing the bat. What's weird is that I can totally see the faces of some of these girls in my head, and we're talking about not seeing them for 30+ years. Just as long as you don't ask me their names, we'll be good, I think.

Thanks to everyone who donated to Junior's Jimmy Fund fundraising efforts, whether in person or on the Jimmy Fund website. You people rock, seriously. North Leominster Little League had 4 teams playing in the tournament (at various levels) at raised a total of $15,000. I think that's very cool. I should not be hitting you up for anything here in the foreseeable future. Wait, no, I think I'll start accepting pastry donations. Please, help support the, uh, American Pastry Association, with your kind contributions of pie, cake, danish, brownies and cookies. The APA is a fine and worthy cause, and, um, fresh, homemade pastry (or one of those big danish rings from the Dutch Kitchen) is greatly appreciated. Remember our motto - The APA: Fill Our Your Piehole!

Labels: baseball, food, fun, pie

Finally got Junior's Team added to the Jimmy Fund web site (the manager is supposed to do it, but our league didn't, so I took matters into my own hands).

http://www.jimmyfundevents.kintera.org/littleleague/laferriere

I have only a few days before the donation deadline for physical checks, but you can also use a credit or debit card to donate on the official Jimmy Fund website and they'll handle everything for you.

I set up a web page for donations, and if you're interested in seeing the most handsome second baseman on the planet, you can see a photo of him collecting outside of Wyman's last Saturday at the donation website.

I appreciate everyone who even visits the site to check out my kid. *proud parent*

Labels: baseball, charity, junior

Okay, I didn't lose macaroni salad, exactly, but I did create a whole post about macaroni salad, and when I went to view BDT, there was no mention of macaroni salad anywhere. Not even a whiff of it. So what, now I have to type it in again? That's a lot of work just to dazzle you guys with nonsense. Let's not even count the minutes spent pressing the spell check button and correcting all the errors.

I believe I started off by mentioning that Junior's baseball team won their second game last night with a more reasonable 7-5 final score. Not that 28-4 wasn't fun. Except it wasn't, really. Last night's game was really fun to watch because the teams were so evenly matched. Quite frankly, I was shocked that we won. Based on the first couple of innings, we didn't, but we really pulled it together at the end.

So the macaroni part of the message was related to me bitching about the weather predicted for this weekend. I hate hot and humid (which should not be news to anyone here) and I said I would probably only leave the house to grill burgers and dogs. And then I asked you all to post your favorite/best/easiest macaroni (aka pasta) salad because I adore macaroni salad and I think it should be required any time you fire up the grill to have a giant bowl of pasta salad available.

I also requested recipes that were mayo based because I'm in search of the macaroni salad of my childhood, and while I "get" dumping a bottle of italian dressing on cooked macaroni, that's not what I'm looking for. Even though that's sort of how I'm kick starting the request:

1 pound cooked rotini
1 green pepper, diced
1-2 tablespoons of light mayo
1 bottle of Wishbone Russian dressing (MUST BE WISHBONE. It's dark red in the bottle)

Mix up the rotini and pepper with the mayo to sort of coat the pasta. This will help the russian dressing stick. Stir in the bottle of Wishbone Russian Dressing. Cool in fridge. Re-stir before serving. This dish is even better after it sits. Even Mr. Dump likes this one.

Labels: baseball, cooking, weather

Junior, who was selected to play on one of the Jimmy Fund 10 Year old teams from North Leominster played against one of the Leominster American teams last night. Final score? 28-4. It was a horrible, crushing win. At the top of the 6th the score was 28-0. The parents on both teams were completely subdued - even our kids noticed that their parents were no longer cheering for them. We all just wanted the whole thing to be over. Hey, we've been there at a game where our kids were stepped on like that. What I don't get is why the don't FORCE a mercy rule (if you're up by more than 10 runs after the 4th, the game is considered complete) or an inning run limit (normal season is 4 runs except for the 6th [final] inning). I thought I read on the District tournament site that there was a 5 fun limit. I guess that before the game the managers of the two teams playing get to decide if they want to enforce the limit and the mercy rule, and both managers agreed to play without one.

By the fifth inning, several of us were wondering if we should offer them a second chance to call the game, as their players just seemed so horribly sad and crushed, and as parents, we just didn't want to continue to torture them.

You know it's bad when we all started to applaud them whenever they got an out, just because we were happy for them. Totally involuntary reaction at that point.

So yes, we were very excited for the win, but nobody wants to see that kind of blowout, unless it's the Red Sox against the Yankees.

Labels: baseball, junior

Yes, yes indeed, gas hit a new high today. Thank you CNN. Did you not hear what I said yesterday? Am I just whistling into the wind over here? Sheesh, it's like a girl can't change the world just by writing about it and posting it to her website. I have 60-100 hits a day, are you telling me that one of those is NOT CNN? AP? The Leominster Champion? Sheesh.
Speaking of the Leominster Champion and champions in general, Junior's minor league team, Piper Electric, won the playoffs (North Leominster Little League) on Saturday, so their team will get to go to the cities in August. He's been playing baseball in that league for 5 or 6 years now (I keep losing count) and this is the first time his team has been this good. It was a really great group of kids who were a pleasure to watch. The team we beat, Valliere's, was a worthy opponent and my personal choice for the team to win if we couldn't.
I took a team photo after the game and gave copies to the three coaches. The sister of one of the coaches also took pictures that afternoon, and there's a 50/50 chance that the one I gave them will make the paper. I don't know which paper, but I'll let you know if it does.
p.s. This is kind of a test for people who actually read all the way to the end of one of my posts. I recently signed on with FaceBook. I don't really want to post my info out there for the universe to find, because I do like some level of privacy. If folks who also have a website "advertise" that they are on Facebook, how do you do it? Did you create a separate account for your website readers? Or did you find that people don't necessarily friend you even when you make the info readily available?p.p.s. At least one person from my blogroll sent me a note saying that she's in Facebook, but apparently she's got a hidden profile because I cannot find her to add her.

Labels: baseball, junior, websites

I was just reading Surviving Grady, and Red was talking about Youk's shiner. He said this happened because of a "warm-up toss from Scenic Lowell that got away".

Scenic Lowell. I am so stealing that. I will have to use that the next time Mike Lowell and I are in Johnny Rockets cleaning up gumballs.

Labels: baseball, Mike Lowell

Junior's Little League team finished the regular season in 2nd place. They had a bye the first round, which is cool, so we didn't have any games yesterday. This morning there was a [very very damp] practice, and their first playoff game will be Tuesday. Because of the strict pitching rules in Little League being twice as strict during playoff games, they let Junior practice pitching this morning on the off chance that they run out of the regular pitchers and have to start plucking people out of the lineup to finish the game. He's thrilled, but I'm thinking that it would not be a good thing if he had to pitch, simply because he's never done it before, and having the pressure of trying to pitch well in a playoff game...well, I'd just rather we not have to dip into that pool without more practice.

Happy Father's Day everyone! Enjoy all the dad-activities you have planned, even if the plan is to not have any activities.

Labels: baseball, junior, kids

I suppose someone has already come up with the idea of mom badges. They would work like girl scout badges - if you do something worthy, you get a badge to wear on your mom-sash. Or perhaps your mom-vest if you've earned a lot of them.

I get to wear the "Dying in the Heat Watching Little League Games badge."

Junior played on Sunday (he had to be at the field at 1:30pm for a batting practice before the game) and on Monday night. Even though it started later, so you'd maybe assume it would be cooler, Monday was definitely the worst of the two games, because at least on Sunday there was a breeze. Man, what a difference a breeze makes! I was seriously starting to feel a bit panicky last night about how overheated I was getting. I was pulling the ice packs out of the little cooler I had and was applying it to my neck and wrists, just to keep things cool.

So I grant myself a mom badge today (it's lovely, it's got bleachers with those wavy heat lines coming off of them with a background picture of a baseball.) Anyone else earn one the past few days?

Labels: baseball, junior, kids, mommy

I'm more than a little bummed the past couple of days. (What day is this? Saturday? Okay, that's good.) Thursday night at Junior's Little League game he hit a GRAND SLAM, the first in his life (hell, he hasn't even hit a home run before now) and I did not capture the moment on film. Or on computer chip. For the first time, I'm REALLY mad that my good video camera is broken and that I haven't been able to replace it. I mean, what if he never hits another grand slam? My parents weren't able to make the game and I won't be able to share the moment with them. And trust me, they've been to enough games where we've all had to say "good try" to him because prior to this year his mad baseball skillz were, well, lacking. He had none. He had a lot of heart and loved to play, but well, never quite pulled it off. He couldn't hit and he couldn't catch. But now, he hits everything and his glove is a baseball magnet. (In addition to the grand slam he also hit a double, for 5 RBIs on the night) I think you should all put him on your fantasy baseball watch list cause he's gonna rock the big leagues.
But I can't show it to you because I don't have a video camera. Grrrrr.

Labels: baseball, junior

Way to go, Buchholz. We'll try to give you a little room, and not be too harsh if you falter a bit in your next start, but we are looking forward to VERY GOOD THINGS from you. Okay?

I'll even forgive you for being called up so that there was no chance I would see you start at my first Pawsox game yesterday. (Holy crap, what a great place to see a game. Even though we got creamed by the Scranton Yankees. Even though our seats were in the middle of the row and the people on the ends didn't have a firm grasp on the art of letting people by.) Next year we will definitely grab more tickets earlier in the season. And I can't say that the fun of the day didn't have anything to do with the family we went with - thanks P, L, A and C for a lovely day!

Junior (and the other two boys) got the Pawsox team baseball cards, so we have the Buchholz card front and center today.

Labels: baseball, junior, Red_Sox

I told you we had good seats! Actually, when we got the tickets we assumed we were in the 6th and 7th rows. However, when we got there we realized the rows started with C, not A, so we were in the 4th and 5th rows.

So that was two Sundays in a row we went to Spinners games. What the heck am I going to do *this* Sunday, now that it's a habit?

In non-baseball chatter, anyone doing anything fun for the 4th? We're going to just roll out of bed late, fire up the laptops and the grill, and relax. I suppose if I were really awesome like Chuck (http://flickr.com/photos/plastereddragon/) I would have planned a day out taking photos, complete with maps, GPS and a field guide to small bugs and flowers. Maybe I'll just take more photos of my feet, as they are creepily very popular and got a lot of people into my photo stream. (My foot picture is actually of gumballs, with the feet used as a reference for the size of the container.) If I'm going to do that, I'm going to have to put a new coat or two of nail polish on my toes. Too bad I don't own white and blue, I could make little flags!

Labels: baseball, feet, holidays, photos, summer

We attended out 2nd Lowell Spinners game in as many weeks (actually, more like a week because they were both Sunday games) with great GREAT tickets right behind home plate. I mean, right behind home plate. I will post pictures later, but you brave souls not afraid to go look at my flickr account will see a couple of them now.

We ended up sitting next to 5 players from the opposing team, the Tri-City Valley Cats, a single A affiliate of the Houston Astros. They were all pitchers, and they were sitting in the stands next to us with clipboards and radar guns. They were SUPER NICE GUYS given that they were "the enemy" and I swear, if the one who talked to us the most will be my favorite ball player if he ever gets called up to the majors. Mr. Dump tells me that based on the fact that they were just drafted and are already in the single A Penn League team, they are fast tracking up. I will have to find out their names so I can set up Google Alerts to tell me if they are ever in the news.

My heart belongs to the Boston Red Sox, but it can't hurt to have a favorite National League team, right?

Labels: baseball, Red_Sox, weekend

Hi kids!

Just popping in with a quick one so you won't think I've fallen off the roof or anything. Up to my armpits in stuff to do, and BDT has suffered greatly. Let me just share with you then, that in the past couple of days I have gone to Canobie Lake Park, a baseball jamboree for a league we aren't in, our final playoff game, a Lowell Spinners game, in addition to doing laundry, mowing the lawn and grocery shopping.

I assume eventually we'll get into the "lazy" days of summer, but so far, no go.

Junior started camp today, so we have that routine to get used to. He's already left something behind; I wish we had set up some kind of pool on how many days in it would take for him to not bring all his stuff home. We also could have set a value as a tie-breaker. The item left behind, his water bottle that you put in the freezer overnight, was worth about $4. So, because I didn't have a pool set up, I can official say I won!! My prize? Finding something else to freeze to send with him tomorrow because it's going to be 95 flippin' degrees.

Labels: baseball, camp, summer, weather

We had baseball games on Saturday and Sunday this week. The difference between Saturday's sauna game (I thought I was going to pass out at one point - I can't imagine how the boys in their polyester uniforms and knee socks handled it as well as they did) and Sunday's wearing-three-layers in the drizzle game was staggering.

Interestingly, the IFO (because after a minute it was no longer a UFO) incident happened on Sunday, when it would have seemed more appropriate for the hot day.

We were standing, watching the game, when suddenly we saw a "balloon" take off from the neighborhood behind the ball fields. We quickly realized it wasn't a balloon, but more of a flying donut with strings or something hanging off of it. I decided (and others agreed) that it looked like a flying pool toy - our assumption being that someone had a helium tank and had filled up an inflatable pool ring with helium, turning it into a balloon.

What an odd site. I would have killed to have my camera. Or to be on hand when the thing finally landed somewhere and people have to figure out how they ended up with a pool ring on their roof.

Labels: baseball, summer, toys, weather

8:00am. That's early on a Saturday. Hell, it's early on a Tuesday. Our team had the 8:00am practice slot today, so off we went, coffee in hand. It was much warmer than I'd expected, given how chilly it was during the game last night. It was actually a great morning to be outside playing baseball. I just wish 8:00 happened a little closer to 9:30am.

By the way, there's a project called "24 Hours of Flickr" and anyone who wants can upload a picture that they took on 5/5/07. The Flickr people are going to look through all those photos (oy!) and put the best ones into a book. I am not nearly as good as half or more of the people using Flickr, but I'm getting better. This photo was my entry, because I was thinking to myself that baseball is a huge part of many people's lives this time of year. And there's something about seeing an empty ball field that just looks sad, somehow. Now I know that later in the morning, this was a bustling spot, but not at 8:00am.

My two backup photos, one of a glove and one of my flowering crab apple, are available on my Flickr page (click my name below).

Labels: baseball

I'm a teeny bit annoyed right now, because I didn't get to use the camera at all today. This was not the most relaxing day, can I just complain about that. Some woman I don't know was talking to me in the cafeteria yesterday, about how she's just as busy on weekends as she is at work during the week. It's just a different kind of busy. Today was a different kind of busy. We did grocery shopping, laundry, baseball tryouts, Target and Dick's Sporting Goods errands, picked up dog poop in the yard, dishes, more laundry, get the house picked up a bit because Junior is having a sleep over tonight. Oh, ya, his first sleep over.

So I finally sat down to eat something (I had chicken breasts, chicken stock, canned mushrooms (shut up, they work better in the crock pot) and cream of 'shroom soup in the crock pot all day. Served it over No Yolk egg noodles. It made me happy. The boys were eating something else and ended up asking for some of the chicken, and Junior even asked for seconds. I'm still stunned. But they are off playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and I'm finally sitting down at the computer. Ahhhh.

p.s. Baseball tryouts went great. I was terrified he'd be awful because he literally hasn't touched a ball since last summer. He more than held his own in there, and I was SO happy. And hey, when he had me hold his glove during the batting part of tryouts, a kid hit two foul popups into the bleachers and I held out Michael's glove to catch them. Everyone was actually cheering me the 2nd time it happened. In your FACE, other parents!

Labels: baseball, errands, Saturday