Bill Roper's Journal

I had some plans for today. Then the fence fell down again.

The wind today wasn't *extremely* strong. But the section with the gate with it had already taken damage and had been propped up, so today it came down and ripped the fence section loose from the intact corner post, making a complete mess of it. I managed to lift it back up into position, got K to bring me a 2x4 from the garage and propped it up.

That lasted for maybe half an hour. Then it fell down again.

So I found a second 2x4 and propped the fence up again. It is still standing.

It is *nothing* resembling stable.

I now have an appointment with one company to come give me an estimate on fixing this mess tomorrow. I have calls out to three more companies to get estimates in the hope of being able to do some comparisons. Whatever happens is not going to be cheap.

Meanwhile, the new TV is supposed to be delivered *sometime* tomorrow. The website had been showing a 3-7 PM delivery window, but that information is no longer there, so I'm assuming that they could reschedule the delivery for almost any time in the day.

Gretchen just asked if 7 AM was a possibility. Probably not, but I'm told that I'll get text alerts on my phone about all this tomorrow.

Probably at 7 AM.

This means that the kids and I will be moving the existing TV off the existing stand shortly to make room for the new TV.

Right after the Padres vs. Dodgers game ends...

Major League Baseball wanted to make things really difficult for the Wild Card teams by forcing the bottom two wild card teams to win two out of three games on the road. As usual, MLB is not getting the results that the home office expected.

The Astros (AL West winners) and the Orioles (top AL Wild Card) have now been eliminated with two successive losses. Oops. The Padres (top NL Wild Card and what I referred to as "the team no one wants to play") swept out the Braves, which was the "expected" result. The only series to go to a third game will be Brewers v. Mets.

Last year, it was the Wild Card Rangers over the Wild Card Diamondbacks in the World Series.

I await the next bit of jinking around with the playoffs by the MLB home office to try to make things "better". Sheesh.

After yesterday's great burst of offense, the Cubs had much less offense and lost to the A's 4-3, although Ian Happ did manage his second homer of the game off the A's excellent closer in the bottom of the ninth. The solo homer in the ninth would have been much more impressive if the Cubs hadn't been trailing by *two* runs though.

But an old friend and coworker joined me for the game, the conversation was good, and there was a lot of good defense.

Just not as much offense as required.

The Cubs are six games out of the last wild card slot in the NL with 11 games left and needing to pass two teams to get in. This is not an enviable position except as compared to the Cardinals, who are *seven* games out of the last wild card slot and needing to pass three teams, those including the Cubs...

I suppose it was a good baseball game tonight. The Cubs played tremendous defense and hustled on the bases as they built a 3-0 lead over the Pirates through the first seven innings. But even though he only had around 90 pitches, it was time for Taillon to leave with the top of the order coming up.

And the reliever proceeded to give up two dinks and a homer, allowing the Pirates to tie things up. And then another homer to give the Pirates a 4-3 lead, which they extended to 5-3 in the ninth. Ick.

Among the odd plays in the game was the odd 6-4-3 out at first, as Pete Crow-Armstrong beat the throw at second on the double play attempt, but Amaya could not manage the same at first. You don't see that often.

The dryer ran for a few loads and then gave up again. The current problem is almost certainly the thermal cutoff fuse, which is not an expensive part, but you have to disassemble the entire dryer to get at it which means this is going to be an expensive repair. If I had an appliance guy that I trusted around here, I'd consider giving up and paying to get it fixed, but I don't.

So tomorrow morning, I am going to pay about twice what it would cost me to get the current dryer fixed and start over with a new one. And I am going to keep the dryer vent clean, including finding someone to run the vent in a better way than the builder did.

In other news, the Cardinals have lost catcher Willson Contreras to injury again, as he was hit by a pitch while batting that broke the middle finger on his throwing hand. It's definitely being one of those years.

In better news, I got another song mixed down today while waiting for the load of towels to not dry.

I had some hopes for the Cardinals baseball team a month ago. And then they fell apart again.

The manager, Marmol, and Mozeliak are clearly not on the same page. This is the third time in a row this has happened, which is distressing. Shildt got fired in the offseason for apparently not being on the same page with Mozeliak, while we are now seeing Mozeliak repeat what he did with Matheny before firing him, which is to take toys away from the manager to prevent him from misusing them.

Clearly Jordan Walker was brought up to play in the hope of sparking some life in the team.

Equally clearly, Marmol had no intention of playing him against right-handed pitching, despite his career splits being better against same-handed pitching. (Don't count on that holding up forever, but still...) And if Marmol wasn't going to play Walker, then he needed to be at AAA getting at bats. We saw this with Kolten Wong under Matheny.

Marmol seems to have handled the relief staff pretty well, but my usual assumptions give credit to the pitching coach when things are going well and blame to the manager when they aren't. This may be unfair. It may also be accurate (as I remember Dusty Baker with the Cubs).

The whole situation is not helped by Goldschmidt looking aged and Arenado looking middle-aged at best.

This team needs a reset.

And that will have to wait until next year.

In the meantime, I understand that Skip Schumaker will be available...

I was down in the studio in and around laundry today (still got to go down and retrieve the towels!) playing with some tracks that I had done a quick mix on earlier so that I could send them to a friend. The quick mix wasn't bad, but it was time to look at it a bit more critically.

The first thing I realized was ..that I wasn't really happy with the sound of my guitar. That track was a direct in from the Taylor ES2 system and it was sounding thin. Pretty much everything that I'm using in terms of plugins at the moment is from Universal Audio and I had thrown the Hitsville EQ on this. It wasn't being a good choice.

When in doubt, try to learn from the experience of others. So I opened up the search engine and asked for suggestions on EQ for the Taylor ES2 system. A bit of poking around found a number of reasonable suggestions, one of which was to try the Pultec EQs. I pulled the low and mid-frequency Pultec EQs onto the track, fiddled with them a bit, and the sound was improved substantially. Yay!

EQ games followed with my vocal until I got it sounding better, as I picked up a bit of low end that had vanished into the ether. We'll call the EQ adjustments good for now.

I want to look at the reverb settings, because I'd thrown everything into a single reverb field, which is probably suboptimal. But that will be tomorrow's project, having saved today's work into a new session.

In the meantime, the Cardinals have swept the Cubs in today's doubleheader, so that will make up a bit for the doubleheader that the Cardinals dropped to the Royals a few days ago.

Now, we just need the Brewers to lose some games...

That was quite a baseball game.

It was the second game between the Cubs and the White Sox at Wrigley. The Sox got out to an immediate lead, as the first batter homered on the first pitch. The Cubs tied it up, but then the Sox got six singles in one inning and scored four runs to take a 5-1 lead.

The Cubs scored a pair and then later scored three more runs to lead 6-5.

This lasted one pitch, as Paul DeJong hit the first pitch of the next inning out of the park to tie the game. That's how it remained until the bottom of the ninth when Mike Tauchman hit a line drive homer to center field that I would have sworn would fall short, but it didn't, and the Cubs won 7-6.

It was a very full Wrigley Field. :)

I went down to Wrigley Field today to catch my second game of the season, which was Cubs vs. Padres.

Imanaga, the Cubs new Japanese pitcher, was tonight's starter and he was quite good, as he has been all season. So was the Padres starter, which wasn't what you would have expected checking out his ERA before the game started. The Cubs led 1-0 going into the top of the eighth. Imanaga had thrown nearly 100 pitches and was about to start his *fourth* time through the order, but he'd been pretty effective. And new Cubs skipper, Craig Counsell, is supposed to be one of the smartest managers in the league. So when he trotted Imanaga out to start the eighth inning, I was surprised.

The Padres brought on lefty pinch hitter Luis Arraez in the nine hole to start the inning and you might have thought that this would be a great time to bring on a lefty reliever. Counsell did not. Arraez promptly singled to right.

Lesser managers might have looked at the situation and said "Let's not put Imanaga in a position to lose this game." But Counsell looked at how Imanaga had retired the Padres leadoff hitter, Jurickson Profar, three times so far and figured that he was likely to see Imanaga retire him a fourth time.

He did *not* figure on seeing Profar hit a two run homer to give the Padres the lead.

Dobbin having departed the barn, Imanaga departed the game.

The Cubs managed to tie up the game in the bottom of the eighth and held the Padres scoreless in the top of ninth.

And then it started to rain, but not so heavily as to halt the game.

Which was good, because Busch hit the first pitch of the bottom of the ninth out to give the Cubs a 3-2 win.

It was a rather spectacular ending.

Elsewhere, in less happy news, Cardinals catcher Willson Contreras was injured by the backswing of a Mets batter and will be out from 6-8 weeks with a broken arm.

*sheesh*

The day started off with an alert from K, who let me know that Ruby the Dog had caught two baby critters in the back yard and had brought the now-poor-dead things into the house. The dog had been exiled to her kennel and I was informed that I am *still* the one in the family who is responsible for dealing with dead animals. After I got showered and dressed, I did so. I'm not sure what type of baby critter they were (I think they were squirrels, but it's hard to tell), but they were quite dead and will be departing with the trash next week.

Not enough house cleaning happened today. There was a brief moment when we thought that Sam and Bonnie might be coming over for an impromptu dinner, but they decided they were overtired, so we called off the Code Red.

But having bought three more new shirts, I did an extra load of shirts this week to get those into the rotation. Then when I was hanging shirts, I removed one shirt from the load to be dispatched to Goodwill. I expect to find a few more shirts to go in that direction as I move down through the closet.

I also did a bit of work for work this afternoon, digging into a problem that's been annoying me. I have finally concluded that I cannot solve this problem, because I am being betrayed by something in my setup, so I have fobbed it over the wall to the UI team to fix, since it's a bit of the UI code that I've been wrestling with.

The *best* thing I did today, though, was to put the new pair of insoles and arch supports into my shoes, the old ones having broken down. These cost half the price of a new pair of shoes, so if they do the job, they will have been a bargain. My feet felt better immediately, which is a good thing, because I've been dealing with a heel bruise or some such on my right foot for several days. I'll see how they do across the next few days.

Since I'm heading to Wrigley Field on Tuesday to *finally* see my first game of the baseball season, they'll get a workout then. :)