Thanks! It's a little too bright on the top - thanks to the gray - but we'll fix that next time. I love it!

Love the hair, zenkitty. Is very frabjous.

Callooh, callay, I chortle in my joy.

Frabjous is such a great word.

Zenkitty, great pics and great hair!

Had a really delicious and obscenely healthy dinner. Tom grilled a whole Mediterranean Sea bass on the grill, just with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper on it. Came out SO DELICIOUS. The fish was just creamy and delicately flavored and rich and YUM. I cooked up some red chard with garlic and shallot, red pepper flakes, balsamic vinegar, and pine nuts.

I just love it when a healthy meal tastes so DAMN good.

Nora, you're making my mouth water. I'm starting to think you, Tom and Deb should have a cook-off at the F2F.

I'm starting to think you, Tom and Deb should have a cook-off at the F2F.

We'd lose. BUT, we will be incredibly appreciative and voracious eaters!

(ETA: Jessica would also outcook the holy hell out of us)

It's funny, we approach cooking in different ways. Tom tends to look up recipies, measure stuff out, and apply a given technique very carefully. Which is why he is also an excellent baker. Me, I sort of do some of this... maybe a bit of... that.

Lovely hair!

We'd lose.

Nu-uh, we'd all win! And definitely add Jessica to the mix, we've got so many talented cooks on the board it's a shame not to get them all together and see what we end up with.

Whoa, Zenkitty is a hotsy totsy. Gorgeous hair too.

We played today after all, though it was an odd practice game where we could use the outfield at all. Anything hit to the outfield was an automatic single.

After all my stress on the subject, it turns out that Triple-A wasn't all that different from Double-A. Emmett picthed an inning. He was a little rusty at first and couldn't find the plate, but he bore down (as he usually does) with men on base and struck out the last two batters. He did a real good job at catcher of controlling the baserunners. He was a little tentative at the plate today, but walked and scored, struck out, base hit and came around to score and popped up. So really he was hitting .333 with an on-base percentage of .500 and had two runs.

We pitched well, and were pounding the ball into the outfield, but had many mental lapses that allowed at least four baserunners to score from third on misplays. Frustrating.

Still, it was good to go out and just play some baseball.

Still, it was good to go out and just play some baseball.

The pure simple truth of this statement cannot be exaggerated.

Which leads me to say -- I feel so betrayed. Very, very seriously.

I think all y'all know how I feel about baseball, and, specifically, the Reds. The game is in my blood -- the *team* is in my blood. Baseball is the first sport I ever understood, because my dad started taking me to baseball games when I was 5 or 6, back in the days of the Big Red Machine. It's the first sport I understood, thanks to my Dad's penchant for taking me to Reds games when I was 5 years old (back in the good old days of the Big Red Machine). I played softball for close to 10 summers in a row, because it was the closest thing to baseball a girl in my part of southern Ohio was allowed to play back then.

The Reds are my team. Even when they suck hard enough to alter the jet stream, I love them.

So perhaps you'll understand my feeling of betrayal, of revulsion, at this news: [link] .