Kevin's Ramblings…

I guess all good things must end. Back to work this morning. Well, saying “back” sort of implies that I’m going somewhere, I’m not, well, other than the front bedroom that I use as an office.

I am happy that I am not working at 430 on Mondays any longer. That was fine in the summer months, but 630 is a much better start time. I’m still done at 3 which leaves me plenty of time to get stuff done before I have to venture off and do whatever I’m doing in the evening.

No baseball until Wednesday. It’ll be a busy weekend of ball though, hopefully the weather will be nice. It is typically dry this time of year, unless we get some snow. 🙂

The dogs will likely be disappointed that we don’t go to the park until after work. We could go at lunch, but we’d be rushed. I think we will go for a regular walk at lunch then the dog park after work. I will try to make that the normal routine.

So, welcome, back work, not that I really missed you all that much 🙂

Up early this morning… If this Fall is like others, in a few weeks, I will start to be able to sleep in again and will be dragging myself out of bed for work.

Baseball warm ups start at 830, game at 10. Not as cold as I had feared this morning, the cloud cover did its job and kept in some warmth, it is already (or still) 12C. Hopefully we can build on yesterday’s game and pound in a few runs. A win would be ideal.

After coaching, I zip home, maybe take the dogs for a walk and then head back to umpire for 3pm. Will be good to get back on the field for that as well.

I will also take the dogs to the park but need to wait until 645 or so when the sun starts to rise. Gotta get them their daily excercise and get myself some as well. After ball, I might catch some football so it looks like it is a sports day. The Patriots are in Buffalo to play the the Bills. Buffalo has reinvented themselves this off season. It is too bad that taking in a game isn’t possible, at least their games are covered on tv.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Babe Ruth Fall Ball has finally, officially start for me. I’ve attended a few practices but the double header I was supposed to be at before I went to Ontario was rained out. I missed a few games when I was away, although th had rain as well and one game was rained out in the 4th, so that’ll be made up.

Anyway, we played this afternoon at 5pm. It was a good game, pitching was good, defence was solid but our offence was lacking. We drove in two runs in the first and then went dry until the top of the 7th. We ended up losing by a final of 7-3, not a bad game at all.

We are out again tomorrow morning for the early game, starts at 10am which means we need to be at the diamond for 830, I’m sure the boys will look be that now that they are back in school. Oh well, I presume they’ll survive.

I also have to umpire tomorrow at 3pm. The umpires association can’t, for some reason, get umpires to fill our games. Not sue what the issue is. I don’t mind, will give me some cash. 

Tomorrow is also, sadly, the end of my vacation. Back to work and a regular routine on Monday.

I purchased a Nexus 6 Android phone a few months back. In general, it has been an excellent phone, but, I’ve had some odd issues with it.

Back in August, it was hanging on my pretty badly. It started suddenly and I would be willing to bet that some update in one of th apps caused th issue. I did a factory reset and reinstalled my apps and the phone seemed to be much better behaved.  Recently though, the battery has been dying far faster than I’d expect. It might have 4-5 hours of life with minimal use. Very odd.

The battery monitoring app said nothing was using the battery heavily. Well, somethi was for sure. I did a factory reset of it again and it has been much better. I didn’t reinstall a few Microsoft apps, essentially the Office Suite, Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I’m thinking it as Outlook, connected to my work Exchange account that was killing the battery.

I do have a work phone, so, I might as well use it and leave work stuff off of my personal device entirely. I recently upgraded to an iPhone 5s and it is a nice device, small when compared to my Nexus. There are a lot of good features, I really like the finger print reader, very handy.

So, thus far anyway, the battery issue on the Nexus seems to have been resolved. I have an app that monitors usage and another that turns off WiFi if I’m not in range of a known hotspot, same with BlueTooth. So far, so good.

I sort of felt like I was retired today. I was wandering around Chinook Centre for an hour or so, sort of aimlessly. Sort of like a lot of the older people who seem to do this on a daily basis. I’m only 20 years shy of retiring, or so. It was a relaxing day.

I still need to go to Walmart tonight at some point. I am running low on coffee. Running out would be nearly tragic. I also need to get a few other things, finish my grocery shopping. My place was just about out of food while I was away.

Back to baseball tomorrow. It seems like it’s been forever. We’ve missed a few games due to weather. We’ve had a lot of rain. It is supposed to be nice this weekend, so hopefully we will get in all of our games. We practice tomorrow. The long term forecast calls for above average temperatures in October. Not sure I will believe it, they can’t get tomorrow’s forecast right.

Well, only 4 more days off before I’m back to work. Gotta enjoy it.

I flew back to Alberta yesterday afternoon. I got into Toronto shortly after 1pm and took the subway and then a bus to the airport from downtown. It is a sweet deal at only $3. I had to change my flight, I was originally booked to return on Sunday. It was just over $200 to change the flight.  Well, the flights would naturally be more expensive, costs have gone up. Oil is through the roof and I’m sure jet fuel is way more expensive. Oh, wait…

Anyway, it was $200 to change the flight. The extra time that the dogs would have been in boarding would have been $300 or so, then, when you add money I would have spent in Ontario, I save a few hundred leaving early. All in all, I’m glad to be home.

Got in late last night. Nothing to eat in the house so I got a sub at Subway. It would have been 10pm before I could have gotten the dogs so they stayed over. It didn’t cost any more for them to stay. I picked them up at 730 this morning. I think they are happy to be back. I’m happy to have them back as well.

It isn’t raining so although they look tired out, I think we’ll go for a walk. The park will be too wet so we’ll just walk around the neighbourhood. I do need to hit the bank, so that’ll work.

I’m off until Monday. No real plan for the week. It will depend what the weather does. We do have a baseball practice on Thursday and a game on both Saturday and Sunday. I think we are still waiting for our first win, hopefully the weekend brings one.

I sold my Blue Jays tickets in about 8 hours after I posted them the other night.  It was a good experience all in all.  Pretty easy to add the account, very easy to post the tickets and no further work on my part.  I posted the tickets for $30 each, less a 10% fee so I expected $54.

I was paid for the tickets today, the funds were transferred into my PayPal account but it was $54 USD which converts to just under $70.  I was rather happy about it.

Now I will need to find something online that I want to buy so I can spend my PayPal balance.  That shouldn’t be too tough.  I could transfer the funds to my bank account as well.  The only issue is that will take 3-5 business days to transfer which is a little insane.  One would think that a transfer could be instantaneous.  Oh well, perhaps some day, it will be.

At any rate, the entire process was pretty straight forward.  Thanks StubHub.  🙂