Category: life

Buy me some peanuts and crack’er jack!

It is well documented that I am a HUGE fan of baseball. I am also a huge San Francisco Giants baseball fan.

Pick up any sports page in the past few years and you will know that my poor Giants have fallen on hard times. The once mighty team is barely a squeak on the baseball radar.

It’s tough. The big boys are off to a rousing 3-6 start. Starting off the season at the bottom of the standings, cellar dwelling has become the standard. That’s where they finished up last year.

I used to go to a lot of games with a good friend of mine. She had season seats up at SBC Park and it was a lot of fun. We have bombed out on CalTrain into the summer night to watch our team plenty of times. Hell, I even wrote a book about it.

A year ago, my friend gave up her season seats at the big club. Health issues and rising seat costs along with baseball depression at the hands of a struggling team forced her decision.

She invested that year in season seats for the Single A affiliate, San Jose Giants. It’s a little cheaper and a lot closer to home.

She is also a “host family” for a player. This is her third year being “mom” to a young player who makes max about $10k a year and needs a rent free place to stay for the season. It makes her happy. She gets to cluck over a twenty something kid, he gets to eat well and they both get to talk baseball with someone who really understands.

This year my friend approached me about her “grand plan” to buy up a whole row of seats in the section she likes at Muni Stadium. It is only five seats, but she began recruiting friends to pitch in on the seats in exchange for access to games. It makes her most happy to go to games surrounded by friends and family. So she did such good a sell job, I wrote her a check.

Tonight The Good Man and I get to go to the game as “season ticket holders” along with my good friend and bunch of other fun folks.

There is a whole different vibe in Single A ball. The players are young and hungry. They play for meal money and not much more. They *want* it. Humility is high. There are audience games between innings. The beers are only $3. Half price when the designated “beer batter” on the opposing team strikes out.

Tonight is the home opener for the San Jose Giants, last year’s California League Champions.

Oh, did I mention they are 5-2 so far?

Yeah. Things are looking good in the minor league.

Photo by Karen Fayeth

Inauspicious start to the week

As mentioned before in these pages before, I have become a full blown commuter, taking a train and shuttle bus to get to and from work.

It’s one of those “when it works, it works great” type of deals. To be honest, the whole thing usually just works. Easy. Since my company subsidizes the cost of using commute alternatives, I can ease my pocketbook from the pinch of $4 gas.

However, this morning was one of those days where it didn’t work. Oh, all seemed fine. I walked to the station. The train arrived on time. I climbed on. Hey, I even got a good seat!

Then I overhead the conductor on his cell phone. “Hit, huh? At Menlo Park? Ok. Delays of up to an hour. Ok, I’ll make the announcement.”

Ruh rho.

Yup. The train in front of us hit a pedestrian. And since dancing with a train never goes well, the whole operation had to come to a halt.

My train stopped at a station that was just far enough from both home and work as to be troubling. The conductor told us to get off and figure out what bus to use or whatever. Ugh.

With a cell phone on the last vapors of battery charge, I called a cab and paid an inordinate amount of cash to make it in to work about an hour late.

*sigh* All’s well that ends well.

In other, better, news, I’m happy to see in the ABQjournal that it’s official as of today, the New Mexico quarter is OUT. If you are in Santa Fe, there’s even a little ceremony.

Yay! I can hardly wait to have one in my hand! W00t!

We’re going big time, Oh Fair New Mexico!

Tastes Like Nuevo Mexico

I have been reading a book titled “Tastes like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home” by Eduardo Machado.

I picked up this little gem off the “new” rack at my local library. I liked the title. Plus I have a total fascination with Cuba. This passion in past years has been fueled by the movie “Buena Vista Socal Club” which I saw in the theater, and own and watch often. It’s an amazing movie.

What lay ahead of me in this book, Tastes Like Cuba, was not something I could expect. I was excited by the form the book took, discussing Cuba through the author’s memories of food. Each chapter ends with a couple recipes for the food just discussed (which is a really cool idea). It was like food porn, and since I’m a big fan of good eats myself, it immediately appealed to me.

As the book progressed, it went from mild interest to speaking directly to my heart. Eduardo goes through quite a transformation in his life. Born and raised in Cuba, at the age of 8, just as Castro took over Cuba, Eduardo was shipped out to Miami on the now infamous Operation Peter Pan flights. He went from a life of relative luxury and wealth, surrounded by his parents and grandparents, to being poor and parentless in a new country with the added responsibility of caring for his younger brother.

When his parents did finally arrive some months later, his father moved the family to Los Angeles, a wild and wacky place for a young, sensitive, creative Cuban kid in the 1960’s. He struggled to identify himself. He wasn’t a Chicano during the power and protest periods in LA. He was not a Caucasian American. He was something no one could identify, not even himself.

To add to this lost state of feelings, in America he couldn’t get the food from home, the tastes that made him feel whole. Through growing, becoming more of an American, and exploring his creativity, he found a dichotomy. A man without a country, without the touchstone of his family that turned out to be more dysfunctional than he’d ever imagined (his father boldly admits, to his face, that he never loved Eduardo. How’s that for a mind f*@k?), and without something to identify with, it sent him down a spiraling journey into low self-esteem and depression.

What finally rescued him was the theater. First as an actor, and then ever more successfully as a playwright.

He wrote plays about his life, his family, his darkest fears, the ugly parts, the pretty parts, all of it. And though it scared him senseless to put it all out there, he still did it.

I started thinking hard about why this book spoke to me so deeply. Now, certainly, I’m no exile from another country, but I, too, was raised in a very culturally deep place with food unlike anywhere else in the world. And yes, I miss the food from my home. Daily. Did you know you can’t find whole, fresh roasted Hatch green chiles in California? And forget it about Indian Fry Bread.

And I often feel misunderstood here in California. Culturally, artistically and all the rest. It was profound when I first moved and still is something of an issue, some ten years later.

But, much like Eduardo, it took me leaving my home to be able to plumb the depths of my own creativity. Living in California has become a means to help me learn who I am, why things matter to me, and to be able to write, paint, and photograph about them.

I am a woman of two places. Like Eduardo, I’ve learned to love them both, while being conflicted at the same time.

My transformation has been on a much smaller scale than Eduardo Machado. But I guess in reading his words, I wish I could just tell him, “I get it”.

Because I do.

Oh the beauty of the retail high…

About two weeks ago, I detailed my impatience in this post about how long it was taking to receive a brand new product I had procured, but the retailer seemed to mishandle my order.

After two phone calls. One nice, one in which I used the words “upset”, “angry” and “very frustrated” liberally, I finally got my package.

But true to Murphy’s Law, the ding-dang thing arrived when I was out of town.

That being said, it finally arrived. And it’s GORGEOUS!

What I ordered was a Sony CyberShot T200 in luscious red.

I have an old CyberShot that I have used and loved greatly for about five years. For a point and shoot, it takes really great photos. I have pushed the bounds of that little camera and it has stood up to the test. But it’s starting to show its age. I actually carry it with me every day and it’s great for that “just can’t miss” photo op. But the battery will only charge to about “23 minutes” which isn’t much, really, for a camera. I replaced the battery, but it didn’t help.

So this red beast is the new kid on the block. The coolest aspect? The gorgeous screen on the back. Not only is it glorious to look at, the camera is all touch screen controlled via this screen, and is surprisingly intuitive to use.

I only just got the battery charged and into the camera yesterday, so I haven’t taken but a few photos, but I already really love it. It’s an 8.1 megapixel (whoa!) and I bought a 4 gig memory stick for shockingly cheap on Amazon. This little camera won some awards for it’s design and I can see why. Tonight I get to play with it a bit as we are going to the Fan Fest for the San Jose Giants. I’ll share if anything comes out looking good.

New toy! New toy!!

Head out for the highway

Yes, Monday finds me back at my same gray walled office. Back to work, slogging through emails and working up my expense report.

All in all, the trip to Florida was a good one.

I’m glad to be home. It was a long haul on Saturday, hopping a couple planes and ultimately arriving almost two hours later than I was supposed to. But I made it and a really cute boy was waiting for me when I came down the stairs to baggage claim.

I didn’t sleep well on the trip, so was glad to sleep in my own little bed, and sleep I did. Woke up Sunday morning MUCH refreshed. The Good Man fussed over me and that helped get me right, too.

Back to “regular” work today. While making the drive in this morning, I was thinking about what made the Florida trip fun, and I hit on a thought.

I got to drive.

Now, don’t gave me that doggy head tilt look. Let me explain.

“Back in the day” living in New Mexico, one of my best stress relievers was to get in the car and drive. Not always with a destination, sometimes just driving, watching the white lines roll by.

Since I went to school in Las Cruces and my folks lived in Carlsbad, I had a LOT of hours in the middle of NOWHERE, hum of the tires as my companion.

I got a LOT of good thinking done during those drives.

Meditation. That’s really what it is.

Well now living here in a densely populated area, just getting in the car and going isn’t all that meditative. With all the traffic, it is stress inducing.

When I lived in Albuquerque, I could drive for a half hour in pretty much any direction and be OUT of the city, humming along at 75 mph, and letting the stress float away.

Here, I can drive a half hour and be ever more mired in humanity.

So I enjoyed the fact that, last week, I got some road time. The ride on I-4W to Clearwater Beach took about two and a half hours all in. It was a little densely populated around Tampa Bay and that stressed me, but had moments of a peaceful ride. It got really good when I got off I-4 and into the small roads winding through Clearwater and over all the causeways.

The trip to Cocoa Beach was only about an hour and was PERFECT for highway meditation. (see, I still can find NOTHING wrong with Cocoa Beach). SR-528E is pretty rural, away from people, not heavily trafficked on a weekday. The tolls do take a bit away from that trip, but even they are manageable. You get a rhythm of hitting the various toll plazas and you know they’ll be there (kind of like having to stop at a Border Patrol station…so it’s all good).

And during those two drives a lot of thinking got done. Some useful (i.e. where should I emphasize success criteria for my team this year), some not (i.e. why do so called “80’s” radio stations only play the cheesy “hits” like “Jump” (both Van Halen and Pointer sisters), and not the deeper cuts from bands like Depeche Mode or The Cure?).

Getting all that thinking done is healing. I find I’m in a better mood today than when I left. Like I’ve grown from my journey.

I sure wish I could more easily hit the open road from where I live to think things out.

Oh well, just another reason to miss my fair New Mexico.