Its a long Way to Tipperary...

Friday April 30th. Looking down the barrel of a 10 game home stand. Its been a few years since we've played a 10 game home stand. As a matter of fact, I don't ever recall one that long. I'm not all that sure how I'm going to fare with that long of a stretch. This is my 15th year on the crew. I was 36 when I started. If you do the math, I'm 51 now. I don't have near as much in the tank as I used to. I used to be able to work 6 or 7 games in a row, getting home after 11 every night, getting up early to be at work in the operating room at 7 AM and working all day and coming back to work another game the next night. I'd be a little tired after the 6th or 7th game, but I'd bounce back after a day or 2. Now, after a 7 game home stand, getting home every night late, and getting up to be at work at 8, after about the 4th night, I'm dragging butt in a big way. no getting up at 5:45 to go to the gym to work out. I sleep as long as possible, drink a lot of coffee (which I never did until just recently) and barely make it into to work. But at least we're starting on a Friday. I'm pretty fried by Friday afternoon, but this Friday was a nice evening for baseball, so I headed for City Island in a good frame of mind. It was going to be the same crew for most of this home stand, Doug, Izzy and me. Alan was working in Philadelphia all week and would be next week too, so his appearances would be limited to weekends. Frank was still working a lot of overtime and working on his new house in his off-time, so we won't see him for a while. So here we go. Friday night with all of the associated activities. Flat screen TV giveaways and of course, fireworks after the game. And Launch-a-Ball. So no early exit tonight. Not really that big a deal, though, since tomorrow is Saturday and I can sleep in. So away we go. opponent for this series, Altoona. They've been kicking our butts with some regularity this season, so I have no reason to believe it would be any different this weekend. if we could squeeze out one win, I'd consider that a decent series. Altoona is in 1st place in the division and is playing some good ball right now, and we haven't exactly been lighting it up. So as things got under way, we settled in to our seats. It being a Friday it was another flatscreens and fireworks night. I can't remember if I've mentioned it yet, but on Fridays they give away, every inning, a flatscreen tv. Pretty cool. And, of course, fireworks after. The boys actually played a good game, were only trailing 5-4 going to the 9th, but coughed up 2 runs in the top half and couldn't push anything across in their half. So we headed out to finish up the post game work. Of course, we had to work around the Launch-a-ball and then in the dark while the fireworks were going up. We've been fortunate on fireworks nights in the fact that the wind has been favorable on every Friday so far. A nasty wind that blows the debris back onto the field makes for a long night, picking up trash for another hour. But, again tonight, we lucked out. We finished up, had a beverage, and vacated. One of ten in the book. Back again tomorrow. Until then, later.