Luke’s Notebook

Argh! We lost again tonight, this time by a score of 12-10. I batted 1-4 with an RBI single, a run scored, and I had a triple or a homer get robbed by the right-center fielder! Seriously, he made a really nice catch on a fly ball I hit to right. But we ended up losing, which is a bummer. Our team has just not been quite as sharp the past several games. We’ve made a few rare defense errors, and our hitting seems to have been a little sluggish recently. Hopefully we’ll snap out of it soon! I also hope I snap out of my little funk soon. I’ve been hitting the ball pretty hard, though, so I think I’ll be okay.

Good news! The dish is G-O-N-E! It wasn’t easy, though, I’ll tell ya that. This morning, I realized that, hey, the box James and I created may be a bit too big for the type of shipping we were planning on, and it might end up costing $50 extra simply because it’s slightly too large! So we promptly took it down to the basement, did some measurements, and sawed off the top two inches of this cardboard box. The final dimensions were 48×28x10. Now, we needed to protect the materials!

James and I went to Office Max in Fairview Heights, where I bought three 195-foot rolls of bubble wrap. We went out to the parking lot and started wrapping up the dish and its accessories. We ended up using two complete rolls of bubble wrap, as we made sure everything was extremely well-protected, and then we added some padding in the box, just for added safety. We taped the flaps shut and, surprise, we had a decent-looking box! Everything fit perfectly. It wasn’t too tight of a squeeze nor was there a whole lot of empty space in the box. Methinks we did a good job.

From Office Max, it was on to FedEx Kinko’s, where we shipped this 59-pound package. The total price to ship it was $24 or something, which really isn’t that bad, considering the very large size and the relatively heavey weight! Anyway, we shipped it, and now the dish and the rest of the supplies are on their way to a new home, in Waco, Texas.

So that about does it! I have something else to write about, but since it’s an entirely different topic I’ll just make a separate entry.

Tonight, I batted a not-exactly-super 1-3, as I popped out, grounded out and hit a single. I also scored a run. We lost 7-4, though, and I probably would have scored twice more had I gotten on my first two at-bats! See, I’m still not hitting quite like I should be. I’m not playing awful; it’s just not as well as I’ve been the past several weeks. But, I won’t get too concerned about it, because these streaks come and go. I’ll just concentrate on watching the ball intently as the pitcher pitches it, I’ll try to keep a level swing, and that is usually a recipe for success when playing softball.

This morning, I set up a ladder on our back porch in order to remove the Direcway satellite dish that had been up there for some 17 months. I managed to unmount it and the hardware that was securing it to the roof. So it’s nice to have that off our back roof! Tomorrow, I hope to get rid of it for good. I listed the dish on eBay and the auction ended today, so I plan to FedEx the dish.

Right now, I have a huge box (48×29x12 inches) on my bedroom floor. James and I actually created it ourselves from a much larger box. The reason for that was it would have cost something like $25 to buy a cardboard box large enough to fit the dish and the accessories. On top of that, I would have to pay an additional $50 or so to ship the larger, oversized $25 box.

Well, I felt that would be a bit of a waste, and I noticed we had some fine cardboard boxes in the basement that some shower tub surrounds came in. I hired James to help me construct a box, and we successfully did it!!! Granted, it’s not the most pretty box you’ve ever seen, but I think it will most certainly do the trick. Tomorrow, I plan to stop by Office Max to purchase some bubble wrap, then I’ll wrap that sucker up and get ready to ship it off to Texas!

Exciting, no? I’m just happy to get rid of the dish. It’s another chore I can delete from the mental to-do list.

That’s all for tonight. Check back tomorrow!

I just realized that May 23rd marks the one-year anniversary (or birthday) of this online journal! It’s amazing to look back and see that an entire year has passed since I launched this. So much has changed! And, really, “we” have gone through so much in the last year. Both good and bad, it’s just incredible to look back at what has happened and what I have “covered” in this journal.

Before this blog/journal started up a year ago, I had several brief attempts at an online journal. I just had too hard of a time making myself stay current with them, and they would eventually kind of fizzle out. Actually, I would more often just end up taking them down once I realized that the last entry was already six months old or something. So I’m really happpy that I was able to stick with this for an entire year. I made 354 entries in 365 days, which nearly averages out to one entry per day. Not bad at all!

Obviously, I don’t cover everything in this journal. In fact, there is plenty that has gone on and will go on that will never be mentioned here. I always try to keep in mind that anyone can be reading this at any time. That means that at any given time, someone may stumble onto this site who is a close friend, a long lost friend, a sibling, a parent, an aunt/uncle/cousin/grandparent, a neighbor, a softball teammate, a FamTeam follower, a complete stranger, a client, a — well, you get the drift. I just remember that anyone can be reading this, so obviously there are plenty of details that it wouldn’t be wise to shout out for the entire world to read.

With that said, I still try to tell what I can, and I think I have found a pretty good balance. So basically, I write what I’m comfortable with writing. I hope it’s easy/interesting enough to follow. If not, that’s fine. Even if nobody ever read this, I would still like to have a journal, just as a way to document what is going on at any given time. Now that I’m at the one-year mark, I can pretty easily look back here and see what was going on at any given time.

So, with all that said, I have a new feature to introduce! If you haven’t noticed already, there’s a search bar at the top of this page. Type in a word, and you can search all 350+ entries made into The Journal! It’s pretty handy, so check it out! At the moment, it will not search for whole words. For instance, a search for “ban” will find “abandon,” “banana” and “ban.” Make sense? Good. Still, give it a go! Try a search or two.

By the way, I didn’t spend the entire Sunday working on The Journal. I also found time to go eat lunch at Breadeaux Pizza, to participate in a softball practice with the family, and to drive around for a little while, eating an ice cream cone and sipping on soda. It was a great day! Unusually hot, but still — a superb day.

That does it for this entry. Another work week begins!

This morning, the four oldest and Mom drove over to The Courtyard Buffet near the Mississippi River in order to meet up for breakfast with Mom’s Aunt Emmy and Uncle Dick. We had a really great time there, talking and eating. It was actually the first time we’ve been to this buffet, and I was really impressed. They have a big spread — doughnuts, eggs, French toast, sausage, bacon, oatmeal, Cream Of Wheat, fruit, hashed browns, Belgian waffles, omelettes — to name a few. The price is pretty nice, as I think it’s $6.99 a head, and it includes drinks, such as soda, orange juice or milk. Anyway, the food was delicious, and we had a really fun time getting to spend a couple of hours with Aunt Emmy and Uncle Dick. We have really grown closer to them the past couple of years. Uncle Dick is a retired electrical inspector, and he was an incredible amount of help to us when we were wiring our house.

Unfortunately, I had to spend several more hours today working on Dad’s laptop. Not that I mind fixing it; it was just frustrating that the problems were still persisting. Basically, his laptop would freeze randomly throughout the day, so he asked me to see what I could do about it. What’s tough is there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the freezing, which makes it extremely difficult to diagnose.

I ended up wiping the hard drive clean (formatting it), and then I installed Windows XP. My hope was that I would be able to “emulate” Windows 98 while XP was running, and that emulating 98 would enable Dad to run the software that he uses that is incompatible with Windows XP.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work. XP worked perfectly on his laptop, but the program just wouldn’t behave properly when it was being run through a “virtual” Windows 98. So I had to go back to the drawing board and format the hard drive again.

After that, I proceeded to, yet again, reinstall Windows 98 and started loading the drivers, transferring Dad’s file back across the network. His computer is now at the point where I think it’s working, but it’s just hard to tell right off the bat since the main problem was random freezing. I didn’t encounter any of that, but I only have the laptop for several hours. I’m praying that whatever I did set the laptop straight and that Dad won’t have to deal with the computer freezing anymore!

Well, I suppose I’d better head out. Thank God for Sundays!! What perfect timing. =)

The trip meeting went well this afternoon at Ryan’s! We were able to talk about several different ideas, and then later on this evening we’ve talked to Mom and Dad about different scenarios. Nothing is finalized yet, but we’ve got a couple of ideas, and we have definitely made some progress in the last 24 hours. Good deal!

I’m going to take this opportunity to go ahead and get to sleep at a decent hour, instead of 1:00 or 2:00. Though a little earlier would be nice, midnight is a pretty decent hour to get to bed, relatively speaking. So, I’m going to go ahead and stop typing so I can start sleeping.

Tonight we played softball at 8:30. Our hot hitting seemed to continue today as we scored 13 runs in five innings and ended up short-gaming the other team.

I batted 1-2 tonight with a fielder’s choice, a walk and a two-run triple. I ended up on base all three times and I believe I scored twice. So that’s encouraging, that my hitting has improved this week. I would still like to be doing a little better, but this week was certainly an improvement over last week’s performances!

The past 15 minutes or so, it has really been storming hard here! We’ve had some very strong winds and hard rain, though it seems to have calmed down a little bit. We’ve also had a good deal of lightning, as well. But that’s welcome! After all, we just finished playing our last softball game of the week, and the weather was starting to get hot anyway, so bring on the cooling rain! Good timing.

Well, tomorrow, Paul, John, Mark and I plan to go out to lunch at Ryan’s Steakhouse in order to discuss some trip ideas. I’m looking forward to it! Who knows what we’ll end up deciding? Either way, it’s exciting!

What happened on Wednesday? Well, to be honest, nothing too exciting! It was mostly work — scoping depositions, editing videos — and then in the evening, I was tinkering with my dad’s laptop, as the brand-new hard drive arrived via FedEx and I was able to install it and start restoring things for him.

Lately, some of us older guys have, yet again, been tossing around some trip ideas. In fact, tomorrow we’ll probably go out to lunch and have a meeting to try to decide when and where.

Speaking of trips, there is something coming up that has won my attention. In late June, some of our cousins are going on a weekend float trip down the Meramec River in Missouri. They’ll be camping and then spending nearly an entire Saturday canoeing down the river. I heard about it on Sunday, and I have been really interested in it! Since it’s camping and renting a canoe, it’s not too expensive at all. The campgrounds are an hour or hour-and-a-half away from here, so the drive wouldn’t be bad, either. I’ve been talking about it with some of the fellas, because it’s something that I think would be lots of fun!

Well, we have a softball game in a couple of hours. I’m going to get going and see what I can accomplish in the next little bit.

Hi again! It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it? It’s actually a bit warm as it’s only 8:30, but hopefully it won’t end up being too hot today.

Last night, our softball team had just a spectacular game, as we short-gamed one of the best teams in the gold league, Demo’s, 14-4 in six innings. Our team exploded for nine runs in the first inning, and we just never really gave them a chance to get in the game. What a way to rebound from the past few games! We played one of our ugliest games on Monday, and yesterday we waste no time in snapping out of it. Way to go, guys!

By the way, I batted 1-2 with a single, a sacrifice fly and a fly out. I also scored and drove in a run.

It’s very nice to be back to our winning ways. Let’s hope we can continue this on Thurday!

Well, it’s actually starting to get quite hot in here, so I’m going to go make sure the air-conditioner is on. If it is, I think I’ll turn on the ceiling fan in my attic room here, because — phew — it’s stuffy already!

Guess what! I got a hit tonight! Yes, sir! I broke my week-long hitless streak tonight with a single to the right side. Unfortunately, I only had one hit in four at-bats today, so I could have done better. We ended up losing 14-9, and it was, quite honestly, one of the ugliest games I remember us playing recently. We made many silly defensive mistakes, which is really out of character for us, since we typically have very smart and solid defense. Oh well. Thankfully, the way we played today is out of the ordinary and not the way we play day-in and day-out!

By the way, you probably notice the new Flash animation at the top of the page here. It’s something I whipped together in SwishMax. I wanted to have some sort of graphic or something, so I got to work. I think the end result is pretty nice, as I have that animation that turns into “The Journal” as the title. By the way, the “J” in “Journal” is supposed to be a feather — or a quill, if you will. Did you recognize it as that on your own? Or did you just not realize it? Or do you still not think it is one? Whatever the case, let me know! =)

That’s it! Have a fine night!

Today was a really fun Sunday! Around noontime, the family drove to Belleville, where a surprise birthday party was held for my Uncle Dan, who will soon be turning 40. We had a fun time there, eating lunch and talking with relatives. While there, Paul and I talked with my cousin Dan Dalechek (different Dan, mind you) and his wife, Joni. Dan said that he was going to be playing sand volleyball in the afternoon and asked if Paul and I wanted to join. We thought it would be fun, so we told him to count us in.

Around 3:00, we arrived at Longacre Park in Fairview Heights, where we met up with Dan, Josh and David Dalechek, along with Kelly and Christy (former Dalechek, but married Kelly). Later on, a couple other friends joined us, too.

Anyway, Longacre has three sand courts, and we decided to play on the middle one. We chose teams, and in a little while we were having fun, serving, bumping, setting, spiking and blocking. We ended up playing a good three solid hours of volleyball, I’d say — equaling 10 or 12 games to 15 points. I had a great time, but I was pretty worn out during the last couple of games! That’s a lot of volleyball to play anytime, plus when you’re running barefoot in the sand, it’s a little harder on the leg joints. But I had a lot of fun. I’d like to play sand volleyball again sometime soon! I don’t know when I last played on a sand court, but I know it’s been years — possibly even five years or so. I’m not quite as good playing sand as I am on a regular court, but I think I’ll adjust to it and be able to play pretty well on the sand.

That was the highlight of the day. It was definitely a good workout, and it was fun to spend time with some of our cousins.

When I got home, I decided to tweak some of the PHP code for my journal here. So if you’re a regular visitor/reader, you’ll probably notice the new links at the top that allow you to navigate to any given month. Instead of displaying the last 20 or 50 entries, I decided to have it divide by month, so as to keep things simple. So, check ‘em out! I hope it makes browsing a bit easier.

I suppose that’s it for now! It’s been a fun weekend, with Six Flags yesterday and all that we’ve done today. Monday is approaching, so it’s time to get back to business.