The Red Sox play Seattle in their 7th game of the season and their first home game, and Dice-K could be the starting pitcher for that game. Since Ichiro leads off for Seattle then Matsuzaka’s first batter he will face in Fenway Park could be Ichiro. So this video is a great preview for the match-up.
If you follow the Red Sox then you know that they have done a lot to improve this season, adding some great starting pitchers and filling some gaps in the lineup. They have even improved the bullpen. However there is one area that has been a question mark, and that is our closer. We brought in several guys and the word has been that its up to them to earn the role in spring training. One of the guys they brought in was Joel Pineiro, and a lot of people have been scratching their head about him, because on paper he seems to be a pretty lousy pitcher. However this article suggests that he is much better then last years numbers suggest. After reading the article I am excited that he could be great as our closer. We’ll see how things pan out.
Looking forward to seeing the Red Sox in their first spring training game this evening against Minnesota. Go Sox!
Jillian and I have been married for almost two years now, and we have had lots of adventures over the past two years, and from almost all of those adventures we have lots of pictures. The other day we sat down at the computer and looked through all the pictures from the past two years and picked out 13 really good ones from all of the various adventures, and we are having them printed for us to put on our walls. I was surprised at what a good price you can order prints for. We uploaded our pictures to Walmart.com and ordered ten 5×7s and three 8×10s for around $12 total. We are buying frames and we plan to have a wall containing all of our adventure pictures. I’ll post the ones that we chose on the blog here this evening or sometime.
I have always thought that the downside of digital photos is that its a little bit of a hassle to get hard copies of the pictures. However I am now convinced that digital is all good. If all of our pictures had been taken on old style cameras then we would have spent hundreds of dollars by now having the film developed, and we would have had to pay at least as much to have them blown up to 5×7s and 8×10s. Blow ups of digital pictures come out better because the resolution is so high when the picture is taken, and you don’t have to worry about the picture being damaged.
My dream is that down the road we have hundreds of pictures on the walls of our house from all over the world. Every picture can be a reminder of a trip or experience that we had, and can tell a story. We have been so blessed to have so many such experiences in the two short years that we have been married, and we hope for many more like them.
On the side, we have at least four panoramic photos that we would like developed. I have been told that pixeloutpost is the only way to go to print pans, but it is still pretty expensive there. If anyone has any advice for printing panoramic photos it would be greatly appreciated.
I put together the video I took of Brad at Snowshoe Monday. If you enjoy things like awful wipe-outs then you will like this video. Brad performs one of the most beautiful landings off of a snowboard jump that I have ever witnessed. Check it out here on Google.
Brad, Mr Pete and I drove out to Snowshoe on Sunday night, and had an incredible day snowboarding on Monday. I think when we went to Beech Mountain a couple weeks ago i said that was the best conditions I had been in. That was far superseded by Monday. It snowed for a week and a half leading up to Monday, and there was over a foot of natural snow covering the county, and over three feet on the slopes. I have never been on powder before, but Monday we had an abundance. Down the center of the trails the snow was hard packed, but along the sides you would sink into the powder so it came almost to your knees. There were trails in the woods that you could skate through, and tons of neat features along the slopes. not only that but the place was empty, so at some lifts there were no lines at all, and on others the lines were less then 10 minutes.
This was the countryside on the way out there.
I had never been to snowshoe before, and I loved that place. We were on the slopes all day, never stopping to eat lunch or anything, and we didn’t even do half of the trails there. Everything we did do was a lot of fun, and the size and difficulty of every trail kept things interesting. I discovered that moguls are actually very enjoyable when they are not made up of mounds of ice that jolt you every time you hit them. All of their black diamonds had moguls and a lot of their intermediate slopes had moguls, and they were a lot of fun to tackle.
The powder is deep on and off the slopes
Another incredible thing about snowshoe was their terrain park. It was enormous, and each feature was enormous. I figured that I would give some of the things a shot, and tried some of them out, but most of the stuff there scared the crap out of me… which is good, because it gives me something really high to aim for. Maybe someday I’ll be hitting stuff like that. I did carve my first black diamond and built up the confidence to tackle any slope, so I should be able to keep up with any of my skier friends on future trips.
The potential energy depicted here is amazing. In another second both the snow butt boy and the camera man would be zooming down this slope almost to the lake far below.
The long and the short of it is that it was an incredible day snowboarding (as every day snowboarding this year has been incredible) and it was beyond incredible due to how incredibly incredible the conditions were. That was the long… the short is that it was incredible. The end.
Here is a great article about Murtha and Pelosi and how they are seeking to stop the troop surge: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021601792.html
Wolfpack won again today over Gardner web 8-0 to improve to 4-0 and I went out to see the game even though it was freezing out. Once again our pitching was lights out. I got to see Andrew Brackman pitch for the first time, and he was very impressive with 8 Ks in 5 shutout innings. Gillheeney and and Brown then came in and closed out the game with 4 more shutout innings.
Offensively we looked good too. For power we had two doubles and a homer and we played some small ball, with a stolen base and two sac flies. The guys were looking confident and patient. That is one thing that has really impressed me, is how patient they are. In four games the guys have 30 walks and the team OBP is 462. If they can keep that up then they will have a great offensive season.
Two things this weekend. First of all it seems that things have come together for snowboarding on Monday. We’re planning on going up to snowshoe, and i am really excited about that. Of all the places in the southeast it is the biggest, with 57 trails. It is very spread out so that none of the lifts should get too crowded, and it has been snowing all week and is supposed to snow all weekend, with Monday being sunny. Looks to be some great snowboarding.
The other thing I am excited about is fantasy baseball. With the season just around the corner I am full steam ahead studying for the draft. Last night I did a mock draft that was helpful because it lets you get an idea for where people are being drafted. I thought I did pretty well in the mock draft, and looking forward to the real thing. There are so many great players that emerged last year, it will be very interesting to see how things play out.
