Happy Hot August! Today, when Tom finished work, we ran some errands, including picking up my new glasses!
New computer glasses.
New bifocals.
Now my eyes get to go through more adjusting, but I hope this will help get rid of some of the eyestrain and headaches.
Then… I picked up new Ken fashion.
Kind of cool that most of this Ken-wear is made from recycled plastic.
That sporty jacket just lent itself to this shot.
“Hi, Ken!”
“Hi, Barbies!”
Nope, haven’t seen the movie yet, so no spoilers please. Baseball, not the movie, has been on my mind, so I hark back to my list of missing things that I blogged about in December ’22. I realized that I might have a photo of one of those missing items on a different website I used to curate a long time ago. I checked my Flickr album and there it was, shot in 2007.
I know we had this cup when we moved into this house in 2015, and I think I know how it went missing. At some point when several of us were going somewhere, maybe Christmas shopping, or maybe after going our separate ways after a big dinner, someone grabbed it from my cabinet to use as a “go” cup, and it never found its way back home. No big deal, except the cup has a little bit of history; it comes from the era when what is now Minute Maid Park, where the Astros play baseball, was then Enron Park, before the collapse of Enron and the scandal that ended in founder Ken Lay’s bankruptcy and trials before he died while awaiting sentencing in 2006. Ken Lay was a huge part of Houston’s history, and I know people who worked at Enron, including one who was developing something with Lay that would have been a massive success (I say this with confidence because when things fell apart, someone else unconnected to Lay or Enron had a similar idea and it resulted in a globally successful online business that launched in 2007).
The other reason this cup is part of my personal history is how and when I got it. After the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, you may recall that a whole lot of things shut down for a while, including large gatherings, for security reasons. A friend’s husband who works in the oil and gas industry often had tickets to events that he gave to clients, but since traveling and other activities were curtailed, he ended up with tickets to an Astros game and no clients in town to use them. So he and his wife invited Tom and me to attend an Astros game with them. Baseball wasn’t really my thing, but I was happy to go for their company, and I knew Tom would enjoy the game.
That game was the first time I’d really done anything after the attacks. I was doing contract editing at that time for a financial company, and the fallout to the financial markets put a stop to a lot of work, in my case, for several years. It felt SO GOOD to be out among people again. To be doing something that felt American and wholesome (as the old jingle says, “Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet!”) with my fellow citizens. It wasn’t that we forgot the national trauma we were experiencing, but we could remember that most of the world stood with us, supported us, and believed in us, reminding us to believe in the best of us. If I recall correctly, at the seventh-inning stretch, we saw a moving film tribute to the first responders at the tragedies in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.
The cup is gone, but the memory remains, and it marked a turn in my attitude toward baseball (I have deeply unhappy memories connected to baseball from the 1980s). The change in me didn’t manifest immediately, but I was reminded again of baseball’s power to heal when the Astros won the World Series in 2017. Houston was reeling from the effects of the Harvey floods in late August. When the Astros took that title in October, it was the first time they’d won the series in the franchise’s history, and they were the first Texas team to win it. The impact on Houston’s mood, and my own (as we began to put our home and property back together after being flooded), was immeasurably positive. We had something to celebrate, something to feel good about, something good, not tragic, that brought us together as a community.
To be continued…
So far this week, I’ve watched this DVD I bought sometime last year, the reboot of Sex and The City, ten episodes total. The second season of this starts streaming tomorrow, I think, though I don’t have whatever it streams on, as far as I know. I’d rather wait until the next DVD drops. Waiting between episodes of something usually means I forget about it.
I might have to wait a while to tackle this one, a 1971 offering from James Michener. It’s around 750 pages; that’s a lot of commitment. One of my characters needed something to read back in ’71, and I chose this for her. I figured I can’t know if it engages her unless I attempt it myself. (I know what I’m getting into, having read Michener in the past, though it’s been decades.) It was either this or one of the Russian writers, but the timing was good for this one, and I think the Russians might exhaust me. Will be reading this one in hardcover.
