Thursday, April 06, 2006

Bye Bye Long Weekends; Flutter Mode; Fantasy Baseball

Currently Reading: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Well, my 3-day weekends are coming to an end at work. Fortunately it's only temporary and for mostly good reasons but still, I'm going to miss having that extra day off. It was always nice to have at least one day a week to throw away; one day in which I didn't owe my time to anyone or anything.

One of our groomers was promoted and transferred to another store. That leaves us with just the grooming manager and a groomer-in-training. That, alone, isn't TOO bad. With a slight juggle of the schedules I'd still get my 3-day weekend. The problem is that the groomer-in-training is going BACK to training for two more weeks leaving us with JUST the grooming manager. Yeah, you can see the problem.

Of course, AFTER those two weeks are up we'll get our groomer-in-training back plus he'll be qualified to actually groom unsupervised. Even better, he'll be bringing along another freshly graduated groomer so we'll have a total of THREE groomers at the salon. That's going to make things much less stressful.

But until that happens we all have to put in a few more hours to cover the gaps. At least it's only temporary. Most folks have to live with the standard 2-day weekend so really, this just means I have to work a normal schedule for a few weeks. Yes, I'll be normal for a while, or as close to it as I get :-)

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We've finally figured out a more positive way to describe CC's occasional wandering mind. Like most people, she gets a little fuzzy-headed when she takes allergy medicine. Same thing happens when she's just sleepy or over-worked. Her attention span just disappears and she jumps from topic to topic. It's not unusual for us to be out shopping and she'll be talking about one thing then stop mid-thought and turn and walk towards some item that caught her eye and start talking about THAT instead.

"So we were talking at work and Teresa said that -- look at that blouse? Won't it go great with the skirt I have?"

It's hard to describe something like that in a positive way. Usually you end up limited to saying someone is flaking out or worse. But not anymore. If this happens to you or to someone you know and you want to make it a more positive thing, you can call it "flutter mode." That's right, just like the butterfly, that person's thoughts are fluttering around, seemingly without pattern but actually concealing an intricate flight plan.

There. Doesn't that sound MUCH better? :-)

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I've been playing fantasy baseball and doing rather well at it. I'm playing in on two sites. At the first, you key in serial numbers from baseball card packets and you're given a choice of 4 players. You have to pick one to add to your team or decline all four. So far I've been lucky there. I'm ranked 5656 of 20,000 or so and I'm currently tied for first in my league. I'm not high up enough to actually qualify for prizes (except for random drawings) but still, doing pretty good so far.

In the other game you have MUCH more freedom to choose your players. You start off with 30 million dollars and you have to build a team. As the season goes on, a player's value goes up or down depending on the stats so it's a bit like playing the stock market. Buy low, sell high, improve your team. I've got two teams over there. The first one just got bumped from its top spot. I've been in first place ever since the start of the season but my pitchers aren't spaced out that well. They all play pretty much the same time in the rotation so I get huge surges of points then I have to wait a few days. That's what's happening now. I'll be back on top in no time though :-)

The other team I set up with ONLY players from Japan (and one Korean because no Japanese players were available for the position). That team was doing ok at the start of the season. They were sitting in the middle of the pack but then our second baseman got hurt and is out for a month so no points from him. I decided I'd better trade him for someone active. Juggled things around a bit and picked up the catcher from Seattle. DAMN has that made a HUGE difference. This guy is hitting like crazy! In one day I went from 16th to 5th. I'll be on top in THAT league in no time too :-)

Overall, I'm ranked 16,905 of about 150,000. What's cool about this one is that I'm not paying any money for a bigger budget or more trades. I'm just going by which players I like and can afford and just having fun with it.

Of course, as the season goes on, chances are I'll slide in the rankings. The players I pick tend NOT to be the ones who juice up so while they may put up decent stats and good averages, they'll always fall short in home runs which is where you get most of your fantasy baseball points. I know, the system sucks. If home runs were REALLY that important in baseball the San Francisco Giants would have won last year's World Series instead of Chicago.

Since there's no money riding on any of this, I can pick who I want and see how they do. It's my team, I can run it how I want to :-)

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