Because I am a great big copycat, picking this up from Dana Wells … the biggest shock to me on this is that out of only 794 songs on my iPod (I am VERY picky about what I add), none of the Beatles songs showed up but I did end up with three Mike Viola songs so that is good.

1. Up Periscope — Novo Combo
2. A Way To Say Goodbye — Mike Viola (with Inara George)
3. Northern Downpour — Panic! At the Disco (Actually, this may have been without the !)
4. Choice in the Matter — Aimee Mann
5. Dogmatic — Mike Viola
6. What I Won’t Give — Mike Viola
7. Till The Sun Comes Up Again — America
8. Long Time, Long Way To Go — Todd Rundgren
9. Don’t Touch Me There — The Tubes
10. Be My Yoko Ono — Barenaked Ladies
11. Childstar — Allee Willis
12. Good Times Are Here To Stay — “Dames at Sea” soundtrack
13. Overjoyed — Charles Grigsby, American Idol Season 2 semifinals
14. On the Willows — “Godspell” soundtrack
15. Pinky — Elton John
16. For You and I — 10CC (I still think this is ungrammatical but whatever)
17. Pulling Mussels (From A Shell) — Squeeze
18. Your Woman — White Town
19. Wannabe — Spice Girls
20. Spiderman — Moxy Fruvous

Remember back in the day when these “tubes” used to be called “lifesavers”? It was still early enough in life by about a year or two (for me) that I still needed a floatie to not sink to the bottom of what was, approximately about 3 feet of water there in beautiful Pink Beach on Bermuda.

But every afternoon for two weeks, on our first-ever real four-person-all-healthy family vacation we’d swim around in the ocean for a few hours. My sister, on the left, was a better swimmer. She was a better everything. She and daddy would be up early in the morning, swimming, running on the beach,. etc.

My mom and I would stay up late into the night, reading historic literature like “Murder Most Royal” by Jean Plaidy about the lives and deaths of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard (wives 2 and 5 of Henry VIII if you’re not keeping count) and would go through an entire box of Oreos while reading.

Still had my girlish figure for about another year

Anyway … now? The lifesavers Stephanie and maybe someday I and for sure someday people we know and love will need will take a different form. The form of a donation to Avon Walk for Breast Cancer to help raise awareness in women to whom early detection can be the answer to a death sentence.

If you have someone you love, or have loved or lost, or know people in this situation, won’t you please consider clicking that pink link on the top of the widgets on the right and making a donation, however small, to “my” part of our team, Winston Cups: Hope And DIamonds, the team on which Stephanie and I are walking together for 39.3 miles in May?

Thank you. I’ll send cookies.

If you think this page looks a little different, it’s not your imagination.

I am starting off the new year with a bang and a few blisters, as I begin training over the next 16 weeks to participate, with my gorgeous sister Stephanie (that’s her on the right), in the 10th Anniversary Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, May 5-6, in Washington, D.C.

The two of us, aka WINSTON CUPS: TEAM HOPE AND DIAMONDS, will make every human effort to walk the 39.3 miles over those two days along with thousands of other survivors (that would be Stephanie) and the people who love them (that would be me) in hopes of raising awareness, raising hope and raising funds for the former two.

I promise I will still be chiming in with baseball news and notes, including an entry tomorrow that will detail a HUGE and AWESOME event I am attending this evening. But meanwhile, the page is pink in honor of the task ahead of me, and the new blog name also reflects what I’ll be all about for the next several months.

Hope you will take the time to check out our pages, linked to the right, and also please watch the video that Stephanie made as she celebrated her first anniversary of her surgery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noVlp7y__L8&feature=player_embedded

lovesetfire:

Happy Christmas! And now, PUPPIES!

Happy fourth night of Chanukah and in honor of the Festival of Lights, am sharing this picture from my own paleolithic era childhood (though I think we still have that box of candles) …

The nose! The nose! The nose is on fire! We don’t need no water, let the … um, never mind.

Sorry about the absence but for the first time in my life I’ve actually been enjoying/experiencing/aching through a “part-time holiday seasonal retail job.” Learned how to work a cash register. Learned how to wrap oddly-shaped soap pieces (well, not really — I SUCK at wrapping oddly-shaped soap pieces).

Discovered that doing inventory appeals to my anal-retentive little heart and neat handwriting skills but that when it comes to assembling window displays I am a disaster at following directions re: how to put things together (something I had already figured out when DH and I put together Dana’s talking doll house with the result that the mom doll would say “Dinner time! Here, Spot!”)

And also have added some pretty awesome skincare regimens to my life, as well as the joys of things like leave-in hair conditioner. And thanks to a wonderful employee discount even for us minimum-wage workers, I’ve got enough of my favorite product to last me a lifetime (providing it’s not a really LONG lifetime).

Today is my first day off since Dec. 15 so wanted to wish all (two of) my followers a happy and healthy holiday season and a wonderful 2012. Will be chiming in more often, even if it’s not necessarily all baseball related …

(Though from a baseball standpoint may I just say how happy I am that Gio Gonzalez will be the newest DC/MD metro-area athlete. Having covered Gio back in his minor league days, I can assure any of my media buddies who will be working the Nats clubhouse this year that he is an absolute and total delight to deal with. Hopefully he’s learned to hold onto a cel phone for more than a week since his A-ball days.)

(By the way, am HOPING to have a very special Christmas-related multi-media treat to post here on Sunday, as well as a photo series close to my heart on Wednesday).

lovesetfire:

Pure awesome.

A crazy-busy last few days filled with cooking, baking, eating, whining like a baby about indigestion, working crazy hours at my awesome part-time seasonal retail job (including the 5 a.m. Black Friday shift) and soaking my feet in equally awesome bubble baths – not to mention preparing for the upcoming Winter Meetings – has made this girl a little backed-up when it comes to going into more detail about my “25 Tweets in 25 Days” backstories (and also a little backed up on the tweets themselves).

I was going to start posting them last night when the internet went down.

Seriously. If you don’t believe me, ask my husband (who noticed a few minutes later and came running upstairs shouting “the Internet is down! The Internet is down!” when I’d already shut down my laptop, crawled into bed and started catching up on old Tivo’d shows)

Anyway … here is Day 12’s back story. Days 13-14 coming soon, as well as picking up a little late on my Days 15-16 tweets. Maybe even by tonight!

The goal is still to have the last tweet run the day I leave for the Winter Meetings. I love good timing.

DAY 12: Contrary to what some people may believe, no, most baseball players are NOT jerks.

When people find out what I do for a living, especially people who are fans but don’t work in the game (and sadly, sometimes people who DO work in the game), I frequently get asked if most baseball players are real jerks.

Um, no. They’re actually not.

I won’t go into morbid detail about this because needless to say, the odds alone would ensure that after 25 years as a professional writer who has dealt with not just players at every level – major leaguers, minor leaguers, independent leaguers, field staff, managers, front offices, old-timers, all the way down to college, high school and rec league dreamers (and their parents), — I’m gonna have faced my fair share of … well … horses’ asses. They’re in the society at every level and they’re in baseball.

But that said? If I were to take the time to put together my David Letterman-esque list of Top 10 Guys (and Gals) I’d Rather Bite On Tin Foil Than Ever Have To Talk To Again From My Sportswriting Career, the results might surprise you!

For one thing, I don’t think I could fill even half the list with players.

And no, I won’t list those who WOULD make the list here … other than to say that only one of them is even currently arguably a “big star” in the game.

The rest are a motley assortment of bitter old guy fans (one sent a poorly-spelled letter to my boss that he wouldn’t read our paper again until I was busy emptying the garbage and other things a woman SHOULD be doing), bitter young fans who don’t know why they don’t have my job which they could do infinitely better, “old school” front office types here or there who are realizing the game is changing and feeling that folks like me are part of the reason why (there have been blessedly few of them since my early days of employment) , and just garden-variety asses who would have been asses if they worked in baseball, as doctors, as lawyers, as dot.com geniuses, whatever.

I’ve also found that those who hammer over and over about their complaints and their “woe is me, people are so mean and unfair” (and Twitter has made this more prevalent than ever) tend to attract more active response from the jerks.

In other words – grow a pair (literally or figuratively) and hit ignore, or these days, unfriend or unfollow and/or block.

It’s not you. It’s them. Unless, of course, you want it to be about you.

It’s just luck of the draw and I try not to take it too seriously.

And maybe … just maybe … that attitude is why my tweet for Day 12 is what it is.

“I don’t know everything. I don’t pretend to either. But I do generally know where to find the answers. Better late than wrong.”

This is pretty self-explanatory, no?

But I’m often surprised by how many people, when asked a question people expect them to know the answer to (and they don’t), kind of blather on and on aimlessly, or simply state firmly and assertively, something completely WRONG-O.

In my first tweet of this series, I talked a little bit about how the internet has helped and/or hurt journalism (and in particular sports journalism and in more particular-particular baseball journalism).

One of the “helps” is that there are a lot of great and reliable factual websites where, if you don’t know the answer to something, you can find it (becoming familiar with which ones ARE reliable and which are not so much, that’s another story).

But overall, there is very little that is fact that can’t be confirmed on the ‘net if you know where to look, or, often in my case, by calling the person in question to simply ask.

On the occasions that I am asked by aspiring journalists or what-have-you for career advice, one thing I ALWAYS warn them is this … If you don’t know something for sure, DON’T PRETEND YOU DO. It will bite you in the ass. I promise this.

There is nothing wrong with saying “You know what, that’s a good question. I am not 100 percent sure of the answer so I will find out and get back to you with it.” And then, DO find out and DO get back to them with it, if you can.

Right now, I have an absolutely fabulous part-time seasonal sales job for the holidays at my favoritest favoritest store in the whole wide world. It’s like sticking a chocoholic at Willy Wonka’s factory. But not with chocolate. And believe me, I know a LOT about this company’s product because I think I have helped support them single-handedly for the better part of a decade.

But there are still many things I don’t know (because they, like baseball, have a constantly evolving and changing line of products and stories about the products). So when a customer comes in, if they ask me a question about something and I don’t know the answer, the worst thing I can do is “make it up” … instead, I ask someone there who DOES know (and am lucky enough to have a few managers, at least one of whom is always there, who actually DO know everything!) And each day, each shift, I learn more and more and can answer more and more.

SO the advice I give may be for baseball and journalism, but really, it’s for life.

Tomorrow, I will talk about bubble baths.

As a Rule 5 Draft geek (never Rule V, please note), today is one of my favorite days of the year: 40-man roster deadline.

I’ve mellowed a bit as the years have past. I used to kill a million trees (or so Jonathan Mayo told me) printing out rosters and constantly updating them and then re-printing them.

This time I’m doing it all online and will not print out the 40s until they are final.

And hopefully someone will shoot me the list of all the players that are R5 eligible in the next few days *she said sweetly, batting her eyelashes like she had a piece of sand stuck in her eye*

But some things won’t change. I guarantee you that on the morning of Thursday, Dec. 8, I will be sitting in the front row of the ballroom in Dallas awaiting the start of the annual draft and suppressing my little squees of joy when players I know have been waiting for that chance to be on a 40-man roster and go to big league camp get their names called …

Will they make the cut? Will they be the next Dan Uggla, the first player to make the All-Star Team the year of his Rule 5 selection? Or other Rule 5 later-success poster boys like Johan Santana or Jose Bautista or Shane Victorino (a TWO-TIME Rule 5 pick), just to name a few?

Who knows. But it’s always fun to see the list of who’s available (and often to field phone calls, e-mails and Facebook messages from some of the eligible guys asking if I’ve heard their names in talks). Yes, eligible players often LOVE to be taken … it means people think they have what it takes to make it to the big leagues, maybe sooner than later, even if perhaps they’re stuck behind a perennial All-Star with their own team.

Let the games begin!