Mountains Made Low

Due to the vagaries of the Major League Baseball schedule this year—which included the Oakland As and the Boston Red Sox playing two regular season games in Japan before returning to the US to finish their spring training schedules, and President George W. Bush throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of the season at Nationals Park in DC on Sunday before the Nats’ one-game series with the Braves—I’m happy to report that my Cleveland Indians were perfect in play during the first month of the regular season.

That’s right, sports fans, the Tribe went 1-0 in March!

With a 10-8 victory over the Chicago White Sox at Progressive Field (that still irks me, by the way), the guys kicked the season off right.

Okay, it wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

CC Sabathia surrendered five runs in 5 1/3 innings pitched. Jensen Lewis gave up two more in 2/3 of an inning. But Rafael Betancourt did what he’s known for: bend but don’t break, and the Indians’ D had his back. The Sox loaded the bases against Betancourt in the 7th, but nothing came across, and Betancourt held on for the win with the save going to closer Joe Borowski.

I missed the second inning, but it must have been something to behold, as the Indians plated seven runs (their only scoring in the game until 3 crossed in the 8th).

Perfect in March. It wasn’t pretty. But it was perfect.

If you read here regularly, you know that I’ve recently upgraded a number of the daily technologies in my life: my regular Web browser, my mobile phone, and the blogware that runs this blog for me. I’m happy with the upgrades. Pretty much across the board I’m happy with the upgrades.

But you’ve probably also noticed that there have been some changes around Mike in the Mountains.

First, I’ve added the “moblog” category. In addition to marking posts with categories for their content, any post that comes in from my mobile phone will be in this category, as well. These posts may not be otherwise distinguishable from other posts, but it’s my way of letting you know that I’m posting “on the go.”

The other change is that in addition to categories for posts, the new version of the Wordpress blogware that I’m now using includes tag functionality. I can now mark posts with both categories and tags. Tags are like keywords that can be seen in a “tag cloud,” and you see these things on sites like Amazon showing what’s popular—more common tags are set in a larger font, while less common ones are there, but smaller. So in addition to seeing what’s on my mind in terms of how many posts I have in particular categories, from here on out, you’ll get a visual representation of what’s important to me in the sidebar of my blog, as well. Right now, I’ve just started using them, so the list will be growing, and none of them has been used more than once yet. But you get the idea.

As I’ve said, I’m happy with how my tech upgrades have gone. And, yes, I’ve downgraded the satellite service, as well (kinda). I ditched Cinemax and Showtime, kept HBO, and added the sports package which, no matter where you live, includes Sports Time Ohio. The only downside to this is that this coming Monday is opening day in Cleveland, and Monday is also my day to work late. Which is how I pay for all of this. Oh well.

It’s turned into a beautiful spring(ish) day here in the mountains. It’s not exactly warm, but it’s sunny. And it looks like it should be a lot nicer outside than maybe it really is. It looks like spring.

And, thanks to the shuffling I did with my tv subscriptions, it’s feeling like springtime inside the house, too. The Indians are on the tv, with a spring training game against the Yankees, and with the game half over (it’s the bottom of the 5th as I write), the good guys are winning 4-1.

So, yeah, I guess all is, in fact, right with the world.