Good worker day, summer hockey camp, screen time, bedtime books, nice win, the mystery of the pumpkin ale

Wednesday 7/8/26

Yesterday was a day of weather relief. One of those good worker days. It rained mostly throughout the day, from early in the morning on through to the night, with temperatures in the upper sixties and lower seventies. Took away a lot of that residual heat that boxes itself in in summer and sticks around. A solid citizen of a weather day. I felt like thanking the weather (shades of the narrator in M.R. James's The Five Jars saying, "Good growth to you," after a pleasant exchange with some trees.)

My niece Lilah is leaving soon I think for a trip with her grandmother (not my mother). I texted my sister to tell her to have a good time and to remember to pack enough books for the plane and bedtime.

It hasn't been great without the Melatonin. I've been trying to make due with chamomile tea. It's been a lot of chamomile tea, probably at the cost of other teas I should be drinking for my heart health. Still figuring it out, I guess.

I had to buy a bottle of absorbent powder for my sneakers. The humidity has been such this summer that my sneakers are so wet after running stairs that if I just leave them to air out on their own they'll still be wet the next day. It can feel like they've hardly dried at all, though they must have some.

In the summers as a kid, I'd go to hockey camp. This was usually for two weeks. You'd skate twice a day. First in the morning, then the afternoon. There were only a few hours between sessions. Your gear was stored in your bag. It wasn't out on drying racks. This wasn't some NHL set up, after all, but a rink at a Massachusetts prep school that was otherwise closed for the summer. Let me tell you, putting that gear on the second time wasn't a blast. Good experiences, those hockey camps. Imagine your typical publishing person at one of them?

“If you don’t do it, you’re not getting phone time later.” Words I heard a mother say to her little girl recently on a beautiful morning in the Public Garden to get her to take a picture with her grandmother. Sufficiently entreated, the child took up her position on the bridge next to grandma for a very quick photo. This is how it happens. How the thinking goes away and becomes something people couldn't do even if they wanted to, which they don't, no matter how unfulfilled that makes them.

The Red Sox got a nice win last night over the White Sox out in Chicago with contributions from a bunch of players. Payton Tolle was good again, as I mentioned I expected him to be. Willson Contreras with another fine game. Rafaela homered. But as I wrote here yesterday, it's harder when there are more teams in front of you. For instance, the three teams in front of the Red Sox, and the team holding that final Wild Card spot, all won yesterday. So things stay the same. They're not all going to win on a given day, but usually one or two of them are.

But in baseball, if you just play good baseball on balance, you'll be okay. That's the trick of it, isn't it? Having the playing of good baseball be your standard mode. You can play good baseball on balance and lose. A third of your games. More. But you'll still be okay over the course of a season. This is a fundamental truth of baseball. The thinking person's game, the wise person's game.

There have been three six packs of Smuttynose pumpkin ale in the basement laundry room on the rack below the table where you set down your laundry bag for about a month now. Isn't that strange? From an autumn standpoint, I don't mind seeing this, much as I welcome seeing Halloween items on the shelf as early as possible at CVS. My guess is that someone bought this beer last year, drank the contents of another six pack, didn't like it, and put these here, but it is a mystery (kind of like the Grateful Dead's Mystery Reels of 1966 and 1968). Everyone has thus far left them there, though.