Baseball, Mowing, and Mulching,,,

The above describes the just completed weekend, although you can add a Friday Night round of thunderstorms to the mix...

Baseball____

Celina hosted a 4 team round robin ACME get together including the Bulldogs, along with Crestview from Convoy, and rivals Coldwater and St. Marys, that began Friday night.  Sam and I were to work 4 of the 6 games, including the 2 on Friday, then the last two on Saturday afternoon/evening.

Things got off to a rocky and wet start, as a thunderstorm popped up over the lake and sidetracked to Celina and Eastview Park/Montgomery Field just before the 6pm start time.  We got the opening game between Crestview and St. Marys started about 6:30 and were in the 3rd inning of a 2-2 tie when another batch of lightning and rain came calling.  After an hour the teams and umpires agreed to "kill" that first game where it was.  Since this was not a tournament, just a series during the regular season, there was no need to reschedule this contest.  Meanwhile we waited another half hour, and the skies cleared, so we did start the Celina vs Coldwater game, with Sam, behind the plate.  If not for the "turf" infield and well drained grass outfield, we would have not gotten this game in at all.   Coldwater got excellent pitching and shut out the Bulldogs 3-0, as we finished up around 11:30pm and headed the short trip home.

Four games on Saturday, with Sam and I doing the St Marys/Coldwater and the Celina/St Marys games, after two fellow umps handled the early games between Crestview/Celina and Crestview/Coldwater.  A pretty tidy payday weekend, especially since the drive was only about a mile each way. Tonight Sam and I stay in Celina to work a Junior ACME game in town.  The rest of my week sees me travel to Parkway twice, as well as far north to Kalida with Garry on Wednesday, and finish up at Crestview on Friday....the weekend is off from games,  for our trip to the Dayton area and a Reds game with Hal and Lisa on Saturday night.

Mulching and Mowing, replanting, etc____

The rest of the weekend involved some beer drinking, and cigar smoking on my part...as well as doing the lawn mowing.  Also helping(maybe 10%) with mulching the areas inside the fence and out along the dog kennel.  Patricia decided to mulch the rest of the flowers and edges, including my Sunflowers....which appears to be about 45 plants of differing varieties this year....I don't think I'll have as many "Mammoth" Sunflowers, as I did last season, as some of the seeds just didn't pop out through the heavy mud left by the persistent rains this spring.  But we will have a good crop none-the-less.

After the yard work was complete, I sat on the back steps, had a couple more beers and another Cigar, before calling it a weekend.....weather-wise it looks pleasant for the next couple of days with a mix of sun and clouds and highs in the middle 70s...rain returns for later in the week, maybe by Wednesday or Thursday.

back later>>>>>

Photos-The Sunflower Batch after the mulching...the large plant on the left of the top photo is a "Wild Sunflower" which I transplanted as it grew wild from under the bush stands in the yard...last year I found a wild plant growing in among the others, which produced about 30 sunflowers...the domestic plants, which you buy in seed form only produce 1 flower per plant...don't ask me why, that's just the it is...the middle photo Sam took with his cell phone, as the first round of storms moved over Eastview Park in Celina during the first game of the Round Robin Baseball action....and the final photo is a view looking east of the row of sunflowers next to the old dog kennel.