Farmer waves, Driver's License, and the Kane County Cougars

After living in a metropolitan area for a solid week, I decided that as nice as the people here are (it still is the Midwest), they aren’t near friendly enough. So I decided that whenever I find myself driving down a residential street, I’m going to give oncoming cars a little wave. I have a feeling that so far when I’ve done it, people are a little freaked out, and some just stare at me, wondering if they should know me. I guess they see my Minnesota license plate and wonder a little.

Last Friday, Linds and I decided to get our driver’s license switched to Illinois’ licenses. We looked online and needed 4 forms of ID to apparently prove it was us. We needed our old license, SS card, Birth Certificate, and proof of address. We showed up and went from checking in to sitting in chairs waiting to giving our information and taking the vision test. Now, I should stop at this point and say that when we checked in, the lady didn’t ask Linds if she needed a book to study for the written test, but for some reason she did ask me if I would like to look one over. I asked her if she thought I needed one (in my most confident voice), and she just smiled and laughed and said “probably not”. Yeah, probably but not definitely. At this point in my life, after 17 years of schooling and now a certified teacher, I believe I know the difference between a good multiple-choice question and a bad one. So when I left 3 of the first 5 questions on the test blank after reading them, I should have thrown my red challenge flag because it had to be illegal what they were doing to me. They were questions such as, “When can a driver under the age of 17 drive at night?” and “You can lose your license for which of the following?” And here I thought this was a written test about driving, and here they were going to end up nailing me for the little nitty gritty details. Well, there were two pages of multiple choice, about 20 questions I suppose, and then a page of 15 street signs that you had to identify. I figured it was at least 15 free points until I got to the front and the young girl who was correcting my test must have had something else on her mind, because all of a sudden she went pen crazy and started making all these marks on my test. Turns out, Matt doesn’t know when 17 year-olds can drive at night, or when someone can lose their license. Furthermore, apparently Matt doesn’t know the difference between a merging lanes sign and a lane reduction sign. I didn’t ask how many questions you could get wrong and still pass, but lets just say I wouldn’t have made the honor roll with my test score.

But, as any baseball guru would say… “It’s a line drive in the book…”, because not 15 min later Linds and I both walked out of the office with new cards in hand…and mine didn’t say “This guy only got an 85% on his written test…”

After two weeks of living in the Windy City metro area, and it still being summer, one would think that our (my) attendance at baseball games would have at least begun, especially with limited teaching prep to do right away. Well, we didn’t make the connection that maybe there are teams around that don’t have little bears or clean socks as their mascots. Monday night we drove about 25 miles to the northwest to Geneva to watch the Kane County Cougars take on the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers in a Midwest League matchup. The Cougars are a Class A affiliate of the Oakland A’s, and the Timber Rattlers (which I assume is either Paul Bunyan running from Duluth to Brainerd or some kind of snake) is a Class A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners. We were surprised as to how many people attended the game, somewhere in the 8,000 range, which probably puts them right up with the Florida Marlins in average game attendance. We paid $10 a seat and sat 10 rows up from the home bullpen down the 1st baseline. The game went 13 innings, with Wisconsin winning 8-7. I only recognized one name between the two teams, pitcher Scott Hodson of the Cougars played for Azuza Pacific in the 2007 NAIA World Series, and if I remember right, he was NAIA pitcher of the year that year. We did get to see him pitch 5 innings of relief, and he did really well.

Like I normally do, I’m typing this at home because I almost feel bad typing on my blog at school. Like I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, or something like that. But we don’t have our gracious neighbor’s wireless internet right now, so I’m typing this on a word document. Not that any of this means much to anybody, but it does mean that there’s no official update on Five-Tool Performer’s quest for $10k. Things are bleak right now, after averaging over 40 points/day for 6 of the 7 days last week, it was the 7th day that really did me in. A TEN point day…I don’t remember having a TEN point day all year. I finished the week at 255 points when I was looking for 280. I figured that if I could get two 280-point weeks, I might not be going on, but at least I would have felt good about it. This week could be tough as well, because most teams are taking a day off at some point this week, with a few (Cardinals) taking two off, which really hurts the stats of Ludwick and Molina. I subbed Hernandez of the Orioles for Molina, but couldn’t get it in my heart to bench Ludwick for Alexi Ramirez. But, looking at last night’s drubbing of Seattle and Ramirez’ bomb, I may have been wrong.

Here are a few pictures of the Kane County game we went to…

Until next time…