piano and such.

my passion for playing piano has returned for the time being.
i dont think it will last long though...i'll probably learn a few songs and maybe be able to throw my own twists on them or whatev...change up the lyrics and put in some upbeats or something.

anyway. i heard 'hey there delilah' for the first time on wednesday in kc and i came home and immediately started trying to nail it down on the board...i was pretty proud of myself because it only took about 15 minutes and i had it pretty much figured out...there are a couple downbeats here and there that i'm not landing yet...and i dont have all the words down either, but i'm almost there.

haha. i also figured out crazy by gnarls. holler.

life has been a little busier lately - what with multiple trips to kc a week and an issue or two on the home front - plus class started monday for me (i'm taking intro to shakespeare and its actually pretty enjoyable...shocker) - but this weekend it might actually be nice to be 'stuck in manhattan' as i like to put it. i'll get some good reading done and catch up on the sleep i've been missing out on for a while now.

speaking of - i think i'll take a nap.

-ap.

ps. i just got a text from a buddy that relish won again tonight. what a baller. he's running away with it this year.

ID4.

my fourth of july was a little disappointing...like a fireworks show without a finale.

i don't really ever expect much from the fourth of july, cause to be honest, fireworks don't impress me too terribly much. until the finale happens, i tend to get rather bored with the monotony of it all - plus i really hate large crowds - and no matter where you go you are forced to overcome the hassle of 9 million other people parking in the same place, laying their blanket in the same place, watching the same thing and getting in each others way and on each others nerves like its their job.
so, my family goes to the royals game. i think we've done this every year but once for the last 5 years (granted, the royals dont have a home game every single fourth of july, but kauffman stadium runs the fireworks on tne closest day possible...and my family goes then.

ANYWAY. this year was a 4th of july home game for the royals so i headed out to the K to watch three things. i will discuss each now:

1) john buck. we all know my near obsession with john buck (however, i'd still consider it a passion, not quite an obsession), he went 1-4 with a single. average but boring performance (however, a first-pitch single up the middle brought a little glimmer of happiness to a rather boring baseball game otherwise. the mariners scored 4 runs in the 1st and then no one scored the rest of the game. Washburn was a baller on the mound for the M's and the royals only had 5 hits and only got a guy past 2nd base once. anyway. johnny did not provide the highlight tonight.
however, his song playing when he came to bat in the second inning was "big bad john". love it.

2) the hot dog race is something i am truly passionate about. there are three kinds of people in this world: there are those that root for ketchup, those that root for mustard, and those that root for relish. if you have not done so already, please distinguish what kind of person you are right now. if you picked ketchup, i think your'e boring. if you picked mustard, i think you're a sell out. if you picked relish - you and i can be friends. relish, my friends, is the classic under'dog'. and he is currently rockin ally and freaking the oop at the K. he won again last night (tallying up his 19th win of the season...2 more than mustard and 5 more than ketchup.) this was undeniably the highlight of the night for me.

3) the post-game fireworks. this is potentially one of the most disappointing things ever: the fireworks were damaged due to a pre-game shower and there was NO POST-GAME EXTRAVAGANZA. talk about a serious buzzkill. there were 29,000 fans all super anxious to see what i think are the greatest fireworks in kc, but alas, there were none. the only thing that might make everything okay was that they tried three times to get htem started and each time they played the same intro recording:

"alright royals fans, now lets cap off an already great fourth with a post-game fireworks extravaganza! ready? count it down with me...5...4...3...2...1..."

but then nothing happened. music came on and the fountains looked beautiful (in fact, i took a photo on my phone), but there were no fireworks. then about 5 minutes later..."alright royals fans..." and again, nothing. we sat for about 15 minutes waiting with everyone else in the stadium. eventually the guy informed us that they couldn't get them to fire. BUT. our ticket is good for one free royals game of our choosing the rest of this year. jackpot. even thought the K fireworks are incredible - i've seen them a bunch of times and i already expressed my thoughts on big showy fireworks in general (even though K fireworks are NOT monotonous). anyway. i get to go to another game whenever i want...too bad i have to pay 9 bucks for parking. (robbery.)

-ap.

dont fall asleep at the game.

this is hilarious.

YGMbucks.

so a lot of people are familiar with the fact that one of my favorite movies (one of my family's favorite movies, really) is You've Got Mail. Tom Hanks is hilarious, it is beyond quotable, and for those that know the Cooper Family you know that its quotability is probably why we even like this movie at all. well, my sisters and mom might think Meg Ryan is cute or something too.

anyway, i was at work today cleaning dishes...which is an entirely too lonely time of the day for me. if manhattan wasn't lonely enough, i have to do dishes by myself sometimes. rough life. but while i'm doing the dishes i get to think, and i like thinking. i think i'm a lot better off because of my ability to think and without it i think i'd be rather comparable to jell-o in terms of IQ. i was thinking about You've Got Mail and how my family could very well be watching it as they were driving down to Nowata, OK (again, stricken if i need to include the location....but i've decided its probably more important that i include ", OK" this time. nowata is a bit smaller).

I'm telling you insignificant details and trying to be funny. here's what i foudn interesting: the movie centers around Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) who is part owner of Fox Books, the economic devil in the eyes of Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) who owns The Shop Around the Corner, a children's bookstore. Fox Books is going to put SATC out of business. its inevitable. and the whole movie they all talk about how horribly commerical and huge and impersonal and loud and unhelpful and corporate and nationally annoying Fox Books is.

yet the movie is also obsessed with incorporating Starbucks. i found this shockingly contradictory. that is all.

-ap.

four.

i think i've figured out why i'm not blogging anymore.

i got in a rut of NOT blogging - and now i'm looking for the perfect thing to blog about and its never going to come.
so i'll start lame and work my way up.

today lets talk about....eh...four things that i've recently discovered i enjoy. yeah...4 is good...i can make up four.

1) iced tea. this time last year i thought the stuff tasted like watered down grass...which is kinda what it is actually. i'll put it this way instead: i thought watered down herbs tasted horrible. however, a recent addition of honey to some tea has made me a huge fan - but i dont mix it up. i leave all the honey stuck at the bottom and drink it through a straw so i can get huge globs of gloriousness. love the word glob. so many negative boogerish images.

2) this one is still a stretch, because i think i have some obvious fears to overcome here: collared shirts. during the latest SGRT (thats small group reunion tour) my click traveled to indian hills country club where they have not only a dress code, but a plethora of free andes mints (i take full advantage - i wish they didnt have a dress code so i could wear cargo pants with those massive garbage-bag-sized pockets so that i could fill them up and walk around with sandbags attached to my knees. but anyway. as of june 8, i did not own any collared shirts so i had to borrow one from mi amigo, dan. i was a fan and found myself thinking "hey. maybe i can pull off the collared look afterall...then i got home and apparently AE was having some sort of collared shirt blow out sale cause my parents had bought me three new collared shirts all of which i'm a fan of. i'm still scared to break them out though - maybe this weekend when i dont have to work in an espresso infested establishment for 7.5 hours at a time.

3) harry FRICKIN potter. oh my goodness. i'd already read books 1 and 2. and they were good and entertaining, but not addicting and suspenseful and the greatest thing ever like books 3-6 are. i started reading book 3 on the 24th of may. and i finished book 6 on the 24th of june. 1 month...i think its something like 2600 pages. i'm completely captivated by these books - rowling is unreal. she's created this whole new world (aladdin) of spells and magic and characters and she weaves them all together into probably the most amazing series since star wars. i think so at least. i'm excited for the movie to come out in a few weeks but i'm infinitely more thrilled about the final book appearing on shelves soon after that. i was literally pacing around my room reading the end of books 4 and 6. the most intense and riveting thing ever. eh. other than the outlaw.

4) confession: last weekend i was in des moines (i am currently stricken as to whether i should include the ", IA" after the city there...i think everyone knows where des moines is though so i'm not going to bother...plus the interior of these parentheses just informed and doubters anyway). i was there for reasons i might talk about in another post but are not necessary knowledge now. i was at the dinner table with my two cousins, their two boyfriends, and my grandparents (i did feel a slight hint of disappointment that everyone had a partner but me...kinda like neville longbottom only i'm not plump and i do not have a frog named trevor)...we were eating dinner and my grandma had made my number one least favorite item in the world - green beans - but i was hungry, and i didnt think i'd fill up on fruity jello, so i dished a small helping onto the classic coops dinnerware (brown and tan patterned plates and bowls) and gave it a squishy taste.

and i liked them.

i know. gasp away. gasp gasp gasp gasp gasp. i went back for seconds. it was weeeeeeeeird. no, i dont want to talk about it, but i'm glad to have it off my chest.

alright that is all. its 2:30 and i need to call spain.
"the country, he ran it...that was his job...."

k late.
-ap.

it'd be worse without Buck

this is an article from the KC Star this week. amazing.

After updating the Stat Guy database Monday, a shocking conclusion was reached: The Royals are pretty bad.

OK, we knew that. But, as usual, the Royals are across-the-board bad, which is disappointing. Most troubling has been the offense. The preseason projection was for the hitters to be close to the middle of the pack but with several young regulars, there was the possibility of being much better than that.

The SG database calculates win stats for all the big three categories — hitting, pitching and fielding. Through Sunday, Royals hitters ranked 29th in the major leagues with -14.1 wins added, which is last in the American League.

John Buck and Mark Teahen are the only regulars with positive wins-added figures. Even Teahen, though, is underproducing his projection. While he’s right on target in terms of batting average and on-base percentage, Teahen has yet to find the consistent power stroke that made him such a dynamic hitter during the second half of last season. However, Teahen started slow last year and there really isn’t any reason to doubt that the extra bases will come.

As for Buck, well, he’s been a revelation. Buck turns 27 in July, the most common age for a hitter’s career season, and had similar numbers in some of his minor-league campaigns. Buck’s 0.62 hitting wins-added is the best on the Royals and fourth among catchers in all of baseball, and that’s before his two-home run game Monday.

Bad timing for Buck: Fellow catchers Victor Martinez, Jorge Posada and Russell Martin are all off to monster starts. Otherwise, Buck would be a deserving All-Star starter, not just the Royals’ default pick. Those aforementioned backstops all have about 60 at-bats more than Buck, and that is unfortunate.

OK, we didn’t expect Buck to hit this well, but this idea of having him catch just three out of five games ought to be tossed into the wastebasket along with the blueprints of the Edsel and the recipe for New Coke. The backup catcher, Jason LaRue, is hitting .136 and in 59 at-bats has posted -.52 wins-added — almost undoing the good work Buck has done.

Here’s one other Buck tidbit for you. According to hittrackeronline.com, Buck has averaged 409.6 feet per home run this season. Only six batters in baseball have done better, led by Martin’s 415.3 feet per long ball.

Other than Buck, pretty much every Royals hitter has fallen short of his projection to date. Alex Gordon was projected to produce 20.1 runs above average; he’s on pace for -28.2. But you have to stick with him, right? The only obvious way to improve the attack is to replace Mark Grudzielanek (-.52 wins added) on an everyday basis with Esteban German (-.03). Billy Butler probably should be DH-ing rather than Mike Sweeney (-.30) — both for now and for the future.

But those moves would have only a modest impact.

---

Punchless
Only four Royals hitters have posted above-average wins-added totals so far this season.

John Buck	0.62
Reggie Sanders	0.33
Mark Teahen	0.13
Ross Gload	0.10

Everyone else is below average. Here are the worst.

Alex Gordon	-1.19
Tony Peña Jr.	-1.07
David DeJesus	-0.80
Ryan Shealy	-0.56
Jason LaRue	-0.52

Note: Wins-added measures how many wins a player has contributed (or cost) his team

talk about awesome.

-ap.

touch em all (9, 10)

Devil Rays 4 - Royals 2

5th inning: John Buck solo homerun.

8th inning: John Buck solo homerun.

need i say more?

searching for growth.

i feel like i've stopped thinking, wrestling and growing.

life is pretty stale these days. i'm in one of the slowest moving cities on the planet - at least the slowest i've experienced. slow isn't necessarily a bad thing, in fact, a lot of people (myself included) would argue that a lack of speed is an absolutely beautiful thing. just to stop and be silent and move at a slower rate is terrific at times. and i agree with that whole-heartedly. however, i'm someone who truly enjoys moving fast. going fast means more things are in my life and more things are forcing me to grow and learn and adjust. the faster i move, the more people i come in contact with, the more knowledge i'm able to gain.

but nowadays i see no one. its depressing a lot of the time. i miss the people in my life that would challenge me and give me new ideas to wrestle with and figure out. people like dave, nate, and christian. people with more wisdom than i have for sure, but who i'm able to feel comfortable with and in no way intimidated. sometimes i find myself reluctant to get into a conversation with someone who has new ideas or strong viewpoints because i feel like i'm being attacked. people jump on their soapbox and tell me what to believe. the three i listed before aren't like that and there is a serious lack of people like that in my life these days.

but that doesnt mean i can't grow without them. i need to learn to force myself to grow. wake up every day and search for opportunities to gain knowledge and learn new things. open up books and seek truth on my own instead of hoping it comes to me. i'm hoping my spiritual boredom ends soon - it has been so sparce for a while now (hence the plethora of posts that are NOT on here). check the drastic decline in posts in the last 5 months. happy june everyone. i'm going to try to be back.

-ap.

gwen.

so i discovered something great today.

you know that ridiculous stuff on the radio that isn't necessarily wholesome or meaningful or the slightest bit lyrically complicated?
i've come to the realization that it is officially my favorite kind of music.
probably just cause it makes me dance/giggle.
sometimes separate, but usually at the same time.

lets take a stroll through the last few months:
shakira.
gnarls barkley.
justin timberlake...to name a few.
heck even fall out boy makes me laugh - even if it is terrible.

but the newest edition to my collection: gwen stefani.
yes, i feel like a complete sell out, but man its great stuff.
i picked up her cd "sweet escape" today.
i'm so pleased.
it will quickly be added to dance mixes aplenty.

-ap.

disappointing.

i wish i hadn't lost my motivation to post on this.
cause i used to be so good about it.
but the last two months or so have been just worthless.

i've had very little spiritual growth, and even less motivation to be creative, let alone funny.
maybe i'm growing up.
or maybe i'm just waiting for the motivation to return.

rest assured, when it does, these will be up every day.
again and again and again.

but until that day - late.