Week in Review – 2024-09-15

So Hell Week was quickly followed by Fire Week here in Southern California, as several pillars of smoke rose at once into the sky. There was the Airport Fire down in Orange County, The massive Line Fire over near Big Bear that looked like a volcanic eruption, and the Bridge Fire near me in the Mt. Baldy area. I was driving up from Costa Mesa on the 55 on Tuesday and could see all three driving North from there. I don’t think I’d ever seen a sight quite like that before.

I initially had no idea that there was a large fire near Mt. Baldy until someone from work called to ask if I was alright. I had some ash on my truck that morning, but I thought it was from the Line Fire over in San Bernardino that the wind blew over. That’s what I get for ignoring the local news before heading out, I guess. I still didn’t even see it that morning on the way out, so I figured it was small, but it had grown tremendously by noon when I took the picture below near Diamond Bar:

We watched it grow in real time all afternoon and it’s rapid intensification right in front of our eyes was shocking. Luckily for us, the winds shifted north and pushed the fire away from us, which turned out to be very unlucky for the folks over in Wrightwood.

The following days cooled down significantly and the humidity increased, which I think have helped with the fires, but they’re still going with minimal containment as I type this.

In gardening news, the extreme heat killed off a couple of my plants, but my lone radish in the raised bed somehow survived the heat. My rose also began to bloom as well, so some good news there at least. If it stays cool, I may think about putting out the Halloween decorations, but I think the 10 day forecast shows temps getting back into the 90s again the week after next, so I may hold off until the first week of October.

During our garage clean-up last week to make space for a new hobby work area, I found a box containing a few hundred loose baseball, Magic, Pokemon, and other cards. I spent a good chunk of the week sorting and properly storing them, and found some real gems. I doubt any of them are worth any real money, but that’s not the point of these anymore. A lot of the baseball cards are from the late ’80s and early ’90s when I was teenager and collecting them, and the other cards belonged to my son when he was a little guy playing those games in the late ’90s and early ’00s.

The trip down memory lane while organizing and sliding the cards into their little plastic cases was awesome. A Derek Jeter rookie card from a ’93 Upper Deck collection, a Tim Raines rookie card from Topps, and more. But my favorite thing was just seeing some of my favorite ballplayers from that era, like Doc Gooden, Dale Murphy, Tom Glavine, and good ole’ Mookie Wilson. It reminded me of seeing a lot of these guys play when they were in the minor leagues, and then following their major league careers afterward.

I saw Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry play for the Tidewater Tides in Norfolk, who were affiliated with the New York Mets at the time. It also meant I saw a lot of the Atlanta Braves crew as well, since their Triple AAA affiliate played out of Richmond and they had several series against Norfolk during the season.

I was a hardcore baseball fan until the 1994 strike that cancelled the World Series. The spell was broken after that and I never followed baseball too much afterward. I didn’t watch another professional game until all of the players who were active that season had retired or were no longer playing.

Basketball filled the hole for the remainder of the ’90s, and football to a lesser extent, but no other sport has ever captured my imagination or love the way baseball did when I was young. I could tell you the ERA of just about every pitcher for every season they pitched, along the batting averages of most players for their careers as well, and I loved to replay games in my head by reading the box scores. But that ended abruptly in August of ’94.

Even now when I watch it, I enjoy the games, but there’s always a level of emotional detachment. I’m happy for the players when they do well and I nominally root for the Dodgers, but I don’t feel invested anymore. I couldn’t tell you anyone’s stats, other than knowing whether someone’s having a good year or not (Shohei Ohtani being the exception, because well, he is exceptional).

All in all, I think it was for the best, since I essentially forced myself to pursue other interests I otherwise wouldn’t have given any attention to, had I not fallen out with the sport. It also really drove me into more nerdy/geeky pursuits that I eventually explored with my son, who didn’t have to grow up with a “sports dad” — a lot of my nostalgia is for the things that he enjoyed in his youth, like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Halo, Spongebob, and just about every Star Wars collectible card game that was ever released.

I think it was a good trade.