I honestly look like the walking wounded right now. Going for a foul ball Tuesday night, I apparently got what could be best described as a “dirt burn” from sliding in a hard dirt surface on my right forearm. There’s a spot about the size of a quarter an inch from my elbow that dripped blood for the rest of the games (two, the rest of that one and we had one immedately after), then proceded to turn ghost white at last look in the shower. It’s got a tail that goes about halfway down my forearm, which means I’ve got this cool gauze-type bandage wrapped around my forearm that brings back favorable memories of “Cowboy” Bob Orton. If you have to ask who Bob Orton is, don’t worry about it.
I’ve got other injuries too. Pulled muscles, bruises, everything like that, but I’m having a lot of fun out there playing softball. We played four games this week in three days. What does that mean to you, the loyal Buhner.com reader? A lack of updates, with the exception of statistics, damned statistics.
Trust me though, the 10 Job Challenge is going to be an interesting look into the job search. It’s going to be a huge article, and I hope it gets some nice hits.
Anyway, we played two games Tuesday night and one more Wednesday night. I caught all the games, so that’s why I’m bitching about the injuries. But, I hit well, which is a positive. I keep moving up in the order, so that means that someone’s watching. Five hits in those three games, including one that almost tied up the game in the bottom of the 7th (the runner was thrown out at home, otherwise we would have tied and I would have been the winning run at second, which would have been a major upset.)
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG10 24 9 13 1 0 0 5 2 0 5 0 .542 .621 .583
The 10 Job Challenge is running well, and as expected, the responces started to come today instead of Friday. I’ve currently got three interviews scheduled this week, with another of the ten pretty much assured an interview. How this will all play out, I’m not sure, but it’s at least nice to know I’m somewhat wanted. However, at the same time, having not gotten a response from the other five (number 10 is scheduled to be faxed tomorrow), I’m assuming that those are pretty much dead in the water. While a response Friday afternoon wasn’t to be expected, nothing on Monday as well implies that they’re probably not going to get in contact at all.
The article itself regarding the 10 Job Challenge is going to be pretty huge. I’m putting a LOT of content into it, so that you readers can see exactly where I’m coming from and have the exact same knowledge I had before I sent out these applications.
Softball reared its ugly head again tonight, but this time, I wasn’t so lucky. The team lost again (as does happen), but despite me hitting the ball solid twice, I went hitless. The stats:
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG7 16 5 8 0 0 0 4 2 0 4 0 .500 .600 .500
Yet another edition of the Southampton Press came out today, which is pretty much my sole lead to jobs in this area. Sent out weekly every Thursday to subscribers, it features local news and a decent classified section that, for the most part, isn’t littered with the typical “scam jobs” (ie. “Make money from home” and other jobs that direct you to a 1-800 number). Looking through it and not seeing anything that overly jumped out to me, I realized that this job search thing was hitting a dead end the way I was going about it. So, I had to try something different.
Enter the 10 Job Challenge.
This Friday, I will attempt to send off 10 resumes to ten different companies offering positions to which I should be able to perform reasonably well. They may not be interesting jobs, or jobs I would normally send a resume to, but they (obviously) have to be jobs that I would accept if given the opportunity and do my damnest to be the best I can be at the particular position.
The Press didn’t look too bad this week, so more info will come later. However, softball once again entered the picture tonight as we lost a tough game, 21-14. We gave up eight runs in the bottom of the sixth, to make a reasonable 3 run defecit into a 11 run hole, and despite getting four more runs in the top of the 7th, we took the loss.
I, however, had a damn good game at the plate, and not a horrible one in the field. I started at first tonight, my first action at first this season (making starts at 1B, 2B, and C this season). I got on base four times in four times to the plate, driving in two, scoring twice, and even stealing a base (whether it can really be determined a steal is questionable considering there was no effort made to throw me out, but I’ll take it anyway). That puts the current stats at:
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG6 14 5 8 0 0 0 4 2 0 4 0 .571 .667 .571
Sorry about the lack of quality updates recently. I really haven’t been inspired to write anything, and when I do write, I just sort of fade out, and can’t concentrate on what I was writing. I don’t know even if the last update made any sense, but it’s up there, so whatever.
I did receive some depressing news driving around looking for NCAA Football 2004 Sunday. I went to Game Express in Garden City, a place I frequented quite often when I was in college, and still made an effort to go see when I was around, even if I had no money. Unfortunately, I found Game Express to be completely closed and emptied out. The signs were still on the building and on the sign at the roadway, but they were definitely gone for good.
Game Express was the easiest way for me to get import video games when I was at school. As for regular video games, they had excellent prices that almost always beat any other store, and had a collection of older games for systems usually not carried by “major” stores. Game Express is where I got my old Sega Saturn, and got Fire Pro Wrestling 6 Man Scramble, possibly the greatest wrestling video game of all time.
Goodbye old friend. You could have told me you were leaving.
Oh, and we got killed in softball tonight. I started at catcher, got pulled from the field when we changed pitchers, and ended up going to second in the 7th because our second baseman really didn’t know what the hell he was doing. The ump was really bad tonight (and with a more serious team following us in the second game, I’m sure that would have been interesting to see their reactions to some of those calls), but I managed to keep the strikeout-free streak alive. Granted, I couldn’t hit a ball out of the infield in two at-bats, but considering the strikes I was getting called against me (two below the knees), I consider it a moral victory.
G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG5 12 3 6 0 0 0 2 1 0 2 0 .500 .571 .500
My wife (whom recently redesigned her site, check it out) is very active on one particular message board. On there, they not only go on about the actual topic of the message board, but they go into discussions about just about anything.
One topic that Tara was telling me about that I actually took an interest in was the use of profanity and how it affects some people. Again, the views on this went all over the place, from those who felt that the use of a “curse word” didn’t hurt anyone to those who felt that the use of vulgarity ruined the message board for them, and is a sign of “stupidity”.
I have a tendency to curse a decent amount when I speak. I know when it’s not appropriate (around children, old people, etc), and in my case, it happens a lot more in certain situations (like driving) than others. I also don’t curse a lot when I write. When you write, you have a lot of time, generally, to think out what you’re saying, and therefore can think of the best way to say what you want to without offending anyone and making your content acceptable to anyone who might come across it.
However, “curse” words are just words, and have as much value as any other word. What makes “asshole” any worse than “sphincter” has been completely lost on me, except that your parents made sure that you never said the former, and just looked at you strangely when you said the latter. To say that choosing one word over another shows how intellegent someone is depends on the word, and even then, it still comes off snobbish. You can be a gifted scientist without a good vocabulary. At the same time, you can speak well and be a toal idiot.
It’s kind of funny that people will hold their language skills as their true sign of intellegence. Of course, it’s funnier when people who think that actually have a horrible vocabulary and try to compensate by using large words they don’t know the meaning of in their daily communication. That’s funny.
