Hello once again and thanks for stopping by.  I am pleased to report that this entry finds me in much better spirits than some of my postings of the recent past.  As a team, my teammates with the RockHounds and I have been on a bit of a roll and, as of yesterday, found ourselves in first place in the Texas League’s Southern Division.  Although we lost a close one yesterday to Corpus Christi, we battled back from a slow start and had a chance to win it in the ninth inning so it was another fairly well played game.  I’m not sure what effect that has on our place in the standings either, but obviously we are well positioned going forward.  I have personally been performing much better of late, mostly due to adjustments made to my delivery allowing me to throw strikes more consistently.  I have also been catching some of the breaks required to put up a sustained stretch of good performance, which has been a welcome change and sort of plays into the “make your own luck” mentality.  Hopefully it will be more of the same for the next five weeks as the regular season winds down and the playoffs potentially begin.

 

Away from the field, I spent the past week with my parents and my brother, who drove down to Midland from Minnesota for the most recent string of home games.  I hadn’t seen my mom or my brother since January or my dad since March, highlighting one of the major drawbacks to the minor league lifestyle: the immense amount of time spent away from family and friends.  We managed to take in the Odessa Art Museum, which I was mildly impressed with, but other than that there wasn’t really much time for extracurricular activities unfortunately.  It did prompt me to plan a future visit to the Museum of the Southwest, which I ran into accidentally when I made a few wrong turns on the way to the library the other day.  Other than that I have just been chipping away here and there at the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and redirecting my reading time into MCAT study time on the off-chance I decide to take it this offseason to have in my back pocket for the future.  With that, I will leave you with the customary poetry, three short poems in lieu of the standard one, and bid you enjoy.

 

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

by Howard Nemerov

 

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned to pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

 

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

 

 

Fog

by Carl Sandburg

 

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

 

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

 

 

The Eagle

by Lord Alfred Tennyson

 

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

 

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.