Typical weekend for me. Saturday errands on the High Street, and Sunday softball. And even more typical, my team lost both games.  Our opponent today was a team called the Free Agents. They beat us in the first game by a score of 13-3, and there was no mercy rule, as we played the full 7 innings.  The second game was a bit different, as the score was 20-4 after 5 innings and the umpire invoked the mercy rule and the game was over.  Since we only had 9 players show up, and 10 is the ideal number for a softball team, I wound up catching both games in their entirety, and was a regular in the batting order. There were the usual ground outs, but also a pop out and a strike out or two.  As Casey Stengel said in 1962 when he managed the New York Mets in their first season, "can anybody here play this game?" Anyway, despite the 90 degree heat, I still had fun.

Talk about more failures to communicate: I only learned yesterday afternoon that come Monday morning I will be getting a new office mate at work. Right now a summer intern shares the room with me, and he will have to sit somewhere else. The way I found out was when the computer technicians called me regarding a new person whose computer that they would have to set up, in the room that I am in. I told them that I knew nothing about it (which was true) and that they should talk to one of the managers.

I am glad that the weekend is finally here. However, so is the rain. Yesterday it rained during working hours in Manhattan, and it intensified at 5:30 when I was heading to Penn Station to get my train home. Even taking the underground part of the way did not keep me from getting drenched (and that was with an umbrella). Once we left Penn Station it was slow moving all the way to Jamaica. Since there were (and still are) areas of Queens without power, it most likely affected the signals as we went through western Queens to Jamaica. Once we left Jamaica it was smooth sailing, but I still got to my home station nearly 40 minutes late.

This morning I was at the fire station using the computer when an alarm came in. It was a miscellaneous alarm, and in this case it was the sound that the resident (who was elderly and legally blind) could not locate. It turns out that neither could we. We checked the flat several times for appliances left on and also went into unoccupied flats to see what was there. Just as we were about to go back and labelling the call an unfounded alarm, a probie decided to check under a bag of cereal on top of the microwave, and there it was! It was a tiny homing device, about the size of a small cellphone, whose battery was low and it was making the high pitched noise. The item is placed into a cup of coffee so that the visually impaired person would llknow when the cup is full. The woman apologized for imposing on us, but we were the ones who really had to apolgize for not finding it the first time around.

While it was a bit inconvenient to have the Long Island Railroad signals malfunctioning due to the power outage, we are more fortunate than the St. Louis metro area. So much of the region is still without power, and the governor had to call out the Missouri National Guard to evacuate people and distribute water, and there were heat related deaths there. Across the Mississipppi in Illinois, the Gateway Grizzlies, one of my many favorite baseball teams, who play in Sauget, next door to East St. Louis, had to postpone Friday night's game due to a power failure there. However, so far I have not read of heat related deaths or any evacuations on the east side fo the river.