"Which one do you want?"

"How about the one in the back, the one I didn't make eye contact with..."

Our older cat, Tuxedo, has been ill of recent. Actually, his affliction was first noticed back in November before we left for Asia, which would be 2013. This February something else came along and brought him close to the end, and after that was resolved, he's back to the weird and unknown ailment that we're trying to deal with.

Corrie's intent on eliminating food-allergy as the reason for his suffering (beyond food allergy, the causes are barely treatable), and this has us trying to find "novel" proteins.

A novel protein is one that animals have not been exposed to recently. Most cat foods are made of chicken, beef, white-fish and pork. We've tried all sorts of stuff in the last seven months: pheasant, turkey, lamb (barf-city), and bison.

One thing we did try, but it had been a while, was rabbit, but in the form of raw frozen hockey pucks that needed to be dealt with a bit. This was during the "raw diet" period.

On this most recent attempt, we decided to back with rabbit. We found a butcher two miles away that sold rabbit, so I rode my bike over to the place to procure some. One. Whatever, really, I wasn't quite sure how it would work.

I was planning on boiling it until it was soft enough to pull with little effort, then adding the tuarine and calcium, reducing the last of the stock until it was gooey and adding it back.

When I got to the butcher, which was a bodega owned by Bangladeshis with a back area for chicken (et al) butchery with two guys and one girl (all Latino), I went to the back and asked for conejo. One guy came over, printed out the ticket, and pointed me over to the register. I had to pay the fifteen bucks before they would move on the rabbit.

I paid, returned, and the guy waved me back. "Back there?" I questioned. He just nodded and motioned again. Through the swinging doors and into the cutting and washing area, through another set of doors into a small muggy room with huge steaming kettles, and then through another set of doors. 

Inside this last room the first thing I saw were the live chickens, dozens of them, in pens. As I moved into the room I started to notice the pigeons and the quails. The guy pointed to a pen behind me, above my left shoulder. I turned.

Inside were two terrified white rabbits. The guy said, "Which one do you want?"

"Uh, how about the one in the back..." and as he was grabbing it like Elmer Fudd with Bugs, under my breath I said, "...the one I didn't make eye-contact with..."

I told Corrie about it later and she almost teared up. I've been back a few times since and they haven't had me play Death again. 

Hopefully Tux comes out of this soon enough. The things we do for our pets...right?

Baseball Notes

I was joking with Ryan about how this year the baseball tables have turned. Instead of the Yankees and Red Sox snatching up the marquee players at the non-waiver trade-deadline, the biggest "buyers" were the perennial sellers Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays.

Well, the Blue Jays aren't traditional sellers like the Royals and A's have been, seeing as how Toronto is a mega-market and the communication giant Rogers owns the team, but they do own the longest post-season drought in the majors. But it's not like they're the Cubbies; The last time the Jays were in the playoffs they were winning their second consecutive World Series (Joe Carter's walk-off game 7 homer?).

This season the best team in the American League are the Royals, last year's pennant-winning squad, and they got considerably better at the deadline. The Jays had one of the best offenses in the AL before going out and getting the best shortstop in the game in Troy Tulowitzki, but their pitching was still questionable...until they signed probably the best pitcher available in David Price. That signing may just amount to a rental, but this team has since won 6 of 7 and has pulled even in the race for one of the two wild card spots.

Now that there are two wild card positions, the calculus of deciding between being a buyer or a seller at the deadline has become even more confusing. It appears that one of the two wild card spots will be taken by whichever AL West team doesn't win the division (Astros or Angels), as both of those clubs are playing well.

The Yankees, my Yankees, were going to be the subject of a post back in March, a post that was going to eulogize what I thought would be a down year. Turns out that the AL East is quite mediocre, and the Yanks have a nice cushion in first place. My dad gave me a list of things necessary to go well for them to be playoff contenders, an idea I thought was so out of touch with reality that I wouldn't even dare mention it.

Turns out that I was the one out of touch with reality. This I knew, and the initial research for my March Yankee post had more of a "Who are these guys?" angle, which slowly lead to a eulogy. I didn't know any better. I did recognize that I was out of touch, mostly because of lack of time to read about sports in general combined with no cable and no baseball on regular broadcast television anymore. (Wasn't Saturday afternoon Fox's baseball broadcast? All I ever find on Fox on Saturday afternoon is "I Love Lucy", which is a fantastic show, but the episodes all seem to be from the end of the series after they move to Westchester, and those just don't hold the same appeal for me...)

So, my dad's list seems pretty good now:
1) A-Rod has to produce somewhat...capital CHECK;
2) McCann shakes off the early dust and produces all year like the end of last year...check;
3) Teixeira remembers he's a baseball player and not a garbageman (my paraphrasing)...capital CHECK;
4) They need just enough starting pitching, and Tanaka can't go down to a-blown-elbow-Tommy-John-surgery-inducing incident...check
5) They maintain their bullpen dominance, second last year to only the Royals...check.

There may have been more on the list, but those were the main points I remember. Both A-Rod and Teixeira are playing like it's 2009; McCann has played well all year; even Jacoby Ellsbury came back and is playing well. Even (weird-shape-headed) Brett Gardner made the All-Star game. The bullpen has been great; Tanaka managed to not snap that elbow (probably shouldn't even mention this for superstitions sake), but "Ol' Pine Tar" Pineda got hurt, which made it likely that the Yanks would go get a pitcher.

So...he got hurt a little late in the trade-market game, and the player the Tigers wanted for David Price is a young Dominican phenom, so the Yankees just decided to hold onto the kid, let the Jays waste a major prospect on Price, and insert this phenom into their rotation like he was a prize from a trade.

Luis Severino is his name and he pitched his first game yesterday. It was a pretty good showing for a first major league appearance: he pitched five solid innings against the Red Sox, no walks, 7 strikeouts, gave up a huge welcome-to-the-show solo homer to David Ortiz, and took the loss because the Red Sox pitcher was a knuckler who was on his game. The final was 2-1, the homer being the lone earned-run Severino gave up.

**

I didn't really mean to ramble about baseball for this long; I just wanted a newer post to show up to supplant the "We like Roy!" post. I have a few other ideas of stuff to work on, and I need to hurry it up as summer winds down.

"We like Roy! We like Roy!"

"And now the seniors in the back!"

All Simpsons related jokes aside, "Roy", when written like "RoY" can represent an acronym. It stands for "Rookie of the Year." And this is a roundabout way of mentioning that yours truly, the feisty Head behind the Caliboy Network of blogs, has won some kind of a Rookie of the Year award.

It does feel a little strange to be a thirty-six year old rookie, but at least I'm doing something I love and find rewarding.

There was a ceremony and everything. It happened this past Sunday at Dodger Stadium, as Corrie and I were treated to a game in an event suite. I don't think I've ever been to a ballgame and spent exactly zero dollars on anything. There was a fridge in the suite that was stocked with (not great) beer and there were hotel pans over sterno flames full of food.

There was even a movable photogenic board that we could take pictures in front of:

They gave us official jerseys with our name on them (see above), and while I appreciate it, I would have chosen a different name had I known what was happening when I filled out some paperwork.

There were 23 recipients of this particular Rookie of the Year award; I was easily both the oldest and tallest recipient. I was also the most Irish, and sunburned easily while we waited in the pre-entrance queue. I was also the math guy, and you can guess what that may imply.

The balcony outside the suite was nice, and an upcoming panoramic picture will speak to that. They showed our names on the jumbo-tron and during the first pitch ceremony they showed "closeups" of the balcony, so we could wave and have pictures taken of ourselves off said jumbo-tron:

My mother asked why I wasn't smiling or looking in the direction that everyone else was looking. My only answer was a joke about doing an impression of Vito Corleone, but really the lag-time was so severe that you almost had to spend the entire time waving and looking interested to have the effect be that it was instantaneous.

Anyway, the game was between the Dodgers and the Angels, the Southland's two major league teams. The Dodgers took an early 2-0 lead, and eventually coughed it up, heading into the 8th inning tied at 2. Andre Ethier of the Dodgers drilled a homerun to put the Dodgers up 3-2 in the bottom of the 8th, which meant that a quick three outs in the top of the 9th would give the Dodgers the series sweep. It was not to be.

The second pitcher in the bottom of the 9th gave up a solo homerun, which, after no Dodger scored in the 9th, sent the game to extra innings. It was about here that Corrie and I started to play pool on the suite's pool table.

Yup, our suite had a pool table:

Once the Dodgers came up in the bottom of the 10th and game was still 3-3, someone got on base and Andre Ethier, the near hero from inning 8, smashed a two-run walk-off homer, sending the remaining Dodger faithful into a frenzy and giving the boys in blue a 5-3 victory.

Quite a show. Corrie and I drove surface streets back to Santa Monica where we enjoyed some dinner.

Here is the aforementioned panoramic picture containing me at the edge and the perspective from our event suite: