Return of the Fair Weather Fan

So here's the kind of thing that happens...

You move away from San Diego, really, just up the road into beautiful Burbank, CA. You take on a new job.

The new job is busier than your old jobs, but that's OK. It's happened before. And then at the same time, your boss that hired you and moved you up the street to Burbank moves onto another job and you get even busier.

You get an actual team of analysts that you actually manage. You start getting stretched thin. Every day is a series of meetings and every phone call begins with the other person saying, "So-and-So is asking for data and as a reminder, So-and-So is the Senior VP of Whats-a-Whozit." And then after a while, it's not somebody asking on behalf of So-and-So, but actually So-and-So calling so you have to answer the phone.

Then stuff at home starts happening very quickly. A 6 year old and a 3 year old are much more of a handful than you had ever anticipated. School stuff starts happening. Weekends are spent camping. You feel guilty looking at the sports news as opposed to, say, teaching your child to read or spending time with your wife who you have moved to a new city away from her friends and her daily routine.

The 3 year old breaks the new LED TV (the only one in the house and the one you had bought as a nice little treat after moving) so there isn't a lot of TV being watched.

The 6 year old takes to gymnastics and scootering and soccer more than baseball, which you didn't quite expect, but you go with anyway.

You begin regularly falling asleep at 9PM shortly after the kids are in bed. Waking up the next morning, you don't have the local news mentioning the San Diego Padres because it's not a thing. You walk to work and you can't find a podcast that talks much about the Padres on a day to day basis (note to self: get Jodes to start a podcast that talks about the Padres on a day to day basis).

Even starting a new blog post feels like a monumental task. You know you'll have to pick out the stock image to the post and you know that you don't know what's happened in baseball recently. You thought the Padres were in second place and that the Dodgers had sh_t the bed. Coming up with the teaser lines and headers for everything becomes such a chore.

And all that leads to pretty much a missed season of baseball. Like... I completely missed it. Like... I have no idea what happened.

Here are the things that stand out to me:

1. I stop showing up for a while and Mentor leaves. Like is gone. Kaput.

2. JBox texts me one day and says, "You really should turn on the game". I turn on the game, text him back, "I don't understand what's happning". The man calling the game says, "And there's the first hit of the game..." And I realize that, even in a season that I barely saw anything for, I have managed to jinx the Padres first no-hitter.

3. I should probably continue to try blogging.

In our original conversations around starting a Padres blog, jbox and I (you guys still call him "jbox" right?), kinda agreed that it would be funny to have a Padres blog written by people who occasionally didn't know anything about what was going on with the Padres, and I have failed at living up to the inherent humor in that.

So I'll try that again.

What's actually going to happen is I'll be referencing things like Marvel Phase 2, Disney's Frozen (in theaters November 27), Need for Speed, in the random weird context of living in Dodgerland ("-ville"? "-town"?) and you'll have to rely on the other Gaslamp Ball bloggers for actual Padres news, because you ain't gonna be learnin' nuthin' new for me anymore! My lifelines have been cut, folks! I'm like Sandra Bullock in Gravity (not a Disney film). I'm like Dane Cook flying through the mountain (Disney's Planes out on DVD/Blu-Ray soon).

Anyways, I'm gonna start catching up on stuff. What else has been going on? Not much, eh?