Things to do if you're bored...

• Scare Stephen King
• Give your cat a Mohawk
  
• Run around in squares
• Think of quadruple entendres
• Speak in acronyms
• Exorcise a ghost
• Exercise a ghost
• Be a monk for a day
• Make up words that start with ex
• Go to a bar and ask for a Molotov cocktail
• Translate Shakespeare into English
  

Directions? I don't need no stinking directions....

In March of 2007 I posted my first blog...today the count was at 307 posts...this is No. 308...that's about 77 per year and I'm proud of that...did you know my daughter Julie has probably posted ten times that amount?

My birthday was a few weeks ago and the family threw a party for me and about 100 of my closest friends and relatives...yeah, I even have relatives who are friends...it was a happy day and one I'll remember forever...I saw almost all the people I care about and all the people who care about me were there...

I received tons of gifts including gift cards to some of my favorite restaurants as well as to Barnes & Noble and Amazon which came in very handy as I was gifted a Kindle e-book from my daughters...it was something I had hoped to receive...I'd been thinking about buying one for several months especially after spending time cleaning out bookshelves taking books to the library and Goodwill...

The neat thing about Kindle is that books are available for about 1/3 the price of hard copies, including N.Y. Times best sellers...books range from a few bucks up to around $12...on top of all that there are I think 12,000 books available for free...yup, for free...books like Black Beauty, Robinson Crusoe, the Holy Bible, all of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, all the old classics, like, bunches of books...

When I tried to register the Kindle I had a little trouble and called my grand daughter Allison, who is a genius with computers and also owns a Kindle... she came over and helped me set it up...she made it look easy and before I knew it I was reading a few hours after purchasing a new Clive Cussler novel for myself and a Mary Higgins Clark for Mrs.D. ..I also picked up a free Count of Monte Cristo that I read when I was 12 years old...

I love the options on the device enabling me to kick up the font size and even the word spacing on a page...I did that a few times until I found the combinations I liked...and, it automatically bookmarks where you stop reading...a few times I switched from Cussler to Alexander Dumas' Count just to see if I could do it and it worked like magic...it's a piece of cake to operate and I can't wait to read, read, read...the Kindle is about the size of a pocket book, weighs less than a real book and is much easier to hold...turning pages forward or backward is simple...it's even possible to write notes in the margins like a real book but I don't care to find out how to do it...

I originally thought I now could sit in our TV room with Mrs. D. to read in the semi-darkness but no...surprisingly there is no light emitted from the pages...I would need to sit near a lamp to read...this afternoon I picked up Sunny at school and while I waited in my car I noticed I could read the e-book with sunlight reflecting directly on it...just like the commercials...it really is the coolest thing...

With the three or four Barnes and Noble gift cards we took a trip there today and I bought a hard copy of Mary Higgins' book so Mrs. D. can start reading it...it'll be a long time before she can borrow my birthday gift to read it on the Kindle...in the next few days I'm going to look at the 'free' list again and set up my library in it...I don't know how many books it can hold but I'm going to find out...can I delete the books after reading them? I don't know...I think I can pass the books on to other Kindle readers...it's probably time I read the directions ...but then I'll have to stop reading my books and I don't want to stop...it's way too much fun...
Thanks Julie, Gina, Debby, Leesa and Sarah...

Whooping it up for a week...

For the entire past week my family and friends have kept on celebrating my birthday with more dinners, more gifts and a baseball game...all these made turning the big 7-0 a lot easier to take than a 'normal' birthday...

I mean, I had birthday cakes, birthday wines, birthday Stolichnaya vodkas and birthday restaurant gift cards and birthday Amazon and Barnes and Nobel Kindle gift cards...
I am so tired today after having been driven and dined in San Diego while watching the Dodgers get beaten by the Padres, which we'll have to get used to as 2011 Dodger fans have little hope of finishing better than maybe third place in the Western Division of the National League...

But what a great day yesterday was...the weatherpeople predicted a coldish day but it was 65 to 70 degrees and sunny and warm all day in the circular confines of Petco Park...it makes Dodger Stadium look like a slum...it is a FANtastic park easy to get around, plenty of restrooms for old guys, hot dogs twice as large and better tasting than Dodger dogs and elevators going up and down from the street...
Beside driving there, my daughter Julie procured some outrageous seats almost behind home plate slightly on the first base side and about 15 rows up from the field...
The game had no Dodger highlights only Padre happy moments...good for them...the fans around our seats, and we had Dodger hats and gear on, applauded me when my name appeared on the scoreboard announcing 'happy 70th birthday to Pete Di Lallo' when my two daughters and grand daughter started clapping and yelling happy birthday Dad and Papa...
On our way into the park I semi-jokingly asked a few ushers if we were safe in our Dodger gear as they patted me on the back saying these were Padre fans and not like the fans who almost killed a Giant fan last week in Los Angeles...

it was a cold and stormy night...

A few days ago I took a ride to the library, the same one where all those people couldn't wait to talk to me last time I was there, but this time I brought Sunny along...she's my 11 year old grand daughter who's been living with us for a year or so...I took her there a few weeks before when I returned a few books I'd borrowed... she was anxious to check the place out after reading my last blog...we had fun looking at all the people, most of them there to borrow books like we were....she and I had borrowed a few books each and yesterday we returned them and started looking for more...I made it over to the large print fiction section and I left her by the young adults shelves...
we met a few times at the table and chairs in between to check out what we had selected...I spent an hour or so beforehand researching books for young girls between the ages of 10 and 14 or so and came up with a list of a few dozen of the most recommended ones...Thanks to Google I was able to print the titles, authors and short descriptions of the stories of most of them...
Since she's been living with us I've noticed not only that she's an A student but she reads almost every day...not much of a TV watcher except for a few shows like Glee, The Mentalist and Modern Family...she's a kind of kid who does her homework the minute she gets home from school...
When I'm reading she usually comes over to see what page I'm on and a little while later checks back to see my progress...she loves to keep track of the number of pages I read in a day...
I was happy to pick up Joe Torre's The Yankee Years along with a James Patterson book called London Bridges...she found a Judy Blume book and another the title which I can't remember..she is a little different than I am in that she says she often picks out books by their covers...I told her the one about not judging by the cover, and all that, but she stood fast with the book she selected, about a young girl who's father is running for governor...
After we checked the books out she was reading the governor book as we walked to my car in the parking lot and kept reading it all the way home...what a great kid...she's a lot like her cousin Allison who also reads avidly and with whom I exchange books...

Fun on Friday...

Today I signed up, again, at the O.C. Library in Lake Forest, after not having walked in there for several decades…I remember taking our kids there when they were young, sitting around reading a while and then taking books home…No… I mis-remembered…it was their mother who did it most of the time while I worked…I took them occasionally on weekends...

As I walked to the check-out desk the lady there told me I had to go stand on the red carpet and wait my turn…there were six or seven people in front of me…most of them were around my age; a few started talking to me…I hate talking to people but I was nice and answered them in as few words as possible like, yes, no, OK, sometimes, never, fiction, best sellers, I hate audio books, I can’t stand people reading to me… I wanted to tell them there’s no talking in the library…

Finally it was my turn… I have to remind myself this isn’t a Barnes and Nobel and the employees work for the County and are not always in a hurry to go anywhere…I told the nice lady we once had a card but it was years ago and we didn’t have it anymore…she looked up my name but didn’t find it in the computer… I showed her my picture I.D. and she reminded me that I had a big birthday coming up soon…I filled out a form with my name and address and when I wrote my e-mail address she said she was happy for me because few people my age had a computer and the library could email me with important messages, like, ‘your books are overdue dummy’… I wanted to tell her to shut the hell up and to just give me the freaken card…she said the card normally cost $2.00 but she was waiving the fee…thanks a lot lady…then she said being old has it’s advantages…I didn’t say a word but she was getting on my nerves…I signed the card and when I asked her where the fiction department was she was quick to point out that it was right next to the LARGE PRINT section…the bitch…

I found a couple of books, checked them out finding out that non-best-sellers can be borrowed for three weeks…I left the building, got in the car, turned off the radio and silently drove home.

I couldn't have said it better myself...

Odds of catching a foul ball at a MLB game...

As I sit watching the second pre-season game of the year between the Dodgers and Angels, in Arizona, a game being attended by Julie Hibbard and two of my nieces, Robin and Sherrie who are sitting in the third row behind the Dodger dugout, I've often wondered what the odds are...

I did a quick research and found out that it's totally dependent on where you are sitting...(no kidding) I found that the areas with the highest probability are in the lower deck down the right and left field lines between third base and the foul pole . Maybe 10,000 fans sit in those areas at any particular game, and say 20 foul balls hit each game in those areas would yield a 1 in 500 chance.

THE ODDS: If you went to every home game for a team for five or six years your odds would be about even.

As Julie has experienced , going to the ballpark early before the game starts you have a good chance of catching a ball during batting practice...