I stopped following baseball after the California Angels - oh, sorry, the "Los Angeles" Angels - won the World Series a few years ago. I stuck with them through the Gene Autry years, winless and heart-breaking, so it seemed that once they finally made it to the top, it could only go downhill from there. Plus this whole "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" nonsense is a bit galling to me.

I suppose I could root for the Philadelphia Phillies. After all, I became a rabid Eagles football fan after the move from Southern California, but I was still an Angels fan then, so I didn't need a baseball team. And now I really don't.

Phils become 1st team with 10,000 losses

Through the last-place finishes, September collapses and every agonizing failure over the past 125 years, no team has lost quite like the Philadelphia Phillies.

Futility has followed them since the day they were born, and Sunday night was no different for the losingest team sports history. Loss No. 10,000 came when Albert Pujols hit two of the St. Louis Cardinals' six homers in a 10-2 rout.

Not surprisingly, this defeat resembled the thousands that came before. Bad starting pitching, brutal relief and hardly any hitting. And, of course, lots of booing.

By the ninth inning, with the outcome inevitable, the boos turned to cheers. Fans in the sellout crowd of 44,872 thumbed their noses at the dubious mark, standing and applauding. One held up a sign that read: "10,000 N Proud" as NL MVP Ryan Howard struck out to end the game.

[Personally, I blame the mascot.]

Gary had to work this weekend, so after I dropped him at the hospital on Saturday morning, I went to Lowe's to buy supplies for the yard, including:

- 6 cinder blocks
- 20 feet of 1" clear plastic tubing
- 2 bicycle cables and locks
- 2 screw eyes
- 2 cubic feet of potting soil
- 2 cubic feet of peat moss
- 2 half barrel planters
- 2 small holly tree

The cinder blocks and tubing are being used for the pond, which is now semi-installed, with about two feet of water in it. I am (slowly) moving one side of the garden to the other in order to build up the sides to the height needed, but I am hoping to have the thing pretty much done by the end of this week. The pump and filter are installed and hooked up, although the water pressure keeps popping the tubing off so I need to get some hose clamps to solve that problem.

The planters and the rest of the stuff were to replace the two lovely sidewalk planters that were ripped off sometime Thursday night. I had two planters stolen over a year ago, and I replaced them with larger ones, their bottoms filled with cinder blocks, and Gorilla-Glued to the sidewalk. They must have weighed fifty pounds apiece. Each had an arborvitae, ivy, some fluffy ground-cover and pansies. And someone must have come with a truck during the night and stolen them.

So the half barrels are now secured with bicycle locks to the screw eyes which are bolted into the side of the stucco wall. I am hoping that the holly stays long enought to grow into something too mean and prickly for anyone to mess with.

[Maybe I need to chain the holly to the wall as well.]

SAVE YOUR CORKS!!

[Only 3,538 more needed for our Wine Cellar Wall.]

Quote du jour:

"Statistics are to baseball what a flaky crust is to Mom's apple pie."

Harry Reasoner (1923 - 1991)
US newscaster, correspondent, journalist

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