The Week That Was

NOTE: I had intended to post this entry on Sunday, 09/14/25, but because of some kind of language that Open Diary deemed inappropriate, I was unable to post it when I had originally intended.  There were some challenges in getting this entry prepared for posting, specifically in that I had to find the inappropriate words or phrases (on my own, with zero guidance or direction from OD) and make some changes.  In the end, there was only one word that I had to change.  Perhaps for the sake of making this entry maybe a little more entertaining to read, any text in red will denote a word that I thought was one of the inappropriate words that OD had flagged.  Obviously, if you’re seeing words in red, those words were deemed safe and were essentially pushed through and otherwise approved when I finally posted this.  Enjoy.       

I still don’t do much with my life, beyond everything that I do during my work hours and doing what I have to do to earn that paycheck.  Life, at least for me, is pretty bland.  Even work has become very ho-hum.

The following occurred during this past week, to which I am referring as “the week that was”.  Clever, I know.

As I mentioned in a previous post earlier in the week, Dad had a birthday on Monday.  That picture above was the moon that morning at about 4:30am, when I left the house.  Didn’t do anything for Dad that day, beyond sending him a celebratory text message.  He didn’t respond to it, by the way, which makes me question whether he even received it.  In the end, I never asked him.  I’m just going to assume that he received it, but didn’t know how to reply to it.  Technology continues to elude him.

On Wednesday and as has been my brother’s tradition for going on three or four years now, we brought Dad to the Cincinnati Reds-San Diego Padres in San Diego game that evening.  Dad has been a Padres fan since the early 80’s.  My brother and his wife still have Padres season tickets, so they had the means to get tickets for that game.  In the end, we all had a good time, that is, until the game ended.  The Reds would win the game, 2-1.  Oh yeah.  If I hadn’t mentioned it before, I am a Reds fan and have been since 1989.  Needless to say, I went home happy.  As of this writing, the Reds have not won a game since, as they have lost their last three games, this time to the nomadic Athletics, formerly of Oakland.

The Reds won that game, as I already mentioned, but the time in the stands was equally entertaining, well, depending on perspective, I suppose.  That picture above shows the shirt and hat I wore that night.  The Padres’ right fielder, Fernando Tatis Jr., hit a home run in the bottom of the 5th inning, which would prove to be the only run that San Diego would score that night.  As tends to happen when players hit home runs, especially in their home stadiums, the crowd went absolutely nuts.  The fans cheered and understandably made all kinds of noise, as fans do.  Normally whenever Tatis hits a home run, I’d be equally ecstatic like the rest of the Padre faithful, but that night, I was one of the few Reds fans on-hand who could not have cared less about that home run, which thankfully didn’t mean anything in the end.  I didn’t care that Tatis homered, but as it turns out, there was also another fan a few seats over who apparently didn’t like the home run either, though for a completely different reason.  Shana, my sister-in-law, couldn’t help but notice that as the crowd continued to cheer Tatis’ home run and as Tatis rounded the bases, a little boy in one of the seats to the left of us happened to have his head down and he looked to be in tears.  As we’re seeing this boy hiding his face in the baseball glove he brought with him, we noticed that he would take both hands and cover his ears.

Shana and I were never out to make fun of this kid, though we were wondering why he had buried his head the way he did, especially after a Padre had hit a home run.  It was a weird sight at first, but it wasn’t until we saw him cover both ears while his head was still in his baseball glove that we thought we had a good idea what was going on.

We figured that this little boy was “on the [autism] spectrum” and that he was likely averse to the sudden change in the ambient noise in that stadium.  Prior to that home run landing into the left field seats, the crowd was quiet, being that there was really nothing to cheer about.  The ensuing roaring crowd noise after Tatis homered had to catch him by surprise and he responded the best way he knew how, that being, lowering his face and covering his ears.  I was not out to make fun of this kid because that sort of thing is indeed very real and truthfully, it sucked that he had to experience that.  We wondered if this happened to be the first professional baseball game he attended, because it seemed that the noise really got the best of him.  At most, Shana and I wondered why his parents would have brought him to such a venue, knowing that he didn’t do well with loud noise.  Had there been more scoring in that game, this little boy might have gone completely insane.  Being that the Padres wouldn’t score again, this little boy looked like he enjoyed the rest of the game.  Even as the Reds scored their two runs in the top of the 8th inning, the Reds fans that were there wouldn’t make anywhere near as much noise as the Padres fans did three innings earlier.

Now, if we were going to make fun of anyone, it would have been this little boy’s younger brother, who we speculated may have also been on the same autism spectrum his older brother was presumably on.  Shana again (who is apparently way too observational than maybe she ought to be) happened to look over to our left and she saw the little brother openly digging in his nose like he lost something up there and very much wanted to find it.  He continued to dig quite vigorously and once he was finished, he proceeded to take the contents of his nose, as these remained piled on his right index finger, and put this finger and contents right into his mouth.  Much like what happens when you drive by a violent and gruesome car wreck, as much as you know you shouldn’t look at it, you can’t help but look right at it.  I looked over twice and eventually stopped caring, while Shana would stare at him for who knows how long.  I will tell you.  As gross as something like that might have been, I will give this kid some credit for doing something that he found pleasurable and continued to do it regardless of who may have been looking at him.  He did not give a damn who was looking and he just kept on going.  I usually don’t care about what other people think either, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to dig deeply into my nose in public.  To that kid, hey, more power to you, young man.  You do your thing and keep eating.  It’s your world.  We’re all just here paying rent.

I suppose Shana wasn’t the only one who was maybe enjoying the stands more than the actual game.  Prior to the action in the 5th inning and then again in the 8th inning, there wasn’t a whole lot going on and I suppose we all had some down time in between the minimal scoring this game had offered.  There was a busty Latina sitting in the seats about two rows in front of us.  She was pretty, though I don’t know I would have labeled her as fine or gorgeous.  Maybe, just maybe, whatever deficiencies her face had were easily masked by her chest, which her top/blouse did a poor job of concealing.  Still, this was a bit of eye candy that I, and I assume many of the other men in the vicinity, would have easily happened to see.  She had some kind of sign in her hand, that I think she had written for Tatis and had hoped that he would see.  I wasn’t able to see her sign, not because I wasn’t focused on the sign, but because she never turned around in such a way to where I could see the front of the sign.  Regardless of what her sign said, Tatis never saw her sign and given how far we were sitting from right field (we were seated at field level and actually had great seats), I am almost certain that he never saw her nice rack either.  His loss, I suppose, though while I got to see some quality Latina breasts that night, he’s still a millionaire.  I guess in some way, I lose.

So, the baseball game came and went.  We’ll look to go to another game next season in September, though there is also a chance that we take in another game earlier in the season.  We still have time to figure it all out.

The following morning, life as I knew it resumed and as per my usual, I was back in the office parking lot at 4:42am.  That’s about the time I usually get to the office, give or take a minute or two.  But Thursday morning was a lot noisier than I was used to.  As I arrived in the parking lot and parked my car, I heard some kind of weird noise outside.  I couldn’t immediately tell what it was, but it sounded like an engine or some kind of motor.  Was there really some kind of machinery running so early in the morning?  At that hour, just before 5am, the world is asleep, if not completely dead to me, except for maybe the security guards that hang in and around the building.  The surrounding area, especially around the outside of my car, should be absolutely quiet.  I shouldn’t hear anything, not a fucking peep, not even from the local homeless who sometimes roam the vicinity.

As I exit my car, I go to my trunk and retrieve my backpack.  The weird sound I heard earlier becomes clearer and as it does, the fact that I can hear it makes less and less sense.  With my backpack in hand, I lock my car and make my way to the office, walking a little faster than I normally do.

In the adjacent parking lot, there looked to be a gardener, probably Mexican (because I am in Southern California), armed with a leaf blower, already working and seemingly blowing away leaves, stray branches, and twigs, in nearly absolute darkness.  The lights in the parking lot were not lighting his parking lot any, as those lights were well above the trees under which this man was blowing away debris.  He was blowing away something under a tree and pretty much in complete darkness.  He was steadily walking in the opposite direction from where I was walking and the last thing I wanted was for this man to engage with me in any capacity.  I want to say that I could still hear his leaf blower going for at least another 20 minutes after I had already entered the building.  Eventually, I tuned it out and went about my early workday.  As for him, I can’t vouch for how effective he might have been doing his job in that early morning darkness, but if he was getting paid at that hour, can I really say anything?  At most, I will say that he probably did a shitty job.  He might as well have had his eyes closed the entire time, because in that kind of darkness, he wasn’t seeing a damn thing without any kind of light source.

Speaking of light, the outside light just above the west side entrance of the office was out again.  It’s been like that for much of the last going on two weeks, though earlier in the week, the light was on, but very dim.  That light is very much a microcosm for the office as a whole.  Most of the people in the office are dim, though sometimes they are completely out and otherwise useless.  I told management about it (the light, not about my dim coworkers), but it has to be addressed.  I anticipate that the light will still be out when I get to the office early tomorrow morning.  As long as that gardener isn’t working at 4:40am again, I suppose I’ll be all right.  Gardeners working in the dark.  I can’t explain it and I won’t try to.  Maybe it makes sense to that guy, but it sure as hell doesn’t make sense to me.

USC won yesterday, having beaten the Purdue University Boilermakers by a final score of 33-17.  I think there was lengthy weather delay that prevented the game from starting, but in the end, USC comes out victorious and runs their record to 3-0 this season.  Those weather challenges merely prolonged the inevitable.  USC was heavily favored and thankfully, the Trojans did not disappoint yesterday.  I was minimally concerned about the potential for a USC loss.

UCLA lost this week and drops to 0-3.  Yup, that sounds about right.

I worked yesterday for about six hours.  Still getting that overtime, as I do.  The office was quiet.  That light outside was still out.  No gardener though, so that was a plus.

I didn’t do too much today.  Just followed some NFL scores online, in lieu of actually watching live football.  Obviously, I found the energy and finally some motivation to write.  Yes, I am aware that this is a long entry, one of the longer ones I’ve written in quite some time.  It’s amazing what the body and mind can do when motivated.

That’s it for now.  Tomorrow, I’ll be back in the office for the start of yet another work week.  I can only imagine what kinds of stupidity will present itself in the coming days.  I want to think that I’ll be ready for it, but truth be told, I can’t always say that I will be.  You just never know what kind of dumb will overwhelm you, even if just a little.  In that office, dumb is ever-present.  Thankfully, it doesn’t follow me when I leave the office.  My personal life is nowhere near as dumb as my professional life and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

If you’ve made it this far and were truly reading this entry (or maybe just digging the pretty colored words that appear sporadically throughout this entry), you might have noticed that one of the words in this entry is green.  This is the word I had to use because the original word I wanted to use was the one that made the whole entry inappropriate and unable to be saved.