Absent like the Red Sox

And I thought that my blogging slump in August had been bad! 

Yet September proved worse for my postings, which appeared even less frequently during that month than wins by the Red Sox or Braves.  And now my October hiatus from blogging has begun to resemble the absence of A Rod’s power in the post-season. 

But unlike the Red Sox who swilled away their swollen advantage and vanished from post-season prospects, there is an explanation for my blogging disappearance, sort of.

Following my final anthem tour appearance in San Bernadino on Labor Day weekend, I had almost 13 hours between the time that I returned home from the game and the start of my annual professorial responsibilities at Whittier College the next afternoon.  13 whole hours, some of which I wanted to spend in my own bed, and a few of which needed to be spent learning the names of my incoming students and beginning to prepare my course syllabi for the impending semester.

When classes started three days later I got submerged in the quagmire of daily preparations for my three quite different courses.  So while I’ve worked on grading students’ essays in recent weeks, I’ve fallen even farther behind in my writing than I had experienced during the final surge of the Minor League season.

Naively I had thought that it would be relatively easy to transform my detailed notes about travel, cities, ballparks, and games into posts.  Incredibly, I had thought that I might be able to finish blogging about a “missing game” every other day or so, even after I returned home and resumed my normal professorial duties.  But the wear and tear of driving 28712 miles, making it on schedule to 104 anthem performances, and worrying about Arby and Toad performances on a daily basis drained more energy than I had thought I might have. 

What then is the future of writing about my anthem project?  Completion.  It’s that simple and that demanding.

Within the next couple of days, I’ll post a blog about the final game of the Minor League season, and then I’ll resume my efforts to reflect on each game, ballpark, and city along the way.  The good news is that, with my courses now well underway and without daily distractions by the NBA in the next few weeks (and months, perhaps), I’ll turn my efforts back to blogging about my anthem experiences in the "missing games" from last season. 

So during the doldrums between the end of the World Series and the beginning of Spring Training, I’ll savor a taste of Winter Ball, not by focusing on the Dominican League but by reflecting on the incredible baseball and patriotic adventure of this past summer.