Digging out

Good morning from central Kentucky, where we just got another couple of inches of snow, on top of the 10 1/2 inches that fell on Monday.  I shouldn't complain, because we're not in the same position as our friends in Boston, for example, who are closing in on 100 inches for the season.  Honestly, if that happened here, I'm not sure there'd be many folks left here who could stand it, given how poorly our region handles even a little snow.

So I am writing this before trudging out to shovel the latest of our bumper crop of snowfall.  The piles of shoveled snow are rather comical up and down our driveway and such.  For instance, today is allegedly trash day, so our cans are at the bottom of the driveway.  Not by the curb NEXT TO the driveway, because I simply could not get them up onto the snowpiles there.

And it's supposed to be COLD here for the next several days.  Low temps below zero will be common during that period.  But, again, we're more fortunate than other parts of the country.  And I have good friends in northern California who would be delighted to have this much snowfall, as it would help fill the lakes and rivers and make a small dent in the hundred-year drought that area is feeling.

The Kentucky basketball team managed to win at Tennessee last night, in spite of themselves.  I read that the team went to Knoxville on Sunday to beat the weather that struck both here and throughout most of Tennessee.  And they played like they had been sitting around somewhere, but regained their composure in time to post a tidy victory.  If you're not watching closely, Kentucky is undefeated this year, and it's been quite a while since a major-college team made it through the regular season without a loss.

To quote a sportswriter whose blog I read avidly, "TV is my life."  Well, not really, but sometimes my wife and I commit to shows, keep watching them after we've become acquainted with the characters and basic plot, only to wonder after eight or ten episodes why we bothered.  I know a lot of folks liked "Lost," but I felt so manipulated after the first season that I insisted we stop watching.

There was another show that kind of fits that category on recently, "State of Affairs."  I have read that it played a bit like the smash hit drama "Homeland" that airs on the Showtime channel, but with a lesser plot and acting.  I have never seen "Homeland," but frankly, it's bound to have been better historically than "State of Affairs," starring former "Grey's Anatomy" star Katherine "I'm quitting to have a career in motion pictures" Heigl.

Never watched her former show, which is still on the air, suffered through a couple of her numerous romantic comedies (none of which were funny, by the way), and now watched however many episodes of this new show she starred in (and was an executive producer of, incidentally).  Plot was all over the place, characters changed drastically during the run of the show, and all the while I kept thinking that it was sort of like watching Espionage Barbie.  The "season finale" aired Monday night, and now I can free up that hour to watch something else, I guess.

On the plus side, "Marvel's Agent Carter" has been fun, and it was only scheduled to have a limited run, which I suspect is nearly over.  It's a spin-off from the first "Captain America" movie, with a real spitfire star in Hayley Atwell.  The show is set just after World War II, and the period clothing, cars and societal conditions are all pretty interesting.

But I pine for baseball most of all this time of year.  Football is over, college basketball is in that period of lull just before March Madness begins (sorry, NCAA, I can't put the "copyright" mark on this blog), and TV is, well, the vast wasteland that it's always been, perhaps moreso.  I continue to watch the Ken Burns "Baseball" miniseries each year at this time, and I'm moving through it presently.  It's chronological, so I'm now seeing and hearing about the great but troubled Ty Cobb and others from the early part of the last century.  Great stuff!

And there's other good news....the Cincinnati Reds are opening their spring training camp in Goodyear, Arizona today, as pitchers and catchers are reporting this morning.  And invariably, a number of other players will be arriving in the next few days.  Pretty soon we'll have ourselves enough guys to have some games, and then we can play other teams, and then they can start playing for REAL.  But not until April.  Oh, well, it's that much, anyway.


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