Highway to Lowdown

Quick post because it's been a few days. Alas, it's another Tuesday night when I should be playing hockey, but I stayed home to get some work done. I need to get my latest newsletter done for work before we head to Joisey on Friday, so it helped that I made some progress tonight. Plus I won't be exhausted tomorrow, when I really need to kick some butt.

Did my first day of speedwork this morning at the nearby high school track and felt pretty good. I had a softball doubleheader last night and I was worried that I would be stuck catching the whole night, but fortunately I played the outfield for much of the night. Not very well...it's a tough transition going from behind the plate to judging fly balls. At any rate, my legs weren't overly sore, which helped with the sprinting this morning.

We had a crazy-ass thunderstorm move in this afternoon and drop a bunch of rain and some not-quite golf-ball-sized hail on us in Marblehead. I could hear the hail pounding on the roof of the building and looked outside and saw the biggest hail I had ever seen in person; turns out they had even worse hail up in New Hampshire. We got so much rain it flooded our whole lower parking lot. I had to wade out in water nearly up to my knees to get to my car; a few inches higher and the water would have poured into my car when I opened the door.

Have you seen Junior's grades?:

• Scary story from the Big Dig, where 12 tons of concrete fell on a car going through a tunnel last night, killing a passenger. It's bad enough that there are plenty of old bridges and tunnels falling apart in New England from age and weather damage, but now we have to worry about the newer ones as well. This tunnel was built in 1999, but the Big Dig is such a joke that it's not really a surprise that shoddy workmanship went into it. And now the political maneuvering and fingerpointing begins.
• Sad to hear of the death of Syd Barrett, who co-founded Pink Floyd in the late '60s but soon became a recluse after suffering from mental illness exacerbated by mucho acid. Makes you wonder what he could have done if he hadn't lost it so early.
• Speaking of psychedelics, this study reached a stunning conclusion: Mushrooms produce mystical experiences. Wow. I had no idea.