A Return to Baseball
Looking back through the archives, I don’t think I’ve ever actually written about our baseball ticket group. State Farm Insurance Agent Kirk Detlefsen (and his family) have been running a Twins season ticket group for quite some time. I was introduced to them through my Northwest Airlines mentor six years ago and have been hooked ever since.
Each season, Kirk buys up a bunch of season tickets in different sections, then divides them into shares at various price points. A ticket “draft” is held every year and each shareholder picks the games they want to attend. Usually this is held in February in the Delta Club with snow on the field, guest speakers from the Twins and an assortment of ballpark food available for purchase. We didn’t have one at all in 2020 and the 2021 version was held via Zoom (of course). Kudos to all the Detlefsens for pulling that off (and managing 100% digital tickets for the first time ever).
The smallest share in the group is two tickets to two games in the Champions Club. Since these seats are super expensive (and generally not available to the general public via single game sales), this was a nice way to splurge once a year (I split the share with my uncle). After a few years of that, we switched to a share with two seats for ten games in the Delta Club. That’s what we currently have, although it appears that our actual seats may be all over this season because of capacity restrictions.
So what was the return of fans like?
Buzzed through book two – pretty sure I know why @AndrewRCraven liked it ☔️
You’d think after all these years, I’d know how to dress for April baseball ⚾️ 🥶
Thank you, science – so happy to be back @SaintDinette in person ❤️
With Wirecutter backing, bought the Archer AX50 WiFi6 router. Now TP-Link won’t upgrade to WPA3 via firmware 😠
Kate’s Sky High Flip
New doge cage sticker
I’ll take top 10% of patrons
Sensory overload: Masters, Twins, Frozen Four, WiFi monitoring, vaccination security cameras and work email/chat
Ready for the jabs
Best Zantigo in town
Excited to help this weekend
The neighbors are back! Good luck to the @SaintDinette crew – see you on Friday
This Shields and Yarnell episode of The Muppet Show is wild – she died of an aneurysm in 2010 (and had moved to Norway)
This cherry donut though…
Not just chippies
Summer in April
What a lark!
Best when hot
It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets on the Muppet Show tonight…
- The Muppet Show Theme
Warm river ride
Giant cheezy & Jell-O eggies
Great to see @Bigdad3233 and his son today at Brookview – the kid took all the money
Favorite sale of the year
A cold, blustery start
The Tourney ‘21
Straight Outta Cannon Falls
Springtide Splendor ‘21
Finally read a book before watching the movie – liked the book waaaaay better
These two, though ❤️
Not the same grilled
A very green green
Lots of little ones
15 Years of Publishing
Happy 15th birthday, 7 Minute Miles! Current stats:
- 12,192 Posts
- 216 Pages
Skipping unique visitors or page counts this year, as my web server logs are all mixed up after the big move to AWS Lightsail. I do hope to get that cleaned up soon – want to learn how the new nginx logs differ from Apache (which I used for years). WordPress.com stats report 8,066 visitors in 2020, along with 20,522 views, but I don’t really know how they calculate that. They also report that the “Reflections on Spring Hill Golf Club” post continues to be one of my most visited stories of all time. Rather hoping this will be the year I actually play there…
Won’t get too much into the technical weeds this time, as I have a lot of things cooking right now that I’m sure I’ll cover in more detail soon. Aside from the move to virtual AWS servers, I’m still on WordPress (v5.7) with the same old custom theme and the same set of plugins I had last year. Hoping for a new look in 2021, but I don’t know the timing of that launch yet. No new functionality recently – just lots of under the hood things (including a fix for the weird SSL/emoji issue).
Thanks for visiting!
My guilty indulgence
Golf round cancelled due to weather, so I spent the afternoon moving servers in AWS – I think most bugs have been squashed
Great food, cocktails and company tonight at Chip’s Clubhouse in Saint Paul
Brian Christopher Slots
It seems hard to believe, but I’ve now been out of the casino industry almost six years. Being an old person, I still visit casinos on a regular basis (more on that age demographic thing later). I keep in touch with a number of my former colleagues and suppliers and get an occasional industry newsletter in my inbox from time to time. A recent one had a link to a story in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that I thought was super interesting: The Plaza downtown was opening an area of their slot floor dedicated to a YouTuber named Brian Christopher.
As a nerd, I’m normally pretty open to new gaming trends, but I never fully understood the desire to watch other people play video games on Twitch (and other services). To see that a major casino in Vegas was partnering with someone who records himself playing slot machines was surprising to me, given what I know about casino marketing and security. I started following the BC Slots channel on YouTube about a month ago and I have to admit I now understand the appeal.
So what’s this all about?
Here’s some money. Go see a Star War.
- Lucille Bluth
Had serious doubts at the start, but shorts were the right call for today’s lunch break ride
Not bad for an amateur
Took me longer than expected, but now running phpMyAdmin 5.1.0 with PHP 8.0.3
The Easter Classic
Added sausage this week
Can’t believe the Menards guy is the richest Cheesehead (and what’s with all the Mars candy billionaires?)
You stay classy, San Diego
One jab in, one to go
Wow. He did not give a fuck. What’s his name again?
- Jay Roach, Barry S2 E7
The 63F felt nice, but the 30mph winds were tough to ride through (17C/48kph for @chuckgoolsbee)
Only the third time I’ve started the MN golf season in March (last was 2012) – shot 82 @ Willinger’s
Spending time with our pals
Last of the take-out?
Re-watching all of the original Muppet Show episodes and I have a new appreciation for Rowlf (and the writers)
Desk napper
24 hours to the start of my 2021 golf season 🏌️♂️
Happy customer of @1Password since version 4, but wow did I have a lot of junk to clean up
Marlene’s Mythical Flip
Our car is a 2017, so it’s a bit eye-opening to look at new car options. This might be a 2022 thing (or later)
Pizza with Jeff, Joyce & Peter
Back at it this week
It was really, really nice to have an entire week off work (and someone else to cover on-call). It’s also great to see some movement in the fight against COVID-19, both on the vaccine front and in the sports and entertainment world. I really felt recharged and ready to move forward this morning, as there are a lot of things that need my attention right now:
- Find a vaccine – my tier is up now, so I’ve got tabs open in my browser for all the big providers. Also discovered vaccinespotter.org (above), which is a big help. Briefly thought I snagged one for this afternoon, only to be kicked out of the process at the end (just like a hot concert ticket). And as the new South ParQ Vaccination Special said, “There’s a place in town, very hard to get into, very exclusive. Walgreens.“
- Reconnect at work – continuation of the file server saga, spring cleaning on software licensing and backups, starting a new firewall upgrade project and generally preparing for the return of ticketed guests to the building. Sounds like I might even get to hire some help this summer, which would be super awesome.
- AWS servers – the $100 credit I received from the re:Invent survey is almost used up, so I need to get back to moving this site off of virtual server one and over to the new virtual server I started experimenting with. That way I can shut the first one down and start figuring out a bunch of things on Ubuntu Server 20.04, including virtual host management, transfer of Let’s Encrypt certs, log analysis and WordPress theme development. It’s already been (nerdy) fun switching from Apache to nginx and from MySQL to MariaDB and kicking the tires on PHP8. WordPress 5.7 is the first release in a long time that did something to my (admittedly) ancient theme: the spacing below quote and status posts on the front page is off. Since I use Masonry and jQuery for layout, I thought it had to do with the upgrade of core WP jQuery from 1.12.4 to the 3.5.x tree mentioned here. After testing with the Enable jQuery Migrate Helper plugin, however, I don’t think this is the root cause (my version of Masonry is also pretty old). Stayed tuned…
- Construction – the design center meeting for the new house last week lasted just under four hours and everything has now been finalized and signed. Next, we move on to the electrical meeting, which has been scheduled for early April. So excited!
- Baseball – the announcements last week about fans at CHS Field (2,700) and Target Field (10,000) mean both of our ticket groups are about to fire up again. The Saints begin their new Triple A life at home on May 11th, while the Twins welcome fans back to Minneapolis on April 8th. I don’t know yet how many games we will end up with, but I’m very excited to watch more outdoor baseball in 2021.
- Exercise – my Apple Watch move streak hit 333 days last night, so I’m getting very close to my goal of one full year. Also found out last week that there will be a limited, in-person field for the 2021 Get in Gear 10K, which will include multiple waves and a sidewalk-only course. I was able to snag one of the spots and look forward to running outside more in the coming weeks to prepare.
- Taxes – ugh, just don’t want to start this yet. Also need to do my dad’s taxes one last time too, so that’s a double bummer. Not too scared of the potential financial hit for 2020, just thinking it will be more complex than normal. Hopefully TaxAct is up to the task (as they usually are).
Now back to refreshing those vaccine screens…
Lemon yellow sun, arms raised in a V, and the dead lay in pools of maroon below…
- Jeremy
Near-miss Orchid Greatness
Only 10 days to go
