baseball, life, and @meteoritemen

Well, it’s the baseball off season. What to do? The Rams have one win on the season so far (yes, we are on what, Week 8?) and the Blues are off to a rocky start. Albert Pujols goes on the full free agent market at 11:01 PM tonight, we’ve lost our 16-season manager to retirement, Yadier Molina won the Gold Glove for the fourth year in a row, and David Freese seems to be following Justin Bieber from one talk show to another. And oh, by the way, the guys won the World Series. Yeah, just a little thing.



Isn't that video great?? It aired on Channel 5 on Sunday night and the guy who produced it (Larry) posted it on Twitter last night, He's @ksdk_sports on Twitter.

Monday night was Halloween, and was mostly a recovery night from the weekend. Last night, however, some more of my Twitter timeline was available (outside my #stlcards tweeps, that is) and I saw that Geoff Notkin was posting about the upcoming Meteorite Men Season 3 premiere following a Season 2 marathon of the show on Science.

Their seasons are 8 episodes, but they are enjoyable. The premise of the show is the space-rock pursuing adventures of Geoff and his fellow hunter Steve Arnold, who uncovered the world’s largest oriented pallisite. I love the description of that find – equipment was listed as ‘sophisticated modern metal detecting equipment (…) and a backhoe.’ I’m so used to people digging things out of the ground with hand tools and brushes that the backhoe reminded me of the line from Indiana Jones: “You would use a bulldozer to find a....china cup...” Geoff is very particular (my impression) and Steve is very much a ‘jump up and let’s go get-em!’ guy. The thinker and the do-er, paired up to hunt for bits of space stuff. They are a LOT of fun to watch. It's like David Bowie vs Led Zepplin. heee

Geoff posted several messages on Twitter last night, and one of them was that he was also a blogger on a website in Tucson, where he lives. All of my exposure to Geoff has been via the TV, and so I was curious about the blog. What else to do in the off-season?!?

I’m glad I clicked.

Geoff had a good friend who passed away a few days ago, and so he put up a couple of blog posts about this friend. I read the second one first, as it was the most recent entry, and was really struck with not only the tone of the post but the insight into Geoff.

First, I have to agree that there comes a point when a person with a terminal illness just has to say ‘stop, enough is enough.’ Most of you who read this blog know that my stepfather passed away earlier this year after fighting his stage 4 cancer for over 3 years. He decided in November that he’d had enough of the treatments and that he was done. Some of you may know that I lost another friend in December of 1995 due to aggressive bone cancer. In his case, the cause of his illness was not found until it was far too late to fix the problem, and anything that could be done would have just been for quality of life. One of my last memories of Tom was watching a Rams football game with him on a Thursday night. Isn’t it odd what we remember?

Second, anyone who thinks that choosing to stop treatment is tantamount to committing suicide needs to have their own head examined. There is a point when the non-terminal person or people involved need to think of the terminal individual and not themselves. Yes, I know that is the most difficult thing to say and do, and no-one wants to just give up, but I would hope that if I was incapacitated, and someone else had to make that decision, they would think of me and how I would live from that point on and not of themselves. It irked me that Geoff had to address the individuals who considered the act of choosing to stop treatment as a sin – deal with it in your own life and then get back to me about it being a ‘sin’. Grrr.

I haven’t been to the intentional suicide point, thankfully, but I’m saddened and somewhat amazed by those who take that route. I’ve been dogged by depression several times, but not to that level.

I have to say, however, that I am envious of those who have the courage to drop everything and take a leap of faith that Geoff did. I am very glad that he had a friend who had the ability to help him detour from the path that would have lead to nowhere. If she hadn’t been there for him, how would all of us (who are still going about our mundane existences) have been entertained by two guys looking for rocks from space? Thank you, Anne Husick; you don’t know me from Eve, but thanks. I wish I had the courage to be that bold.

Gee, I think I’ve written more in this ramble than I have about anything else for a while.

I would recommend Geoff’s blog on the Tucson Citizen site. It’s an interesting read, and has things that sometimes will make you go Hmmm. I really liked the post from Sept 13  and the one from Sept 11 made me cry. Again.

By the way, the season premiere for Meteorite Men is on November 28.

Go think happy thoughts. Baseball pitchers and catchers report in 108 days!

Cheers!