It's Almost Spring Training Time

The catchers and pitchers have reported and the rest of the teams will be here soon! The first Cactus League game for the Mariners will take place on February 27th. I sat down yesterday with the Cactus League sortable schedule that had all of the games the Mariners will be playing this spring. We had decided that we would try to see one game at each of the various ballparks in the valley. There are ten ballparks. I was able to get tickets to nine games at eight of the ballparks. The only two I was unsuccessful in getting games at were Maryvale Baseball Park because the Mariners don't have a game with the Milwaukee Brewers and at Phoenix Municipal Stadium.

We have gotten way too old to sit on the grass or in the bleachers without seat backs, so tickets are getting a bit expensive due to wanting to snag some of the better seats. It took me most of the day to obtain tickets to all the games, one by one. You would think there would be a central ticket office where you could just order tickets for all the games you wanted and just pay one time. But no, you have to go to each ballparks online ticket office, pick out the seats you want, then go through all the rigamarole with a credit card to pay for them. Then you go to the next ballpark and start over again. About half the parks use Ticketmaster, but there's no linkage between them...

Today was about the nicest day we have had for a long time. It got to 72 degrees with beautiful clear blue skies. We opened the new rug we had gotten at Camping World to put under our canopy. I had screwed up when we bought it -- I thought we were getting a 9x12 foot rug, but actually picked up a 6x9 foot one. I'm not sure whether I'll just get another one the same size or whether we'll go ahead and get a bigger one.

I had also bought some bungee cord to repair my lounge chair where the cords had snapped on one side (they get hard and rot in the sun). It was a lot easier to do than I had expected, although the repair kit had shorter cords than were originally on the chair. We just ended up using two of them instead of one long one.