One Shot at Forever by Chris Ballard (2012)

I was at our little league Fiesta about 2 weeks ago and found a beat up paperback gem of a book on my chair.

It is a non-fiction account of a high school baseball team in rural Illinois 1971 that went all the way to state and nearly won the whole thing.  It's a David and Goliath story, and more.  It's also about the hippie coach that made practices optional and encouraged players to do their own thing. These corn fed kids sewed peace symbol patches on their caps.

You may call it mixing your metaphors.  I call it balance. I call it taking the best from both worlds.

Read this one, James.

Where Nobody Knows your Name (2014) by John Feinstein

This is a book by a sports journalist about life in the major leagues. He walks through the career of players looking to make it to the big show, managers, and umpires. It's a great peek into their personal lives and the business aspects of this great game.  How does it feel to be a 40 YO old pitcher whose best case scenario is another season starting at Triple A for a new team?  Interesting stuff.

Read it.

Nomadland (2017) by Jessica Bruder

This is good journalistic reporting about older people who lives in vans and cars and travel from one grueling minimum wage job to another in the middle of nowhere.  They work at Amazon warehouses and national campgrounds.  Read this one.

inventory of trees, berry bushes and grapevines

We have 2 berry bushes, 3 grapevines (not including the one in the front yard that we dropped off), and 36 trees.  So we have a combined 41.  Why 41?  We overshot the mark by one.  We will be getting a greywater system once the permits come through with 40 irrigation outlets. So water from our bathroom sinks and showers and laundry will go to 40 irrigation outlets in the yard.  A couple of our trees will have to share.

Here is the front yard, 16 trees in all, 13 in the main part of the yard and 3 on the strip between the south wall and the driveway.  We have 14 citrus and 2 papayas...

Below is a picture from the porch to the northeast

Below is a picture from the street....

Below are the 5 trees that one day will form a green fence on the north edge of the yard:

 This is one is just to the south, it is a grapefruit tree, papaya tree...

 

 

And now south of that, just to the north of the driveway, is a grapefruit, ladyfinger lime, papaya...

 And to the south of the driveway you can see the lemon tree and orange, but not the buddha hand....

Middle yard we have 4 on the strip between the driveway and wall from the backyard gate to the storage room:

Here they are, from the gate and facing the storage room:

In the backyard, we have 16 trees, 2 berry bushes and 3 grapevines.  We have 4 between the north wall and batting cage: mulberry, date, loquat, and pomegranate.  Then have the 3 grapevines, one recently acquired Afghan mulberry bush, and 12 trees: moringa, pomelo, tangelo, guava, fig, fig, apple, apple, nectarine, mango, almond.

Loquat on the north wall....

Pomegranate which is nearly bare and barely visible in the foreground...

Here is the mulberry bush which is in the northwest corner of the yard....

And here is our cage with the machine. We're putting in clover to green it up a bit.  It can get dusty when it dry.

A view of the backyard south of hte cage...

And just to the south of the cage is the moringa in the foreground...

Here's our pomelo.  We picked this badboy up at a nursery in Riverside a couple months ago. It already have a bunch of flowers on it. We have high hopes...

Here is the Afghan mulberry we bought yesterday. We got it at the Paradise Nursery in Chatsworth for $65.00. It's the one with the light green leaves by the cage.

Here are our two apples. The one with leaves is the superdwarf and superproductive...

Here is the Persian sweet lemon, which is in the circle between the house and the cage. We got this at the Paradise nursery in Chatsworth last weekend.