{"id":4376,"date":"2020-05-04T13:24:07","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T20:24:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/?p=4376"},"modified":"2020-05-05T09:43:51","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T16:43:51","slug":"theres-gonna-be-baseball-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/theres-gonna-be-baseball-again\/","title":{"rendered":"There&#8217;s Gonna Be Baseball Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A brief check-in: I wrote There&#8217;s Gonna Be Baseball Again when figuring out my taxes. I always talk baseball with my accountant as his son is a star college player projected to be the #1 or #2 selection in the upcoming major league draft. In a normal year that would mean a big payday of $6 to $8 million. Probably not this year. The tune is based on the theme song of Gene Autry: Back in the Saddle Again. Who better than the original singing cowboy to cheer things up.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"There&#039;s Gonna Be Baseballl Again\" width=\"1280\" height=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/h7lvu7A9kBs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>My wife Padma and I are fine. We&#8217;re probably in better shape than\u00a0anyone in an apartment with a grumpy spouse or kids at home. I can mow the\u00a0parched grass, weed-whack, rototill, and think about fixing my roof but not worryabout it too much because it stopped leaking thanks to the latest drought. Maybe next year.\u00a0I can play guitar and sing out loud in my den without bothering anyone. I\u00a0could never get loud in an apartment. Padma\u2019s a movie addict and can watch\u00a0subtitled flicks all day long and somehow like it. We\u2019re dealing with overly-closeness\u00a0by daily Scrabble games. So far it\u2019s kinda working. Gin (the card game,\u00a0not the drink) may be next, or backgammon, which I\u2019ve played maybe twice, fifty\u00a0years ago. It\u2019s based based on dice, which I hate. I always lose at dice. I can\u2019t see\u00a0either of us getting into video games, but who knows.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been working at the Area Census Office (ACO) in Santa Rosa since late\u00a0December. Our office is responsible for the seven counties between the Golden\u00a0Gate Bridge and the Oregon border. I\u2019m an Office Operations Supervisor, an\u00a0\u201cOOS\u201d (rhymes with \u201cgoose\u201d), a rank somewhere between a corporal and a\u00a0sergeant. I began a journal, figuring to write about the experience, months ago.\u00a0We\u2019ve been off since Mar. 18. It was crazy WAY before\u00a0Corona. I plan to go to the very end of whatever comes of the 2020Census and\u00a0relate the experience, however it turns out. In theory, I should be one of the last to\u00a0be laid off because of my \u201cveterans\u2019 preference\u201d (thank you Richard Nixon!). The\u00a0job was supposed to end in July, but now, who knows?\u00a0It\u2019s not like being on the first wave off the boats in Normandy, or charging\u00a0up San Juan Hill, but being in a Census ACO in a pandemic seems like an\u00a0opportunity to be a part of history. And also a kind of civic duty, or some such\u00a0corniness. The decennial census is critically important to how America functions,\u00a0or doesn\u2019t. Who knows, perhaps I\u2019ll actually help make it work.<\/p>\n<p>So what\u2019s next? I just turned 72. Some say I should be retired, but I still\u00a0haven\u2019t figured out what to do when I grow up. The pay isn\u2019t too bad, considering.\u00a0What\u2019s the risk? Should I roll the dice, even though I seem to always lose at dice?\u00a0How much history is left to live? Is it worth the money? What will there be to spend it on? Is it the experience, a once in a lifetime kind of thing?\u00a0The census ACO is full of greying AARP types looking for extra income or\u00a0who were bored in retirement and wanted something to do. But that last week many\u00a0dropped out due to susceptibility to the virus, as did younger workers who have\u00a0kids that are suddenly at home instead of at school. I now better understand the\u00a0Chinese curse: \u201cMay you live in interesting times.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A brief check-in: I wrote There&#8217;s Gonna Be Baseball Again when figuring out my taxes. I always talk baseball with my accountant as his son is a star college player projected to be the #1 or #2 selection in the upcoming major league draft. In a normal year that would mean a big payday of<br \/> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/theres-gonna-be-baseball-again\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,35,37,36,38,16],"tags":[26,117,118,105,68,119,58,87,116],"class_list":["entry","author-scottadmin","post-4376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-corona","category-fun","category-history","category-life","category-music","category-songs","tag-baseball","tag-corona","tag-covid-19","tag-folk-song","tag-guitar","tag-normal","tag-personal","tag-song-demo","tag-virus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4376"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4390,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4376\/revisions\/4390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.castaliapub.com\/williamscottmorrison\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}