JD is scheduled to pitch tonight in a home game versus Oak Park.  He was origianlly scheduled to throw against Grandview on Monday, which became Tuesday due to rain and then it was rained out again.  It has now been rescheduled for early May.  Due to the rain, JD hasn't thrown in 9 days so hopefully his arm is well rested and he shakes off any rust quickly.

I've spent some time recently writing bylaws for my fireworks group.  The intent is to organize as a non profit corporation and we'll be doing that over the summer it appears.  We'll also be holding elections for the Board of Directors and preparing for our annual fall shoot.  We have some local cities who are interested in having our shoot at some of their fall city events so that could tie in quite nicely and possibly save us some funds in regard to product purchases and insurance cost.

We're starting to see some activity at the plant in preparation for the re-tool of the passenger system.  There's a lot of work to be done but when finished, our plant will be able to produce pretty much any product the company would need.  We're also confident that we are getting a stamping plant and that is very good job security for our plant.  Not only would we stamp many of the parts we need locally, we would also stamp parts for other facilities as well.  The total investment at our facility would total over $1 Billion if this comes to fruition.

Our contract expires this fall and the anti-union turds are already proclaiming that the UAW will "greedily" seek to restore the lost wages and benefits that we we agreed to give up almost three years ago.  These clowns have nothing better to do but sit in their cubicle and post in online forums all day on subjects they know nothing about.  Somehow they think labor is strangling the company to the point that they can't compete with foreign competition.  Well, my company made $6.5 Billion last year, all the while providing good paying jobs to American citizens.  Does that look uncompetitive to you?  They've also made another $2.6 Billion in the first quarter of this year.  Yep, they are truly hurting by having to pay a decent living wage to their workers.  I'm not disillusioned and think that we'll get all of what we conceeded to back.  I wouldn't even attempt it, but iof they want equity is sacrifice, there must be equity in gain also.

Maybe we should listen to all of the "Dilbert" office types and lower the wages in this country to those of third world nations so we can "compete", after all, all we hear is that it's a "global economy".   I bet that they don't realize that if you lower one group's wages, everyone's will go down too, eventually.  I guess the cubicle dust has made it to their brains.

We enjoyed our trip back to St. Louis for Easter.  We drove in the night after the severe weather hit the area but fortunately, our families and friends were all safe and they had no damage.  We never made it to the area that was hardest hit but we did see a few downed trees.

JD's team made it to the semi-finals of the Northland Tournament and played Friday not but dropped the game to Staley who then lost the next day to Liberty in the championship.  Last night's conference game was rained out and was moved to today but things aren't looking any better than yesterday.  JD is to pitch, albeit on a tight 50 pitch limit as his coach wants him to pitch against Smithville on Saturday in the Smithville tournament the team is in this weekend.

Jodi is busy refreshing her Photoshop skills so that we can do some custom posters for the team to give to the coaches at the end of the season banquet.  We may try to do a little part time sports photography on the side starting this fall.  Football would be a good season to start with and I think our custom sports posters would be a good seller with the parents.  We'll see if we want to pursue that as time goes on.

JD threw a complete game two hitter the other night and got the Eagles back to .500 on the year.  He had 8 K's and 2 walks in the contest with Winnetonka.  The team seeded third in the Northland tournament and will now play on Friday in an attempt to advance to the championship game.

We'll be making a quick trip to St. Louis for Easter festivities with family this weekend.  I haven't been back since January so it will be good to see everyone again.  Jodi gets back more frequently than I do but with my work schedule and other activities that keep me busy, my available time is pretty limited. 

The night at Community America was a great experience for the team, unfortunately they lost 5-3.  JD pitched well enough but the offense has been pretty anemic of late and the defense made 4 errors behind him.  Here's a few pics of him pitching that night.



That's a big honkin' lens

With JD playing at a pro ballpark tomorrow, I doubt my current telephoto lens has the reach I need to get tight infield shots.  To alleviate my concern and seeing how Jodi doesn't want me to spend $5000 for a lens, I rented a Canon 300mm f2.8 USM II lens to shoot the game with.  I'm getting to shoot from the photographer's camera well just like the pro's do and I'm really looking forward to it.  Here's what my rig will pretty much look like although I plan to use a monopod instead of a tripod.





Not much good to report on the baseball front as the Eagles have dropped their last two contests.  They have three games this week.  The game on Wednesday is at Community America Ballpark and JD gets the start on the mound that game.  It should be a great time and a large crowd on hand. 

Here's a few shots of JD I took last week.  Click on the photos for larger images.