We were buried in snow. That’s my excuse for disappearing from the blogosphere for a while. Really, my mind has been a jumble of topics, some of which I’ll recap. First, we’re much closer to opening day. Baseball, I mean. I snagged two tickets to the Phillies home opener April 12 which my son has been longing for, so I obliged. I just hope we don’t have a resurgence of winter and we’re sitting in our ballpark seats with blankets, hats, scarves, gloves and the like and end up forking out big bucks for a couple of cups of hot chocolate.

As I watched the first two televised Grapefruit League games from Clearwater and Kissimmee, FL, I couldn’t help but wonder how the final lineup will be cemented in the next few weeks. One of the Atlanta Braves commentators during last night’s game commented that the Phillies lineup right now is so solid, that if a player has a shirt number in the 50’s, 60’s or 70’s, they could be stuck in the Phillies minor league system for a long time. One of those guys batting last night looked younger than the ball boy – or is that just me seeing time march on?

With spring fast approaching, it’s been terrific to be outside with just a light jacket. I gave the interior of my car a fabulous cleaning the other day, but had to go to the neighborhood car wash to clean the exterior. My husband is sure (and I agree) that turning on the hose faucets would ensure a deep freeze followed by the chance of a bursting pipe. I do love washing my car in the driveway with the portable radio tuned to Phillies baseball. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s sort of like when I’m at the gym. I absolutely have to have something on the TV when I’m doing cardio. These days I’ll watch the Today Show for a while, then flip to Bravo where episodes of The West Wing run from 8-9 a.m. Before I know it, 50 minutes have ticked by as I sweated on the elliptical.

Finally, my son and his room have been bothering me. You can tell me until the cows come home that it’s normal for a 15-year-old to shove things under his bed (including his one and only dress shirt) and continually put all the stuff he should put away on the other side of his bed (not easily seen from the hallway). But I’ll never understand why at some point, the mood doesn’t strike him to straighten things up. We have tried NOT saying anything; we’ve nagged him; we’ve fallen somewhere in the middle and still, he lives in what becomes a pig pen over time. Yuck. Sometimes I think we should remove all furniture and let him live on the carpet. I think he’d be OK with that.