Here comes the sun...

The seemingly unending rain finally stopped and we were greeted to bright sunshine upon waking up this morning. We took advantage of the weather and spent a good portion of the day outside. The lawn got a long overdue mowing this morning. I hadn't mowed in two weeks due to the rain last weekend and it was way overgrown. The kids ran around in the backyard while I mowed and they even helped with a bit of weeding.

Spring activities are starting to wind up as we get close to the end of the school year. R. finished swimming lessons yesterday. A. says she has really progressed during the last couple of sets of lessons. J. returned from the disabled list to play at the "sort of" last baseball game of the season. I say "sort of" because, although this was the last scheduled game, they did schedule a couple of makeup games to replace some of the games we missed because of the rain. His injured pinky seemed to be just fine, as he played the field, threw, and smacked a line drive for a base hit.

The Red Sox had kind of an odd weekend. They split four games with the Texas Rangers after winning the last game of the Yankees series on Thursday night. The weather played a big part in the schedule. The Sox were supposed to play a doubleheader (separate admission - single admission doubleheaders are a thing of the past at Fenway) yesterday, but game 1, which was supposed to start at 1:00 got delayed until early evening and game 2 got pushed back until today at 5. Today's scheduled game got moved back from 2 to 12 noon.

The big onfield news was the walk-off home run by (who else?) Big Papi in the bottom of the 9th of game 1 for a 5-4 Red Sox win. I'll never get tired of seeing those Ortiz game winners. Unfortunately, David Pauley was unable to recreate his magic from Yankee Stadium and was knocked around for 6 runs in 5 innings by the Rangers in game 2, then was followed by a succession of ineffective relievers as the Sox dropped the nightcap 13-6. Most disappointing was the fact that old friend John "Way Back" Wasdin was on the hill for the Rangers and the Sox were only able to manage 3 runs in 5 and 2/3 innings. The boys have a day off tomorrow to recover from the schedule before heading to Minnesota to meet the Twins.

Finally, we saw the new Disney/Pixar movie Cars on Saturday. It was very entertaining, although not quite up to the standards of Pixar's best efforts. Still, it was worth seeing and it got enthusiastic thumbs up from both R. and J. What is truly amazing is how CGI animation continues to progress. Many of the scenes looked like they were photographed. If it wasn't for the fact that the characters were all sentient automobiles, it would have been tough to tell that this wasn't filmed by a group of people with cameras somewhere.

I haven't forgotten about the Jason Grimsley mess. I'll talk about that later in the week.