From The Troll...

Howdy blog-o-sphere! The Troll is doing much better today. It never got past 85 degrees yesterday and that is a very good thing for someone who works out doors. I don’t like talking about my current job much, but I will say a few words about it. I am a trained machinist and I have nearly twenty years experience in the metal working industry, I have been the foreman of a shop that did a million dollars a month in business. I am also a journalist. This has never fared as well as my metal working career, but I have had several long-term newspaper jobs and developed a small amount of success in that field as well. Now, I can’t find a job. There are hundreds of thousands of folks out of work with more experience than myself and they are willing to work for peanuts, which makes finding a job very difficult. I am pretty sure that I am not the only unemployed or underemployed blogger out here. I do sell stories from time to time and still take photos for baseball cards, but the pay has gotten less and less. I am trying to reinvent myself and finally get a degree in engineering see what that can for me. Right now, I am a baseball card blogger by day and a security guard by night. It is a fine profession, but it isn’t what I have worked my whole life to aspire to be, I still take pride in my job and I do it well, but I am not necessarily proud of it. The company I work for has two guards. The other one is a great man, a Vietnam vet and a former police officer. He is getting old and losing his touch a bit. I took Sunday night off for a derby benefit and he covered. On his watch three cars were broken into. It was a pretty big deal. As a security guard, that is one of the ways you can have a very bad night. A good night is a boring night; an eventful night is never good. That leaves him at a crossroads and until further notice, he is on voluntary leave which means I will be back to working 7 nights a week. This is good for me financially; my underemployment has left the Troll household in pretty bad shape, so money coming in is always welcome. On a selfish note, I had tickets for Tuesday night’s ballgame that I couldn’t use. I believe that it was the worst attended game of the season for the Rays. It was also a game where Brian Roberts broke Lance Berkman’s single season record for doubles by a switch hitter. Wade Davis also put in a gem of a performance for the Rays, winning his second game. I watched the highlights and read the box score. Just ten-thousand people were on hand for that one, pathetic. Last night, they won again. James Shields pitched 7 innings of shut out baseball, Zobrist and Crawford both homered and Upton stole a pair of bases. I missed that, too. With that win, the Rays clinched a winning record for the season. That’s two years in a row, something to build on. I really love the Rays and I love being there, win or lose. I watch the Marlins on TV a lot and it drives me nuts seeing thousands and thousands of empty seats. It makes me worry about losing baseball in Florida, which is not something I want to happen. I feel pretty out of touch of late. With the blog-o-sphere, with baseball and it is really driving me nuts. I am scanning cards for my next trade post; it should be up in a few hours. I got the remainder of the packages I had planned to ship, shipped. I don’t plan on buying much more wax for a while and I will likely not have too much trading fodder till next year. I do still have plenty of cards to trade; I am just tapped out on certain teams. I have plenty ideas for posting after baseball season and this site will remain a baseball and baseball cards blog. In other words, don’t look for any football on here any time soon. Okay, that’s it for now. Go Rays! Back to scanning. Troll out.