In lieu of an accounting of my day, which was basically the same as every other day, I herewith submit responses to the comments in yesterday's entry. This is so much easier than trying to be clever on my own, which often backfires. Trust me, I know how I sound sometimes, but I can't seem to help myself.

My grandparents lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of Iowa. We walked a lot. That's what people do in small towns in Iowa, at least in those days. They go for walks, and wave at every single person they see on the street, because everybody knows everybody else. And everyone in town responds to the horn that sounds off at noon by going home to dinner and listening to the farm reports on the radio while eating a massive midday meal. Somehow I was still a skinny little kid at the end of that summer, but it wasn't because my grandma didn't feed me enough, that's for sure.

In yesterday's notify message I mentioned a skunk in my yard last night. That was maybe the third skunk I've seen in the almost 13 years I've lived here, and I've never had a really bad encounter with one. I did find one sitting in the middle of the driveway one night when I was coming home, and I just waited until he left on his own before driving all the way into the garage. It seemed the most prudent way to handle that situation.

Soap operas are great at rehabilitating villains, and I can't think of a better daytime actor to play that shadowy area between good guy and bad guy than Roger Howarth. That's basically who he was as Todd, and after one day I'm totally buying into him as Franco. (In fact, he's a better Franco than Franco, much more nuanced and a lot funnier.) I've enjoyed what Frank and Ron have done with General Hospital since they took over, despite a few missteps, and I trust them to take this story line in an entertaining direction. What more could I ask? (Lotta haters out there in the Twitterverse, though.)

Baseball is pretty conservative about rule changes. I think that's why the designated hitter was such a shock to me when they started using it. I never accepted that a player who didn't play in the field should get a turn at bat. That's definitely NOT how we played it on the playground. Speaking of which...

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Baseball: If the Giants can play any worse than they did tonight, I don't want to see it. They finally got some hits, but they also committed three errors, and the pitching was atrocious from start to finish. The Athletics won again, 9-6, in a game that lasted almost four hours. Even so, the Giants worked their way back into it and gave their fans some hope. Down 6-1 in the fifth, they were only one run behind in the ninth until another error opened the lead up again. It was almost harder to see them lose after coming so close.