Shortest work day yet (Day 9)

It seems almost fitting that I would wake up on someone's floor after all the discussions about me being homeless over the last couple of days.

But I now had a home, with permanency for the duration of my stay in Australia. It felt pretty good.

I didn't even make it back to that home until the evening though. It seemed to make more sense for me just to shower at Carl's and change into whatever clothes I had in my backpack than it did for me to go all the way home and all the way back. Plus, I had no sense of where the office is, so chances of me getting there on my own were slim.

Carl introduced me to the bus system in Brisbane and I managed to follow him without getting lost. He pointed out a bunch of stops and places I could go if I could find my way back to the same bus line again the future. I'm sure it will all prove to be very helpful but at this point, it is still a bit confusing to me. I'll get there eventually.

At the office Carl had Carl things to do so I took it upon myself to do some research. This of course was after we made an attempt to get my Paul story up on the Bandits website. After all of our training and the entire reason for going to the Gold Coast yesterday, we still couldn't seem to make it happen. It definitely  made me feel like a bit of a failure and I was pretty disappointed in myself that I couldn't do it.

Carl eventually took to it on his own and had more success, so I decided that I need to learn more about this team. Especially if I want to do more stories on them.

When I sent Baseball America the Paul story that I had written I asked if I could do more on the ABL for them. And instead of just wanting to wait around for them to ask me for stories I wondered if I just wrote articles whenever I find myself with the time and resources here, could I send them to BA? And if they have room for them in the magazine, great. If not, would they run them online? BA seemed okay with that, having me report from down under. So I look forward to that, and hence why the increased amount of research.

I mean really I should know more about the team that I am working for anyway, but this opportunity provided me with the motivation necessary to get to work on it. And also it's probably the first day I've had time to sit down and look some things up and write some things down.

I found several Canadian connections, like the fact that Justin Erasmus and Andrew Campbell played at tournaments in Canada, Chris Mowday was on the Blue Jays farm for some time, Alex Maestri was part of the Italian team that beat Canada out of the last WBC and Ryan Searle is the Aussie who went 7 1/3 innings against Canada's senior men's national team at the World Cup just a month or so ago, giving up only three hits in a 7-0 victory for the guys with the tans. So that was exciting for me. I'm very patriotic over here.

I learned some other interesting factoids about some of the players but I think the best way for me to go about these stories is just to talk to them and ask questions. Most people will tell you that my general curiousity supplies me with an endless number of questions that you can either choose to find endearing or annoying. I choose the first one.

At the office for most of the day, when we left and made a stop at the ballpark we were actually done working. I can't say I contributed much, but I was there willing to help in any way I could. I walked home from RNA (Random Nasty Astronauts?) since I was already so close.

I wanted to nap but it didn't seem like it was going to happen so instead I got caught up on these journal entries that I've been slacking on and continued to refresh the Brisbane Bandits scoreboard page so I could find out what was happening in their game in Melbourne.

I guess I should explain for those who aren't familiar with my journaling beginnings how this started. Last year when I went to live in North Carolina, to finish my post-secondary education with an internship at Baseball America, I started writing journals. Everyone in my class was supposed to (not saying it didn't happen, but not saying it did either) record their activities and daily workings at their place of internship. I documented mine in journal form, sending them home not only to school, but also to my mother, who wanted to know what I was doing with my time.

Eventually, I started sending them to other people who wanted to know what I was up to and at the end of my time at BA I printed them all out and left them in a binder filled with all the assignments and things I had done while I was there. However embarrassing those journal entries were, I thought it would be worthwhile to leave them so that everyone at BA knew how much being there meant to me. Maybe when I'm done with this round of travel/baseball journals I'll copy and paste all of those ones from their Microsoft Word documents into a blog, so anyone willing to read can understand how great BA really is.

And so ever since I decided to come here to work for the Bandits, I've been getting requests for my journals. I don't know how many people are willing to read every day about how much time I spend at the ballpark, but I enjoy writing and it fills all the time that I wish I could spend sleeping for now.

So I hope you enjoy. And by you, I mean you mom. I know that you're probably the only one left reading nine days in. But an audience is an audience.

So thanks.