Puzzling Sox

I was without the wife again last night.  She went down to Rhode Island to help one of our friends who is moving.  These friends are great people who helped us immensely when we first retired from the military.  We had planned on living in Rhode Island and had a deposit in on some land to build our dream house on.  There was a hold up on the land purchase that dragged on for over a year.  When my retirement date came up we still hadn’t closed on the land much less built the house.  These friends took in our entire family for the summer and my wife and I stayed with them until November when we finally abandoned the land deal and bought the house in Massachusetts.  So we have a huge debt of gratitude that we will never adequately repay to these great people.  Since we have extensive experience in the moving business my wife volunteered to go down and help them pack.  I just wish I wasn’t working so I could help out as well.  Since Buddy and I were left to our own devices again last night I pulled out the last remaining 1000 piece puzzle from my Christmas horde.  Buddy was less than pleased and hovered nearby in case any pieces fell on the floor whereby he would seize the piece and take off.  During our long time together without the wife he learned this would quickly garner my undivided attention.  Being something of a masochist I decided to put my beloved, seemingly fatally flawed Red Sox on the television while I worked on the puzzle.  I found an interesting thing – puzzles and baseball go extremely well together.  I’ve found my attention span has become increasingly challenged as I age and watching baseball, something I used to love, is so slow when compared to other sports that I was losing interest.  Working on a puzzle solved that problem, as I worked on the puzzle and just looked up when something seemed to be happening.  I was getting ready to quit for the night as the Sox were once again losing in the 9^th inning to a team they should be destroying.  All of a sudden a rally started and if you are a true baseball fan you know you can’t kill the rally by changing anything that you were doing – so I kept working on the puzzle.  This of course resulted in a game winning rally where the Sox bull pen finally came through and shut down the other team.  I wasn’t panicking over the Red Sox three game losing streak but this is a team that has to win my trust back after last September’s debacle and they hadn’t done anything to even start that process until last night.