First off, you’ll be pleased to note that the picture of that giant rabbit isn’t the first thing you will see when coming here anymore. Perhaps we could have put up a less surreal image for the one-week span. Then again, for a few hours now you’ll be stuck with that image of the governor of California in his younger, action-flick days (just think of an Arnold/Palin ticket in 2012 … for the posters alone).

So what happened while we hiked and lazed our way around the North Shore with the RandBall Better Half? Well, that’s kind of a very good question and the subject of today’s first post back. As someone who typically spends at least 10 hours a day tethered to a computer and/or inside a room full of news (AKA a “newsroom”), we are usually among the first to know about breaking and important sports news, particularly locally. It’s just the nature of our job. But the trip north was declared a laptop free zone. While we did manage to catch bits and pieces of Twins games, we weren’t exactly about to say, during a hike, “Sorry honey, can I take a break from looking at this waterfall. I think Gaborik is about to sign with the Rangers.” Instead, we found out about that a full day later, and only because of a chance meeting with a friend and former sportswriter who happened to be eating at the same restaurant we were at in Duluth. We read not one word of Ricky Rubio or Brett Favre speculation, and even when we returned to the Twin Cities on Friday evening, we didn’t rush to catch up. There were other things to do with those remaining days of vacation — important things, like watching exhibitions of recession-proof, exploding colored lights — though we did manage to catch the last 45 minutes of Federer vs. Roddick (how do you go the equivalent of more than six full sets without being broken on your serve and still lose?)

So now it’s time to get back into things. We’re clearly starting from a decent base — not, say, the same place as a friend of ours who said he gets most of his sports news from our Facebook status updates — but we’re sort of re-training our mind to go at warp speed towards sports again. We warmed up last night by calmly checking Delmon Young’s recent hitting history (.333 since June 9 with decent power production). And we’ll take the rest, we suppose, as it comes.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 8:25 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.