Last night, my father’s lawyer invited our family to be guests in his firm’s skybox at Oriole Park, so I attended my first baseball game in twenty years. I went along as a gesture of family harmony, not expecting to enjoy myself, but it turned out to be fabulous.

As it happens, baseball is an intriguing and graceful sport played by eighteen handsome men in tight pants. The stadium authorities, however, appear to be of the opinion that there is something inherently dull about it. Every five seconds, the scoreboards would flash something the audience was supposed to yell, or canned music would instigate shouts and rapid foot stomping, or an enormous bird would dance by and promulgate various hijinks, or everyone in the stadium would stand up and sit down in a carefully orchestrated pattern called, I believe, a “wave.” They seemed to be taking their cues from the Chimperor’s Repugnant Administration: use all of the flash and glitz at your disposal to make the population chant in unison and distract them from what’s really going on.

The Orioles won, nine to one.

Today, I went to settlement on my first house. It was a Byzantine, three-hour entanglement made worse when the other side, a relocation company, forgot to show up. They now insist that I sign a document that my lawyer has forbidden me to sign, so I feel a bit as if I am in lodging limbo, but in the end, I don’t care because I got the keys. Goblin bravely weathered the ordeal from her carrying bag in the corner, and after the last i was dotted, she and I drove over to our new home and wandered around it in a daze. Then we sped up I-95 to New York, where we intend to spend less than a day. Ah, bi-location.

Our real estate agent bought us a gift: a squirrel feeder for the back yard. Goblin strikes again!