Guess who's one-year old today!

Happy first birthday, Mila Jane!

[Ed.'s note: We'll have a lot more about the second most important thing to celebrate today soon!]

The Sox win the pennant!

It has been a surreal postseason, not just all the waking up at 4 a.m. stuff and the subsequent sleep deprivation, but moments like in the bottom of the 8th inning in Game 6. J.D. Drew comes to the plate, and Joe Buck actually said something like: “This gives these Boston fans another chance to give Drew a round of applause.”

It was a weird feeling following this team so closely for the entire season without ever actually seeing them play until the postseason. I had read about this team’s unusual propensity to collapse. For four and a half games this team looked unstoppable. They practically ran a hitting clinic against CC Sabathia and Fausto Carmona in the first two games, and it wasn’t just Ortiz and Ramirez either – the whole lineup looked like they knew what they were doing. And then, all of a sudden, the lights went out, the door slammed shut, and the curtains came down. I’d never seen anything like that before – they just looked perfectly average, and it seemed perfectly impossible they could summon the heart to dig themselves out of a serious hole. So it was pretty amazing that the lights suddenly went right back on, and against a good Indians team they managed to pull it off.

Through the ups and downs I developed a routine. Setting my cellphone for 3:57 a.m., having a Red Bull, setting up my balky computer as comfortably as I can. Throughout the matches I ate “Ot Martinka” brand sunflower seeds – I think I went through a pound of them in the postseason so far. Russian seeds, semechki, are different than the little salt balls they have in America. They are simply roasted, and have a very distinct and pleasant taste, though they are a bit smaller than the American ones. I’d have a Bochkarev beer at some point, and I diligently kept score because I didn’t have anyone to talk to.

I’ve learned that watching the games over the Internet is a little peculiar. MLB.com has worked pretty well, I have to say, though I had some minor technical problems on my end. The ads are more irritating than need be, though. From the 2003 postseason, I have burned in my memory Ron Silver shouting “His father is the District Attorney!” over and over again from the promos for Fox’s ill-fated drama “Skin.” But I prefer that to this year, and if you’ve had to watch online you know why. I have had shoved into my head various lines from the trailer for sports melodrama “The Final Season” – “They have a tradition here. It is about playing the game right,” Sean Astin emotes. “We grow ballplayers here like corn,” Powers Boothe insists. I will never see this movie but I can’t describe how much I hate it. And another thing… MLB.com kept promoting this documentary about Tony Gwynn’s induction to the Hall of Fame. The spot starts with the moment he actually got the call he was in. We see him sitting on his couch, he answers his cell, puts it on speaker, a voice introduces itself as the head of the Baseball Writer’s Association, and he gives him the good news. Gwynn starts blubbering, his family rushes over to congratulate him, and then he just hangs up! How rude! I hope he apologized later.

Anyhow, I’ll put up with it gladly for another series. I don’t want to write anything potentially jinxy about the World Series. All I’ll say is that it would be criminal if fans of the 14-year old Colorado Rockies got to see their team win the Series their first time there. I believe history is terrifically important in sports, and they need to build some. Plus, their uniforms are hideous, and they do that that tasteless 69 different jersey and pants combos to maximize their merchandise revenue. Not cool.

Mid-autumn wonderland

I just learned a valuable lesson about why one shouldn't complain about the weather in Moscow.

The view out our window on Sunday morning...

And by way of update, it is now Monday afternoon, and gentle fluffy flakes are again falling from a white sky. And yes, some of it is sticking on the ground.

Drizzle

Autumn in Moscow is little more than a few days of clear skies, modest temperatures, golden leaves on all the birch trees. It is a blip on the calendar, and then it is gone. Friday, Oct. 5 was cloudy and drizzly, and the temperature never got beyond 10 degrees Celsius. And it has stayed the same ever since.

I'll sleep in November

A very late night here in Moscow. For the playoffs, I paid MLB for the Internet feed of the games, and can justify the cost in lost sleep because it is October. Besides, Mila has her first cold and appears to be springing about four teeth at once, so it is not as if my sleep patterns weren’t screwed up already!

I didn’t get to see the team in action except back in April, so it is strange seeing these guys I followed so closely on paper through the year. The Sox look awfully good so far this postseason, like they finally started to play up to their full potential only in the past few weeks or so – especially tonight (this morning), when together Ortiz and Ramirez got on base ten times in five at bats each. Unlike the 2004 edition, they seem like a gang of stone cold pros.

I have to admit that since winning the Series in 2004, and with the Yankees making another ignominious exit, the postseason is much more pleasant than it used to be. I looked up the past Sox-Indians postseason series, and remember how excruciating it was. I remember 1995, getting over the novelty of a divisional series and staying up late with my roommate Adam for the 13-inning Game One that the Sox eventually lost. I remember well 1999, when Pedro game in Game 5 and there was a weird sense that our cosmic luck was finally beginning to change, that there was no way we could lose that particular game. I was also surprised to learn that Dave Roberts, hero of ’04, was on that Indians team in his first big league season.

I happened to see that Oct. 12 was the 40th anniversary of Game Seven of the ’67 Series, the sad ending to the “Impossible Dream” season. Bob Gibson threw a complete game – and hit a solo homer in the fifth -- for the St. Louis Cardinals at Fenway, for a 7-2 win. Jim Lonborg got the loss. What really stuck out for me in the box score, especially as tonight's game approached the four hour mark, is that amazingly, that game lasted two hours and twenty-three minutes.

October

Now it is October, and we’re serious about settling in and all that. We have nowhere to go for the foreseeable future, my visa is all set for a few months, and I’ve gone ahead and gotten a regular job. I’ve started an editing gig at at The Moscow News, one of the English language newspapers in the capital. It’s just a few days a week, but its nice to get out of the house for awhile and see up close how journalism is done around here.

Sunday was a perfect autumn day in the capital, which Olga noted is not so much of a season as a handful of days spread out amidst the drizzle and ominous winter weather looming on the horizon. We decided to spend the day at Arkhangelskoe, the country estate just outside the city that belonged to Prince Yusupov. As with most of our excursions of late, it was an adventure to get out. In this case, it was that we had to catch the rare and incredibly packed No. 549 bus from Tushinskaya Metro station. It was laden with Muscovites eager to get some fresh, autumnal air while they still can.

The estate is really a stunning place. In addition to its palace and other buildings, it features acres and acres of formal French gardens, with lots of lanes to stroll and statutes to see. There is an amazing view south over the Moscow River and the long, flat Russian horizon, which you can see from between two Stalinist sanatorium buildings from the1930s. It was crowded, to be sure, with lots of women making elaborate hats out of the golden leaves and families taking photos of themselves. We were no different of course (see below).

It was a pretty lazy day. We let Mila cruise around for awhile, which she has gotten quite good at if you hold her hands, and point out trees to us. She is a great fan of colorful leaves. We ate some shashlik, after some typically Russian adventures in ordering and waiting for them, and while Mila napped we laid around on the grass, probably for the last time this year before snow and cold arrive in force.

Olga in line for tickets at the entrance gate...

Some leaves....

Walking around...