Weeknotes 22:29

October 4, 2022

Week of September 25–October 1

Wesley: A Forgotten Star, A Tragic Murder, and A Shocking Verdict

On my trip home from Murray last weekend, I listened to the podcast, Wesley. The podcast takes a look at the life and legacy of Lyman Bostock, a baseball player whose life ended tragically at the age of 27. Lyman is the only major league player to be murdered during the baseball season. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in Gary, Indiana.

This story has so many levels. He was a campus activist with the Black Student Union in 1968, which landed him in jail for standing up for what he believed in. In his five years in the major leagues, he hit over .300 and many great hitters think he could have had 3,000+ hits if his career had not been cut short. And the story of his murder is intriguing as well.

One of the most impressive things about him is that he once offered to return a month’s salary because he did not feel he had earned it. At the beginning of the 1978 season, he signed one of the highest-paid contracts at the time with the California Angels. During the first month of the season, he had a serious batting slump hitting under .200. He called a meeting with owner Gene Autry and offered to return that month’s salary. To which Mr. Autry replied, “you know that if you have a great month, I am not going to pay you more money that month.” Autry refused to accept the money back so Lyman donated the money to several local charities in Los Angeles.

Five months later, Lyman’s life would come to a tragic end. While visiting family in Gary–while on a trip to Chicago to play the White Sox–he offered a ride to a friend of his and her friend. The estranged husband of that friend followed them in another car and then fired a shotgun into the car at a stoplight. Those shots ended the life of this promising young ballplayer.

Baseball cards of Lyman Bostock from my personal collection.
Baseball cards of Lyman Bostock from my personal collection.

Visiting my daughter

My daughter holding a mushroom that my other daughter crocheted for her.

While I don’t like the fact that two of my children now live away from our home, I am very grateful that I can visit them on the same trip. I stopped in Nashville on the way home from Murray, KY to visit my daughter. We grabbed lunch at Fazoli’s and caught up. I enjoyed spending time with her and being able to give her some encouragement.

Project work

After taking off the previous Friday to visit my son, I was back to work on Monday. I spent the week going back and forth between the Real World Learning project and the Energy Efficiency Hub project. Both of these will be launched in the next three weeks.

The client for Real World Learning completed their quality assurance (QA) review of the site so I worked on fixing bugs and addressing several elements that they wanted to modify. I replaced some illustrations that had a thicker stroke and had more of a brushed texture with updated ones with a thinner stroke with less texture. I “traced” the different illustrations in Affinity Designer to create SVG paths to mask and animate using Greensock. (I wrote about this process earlier in the project.) The illustrations are line drawings of objects like a lightbulb and a briefcase.

I spent time with the Energy Efficiency Hub finishing up my initial development and then implementing feedback from our internal QA later in the week.

As I was addressing one issue, I realized that I could use just one template instead of two for the resources section. Originally, I had created an archive template for the resources (resources are a custom post type) and a taxonomy template to display “tags” in the resource card. I am using FacetWP on the archive template and realized that I could link the tags to that archive template that is filtered for that taxonomy.

I spent time late in the week rewriting my taxonomy links so that they would point to the archive template and I no longer needed the taxonomy template.

It’s why we do what we do

On Thursday, we met with the client from Real World Learning. In the course of their QA, she shared a link to the staging site with many education partners involved with Real World Learning. She wanted to give them a preview of this project that she has been promising them for some time.

Our client shared with our team how excited our target audience is about the new site. It was a great encouragement and affirmation of the hard work that we have put into this project over the last ten months as a team and over the last five months for me as I have built it. Our client teared up thinking about how her dream of an improved site experience is about to be fulfilled as we launch the first phase of the new site on October 11.

Decluttering

Over the weekend, I started the process of decluttering in my office. I have been wanting to do this for some time. I was inspired to take action as my youngest started decluttering her room. The first thing that I wanted to tackle was my file cabinet. I spent a good part of the afternoon on Saturday going through files deciding what to keep and what to part with. I believe I paired down the contents by about half. Now I have a big pile of financial and personal documents that I need to shred. I also took some time to rearrange things in that closet so that I can access the file cabinet without having to move a bunch of things out of the way first.

What I wrote

Articles I read

Books I am currently reading

What I watched

  • Should I Leave Teaching – Research for a friend.
  • Bernie Mac Show (Peacock)
  • Cobra Kai Season 5 (Netflix) – I have been enjoying season 5.
  • She-Hulk (Disney+)
  • Top Gun: Maverick (Prime Video) – I enjoyed watching this one again. I have an idea for a future blog post about “where I belong.”

What I played

  • Codenames – I played a couple of rounds of Codenames with 4 of my LGND teammates on Friday for our Campfire time. I was a bit nervous when it was my turn to be the spymaster and give clues to my teammate. But I was able to come up with some creative clues that she was able to guess and was able to get multiple cards each round. I had a lot of fun playing and was glad I took time out of the day to participate.
  • FIFA 23 – On Saturday, I bought FIFA 23. It is the first time I have bought a new edition in three years. This is the one game I would buy or have gifted every year. I had been looking forward to getting the game and playing with Manchester City and Earling Haaland. Manchester City was the first Premier League team I considered myself a fan of. I became aware of the club through a website design they did around 2009. I use to play with them more often in FIFA. But over the years, I also became a fan of Watford (I like an underdog) and I enjoyed playing with Tottenham when I bought FIFA 20. But now I feel like I have come back home to City. I really liked playing with Haaland when I played three seasons with Borussia Dortmund in 2020. I was excited when he transferred to City over the summer. I started to play a season with City with FIFA 20 but did not necessarily like the mix of the team. But I am really enjoying this group.

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