Picking baseball players like her mother picks wine, in a way

Julie, who is up in Ohio as the advance team for our blitzkrieg-style home search that will wrap up Sunday morning, chooses wine and beer based on how much the artwork on the label strikes her fancy. Neither one of us has a particularly refined palate, and we really don't drink all that much wine or beer, so this works out well. She's got a hit rate well over 95%, as far as I can tell. But, she uses one sense -- sight -- to select for another sense -- taste.

How on earth am I going to link that to Alana?

Well, Julie's mother, Marilyn, and her "baseball buddy" Gene flew down on Tuesday. They're watching the kids while Julie (and then I) are home searching in Columbus this weekend. Gene is a *huge* baseball fan. Specifically, the Chicago Cubs (although he had a son who was in the Phillies farm system for several years; I don't know where his loyalties lay then -- they are both National League teams, so meet up several times during the regular season). Once Julie and I are back in town, Marilyn and Gene are going to drive up to Dallas to catch three Cubs games when they play the Rangers.

Conveniently, although I've never understood why, our as-basic-as-it-could-possibly-be cable includes WGN out of Chicago. Last night, Gene settled down in the office to watch the Cubs play the Mariners. Carson got interested in the game, and Alana got interested in dragging a cushion from the sofa in the living room into the office. Carson was grilling Gene on what the score was and who was up to bat. Jose Guillen came to the plate for the Mariners, and Gene told Carson his name -- pronounced HO-say GEE-un. As soon as he said it, Alana repeated, "Jose Guillen!" Everyone chuckled. So she said it again. This is reminiscent of how Benton (and now Carson) wound up calling me "Tim" instead of "Dad." Half an hour later, Alana went to bed. She was a little wired, so sat in her crib yelling, "Jose Guillen! Jose Guillen!" for a while. It was pretty damn funny (and cute...as is almost everything she does, IMHO).

So, it sort of seems like she's picked a favorite baseball player based on how his name sounds. Or, perhaps, on what it feels like to say his name. That's my link to Julie's alcohol selection technique. Of course, "favorite baseball player" is not exactly one of the five senses, but I'm not going to quibble with myself. That would just be silly.

I'm bolting out of work a little early tomorrow to catch a flight to Columbus. Julie reported that, of the 13 houses she looked at with the realtor this afternoon, 3 of them look like real possibilities. One of them they could only see from the outside, so we'll be hitting that on Saturday morning. Things are looking encouraging there!