Back in ancient olden times when the only way to know what day it was involved looking at an actual printed calendar, the dates for major holidays were printed in red ink instead of black. Hence, the words “red letter days” denoted something special. Today was yet another one for me. I officially hit the “Send” button on my email program and shipped off the entire “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” manuscript to Outskirts Press. That makes the writing phase of this project officially complete.

Now that they have it, I can’t make any more changes or take a few hours each day to re-read and tweak a word here or a comma there. My little bird has left the nest. My child is out of the house. Elvis has left the building. And I did it in “less than a year.” I did. I really did. I started writing the book on January 6, 2016 and shipped it off to the publisher on January 5, 2017. That’s less than a year. One day less, but less. Maybe I should’ve waited a day to email it just to make it exactly 365 days, but the truth was I was anxious to see it go.

And the antiquated term about days and letters being red on the calendar is but one of many such things we continue to keep in the language well after the literal version of the statement is long gone. When we “hang up the phone” or “dial a number” or repeat things until we “sound like a broken record” I suspect a hefty portion of the population simply goes along with the terminology, despite the fact they’ve likely never put a telephone handset back in the cradle, or spun the dial with their finger to call someone, and it’s possible (if not likely) they’ve never heard a record skip on a scratch. I could say the writing of the book was a thrilling “E-ticket ride” but Disney hasn’t sold individual ride tickets for decades.

So there we have it. Now an entirely new part of the process begins but I’m more an observer than a participant. The initial thing Outskirts will do is review the manuscript to make sure I’m not a terrible writer or my subject matter is inappropriate for their standards. Let’s hope home runs, soccer goals, and 300 mph Funny Cars meet their criteria.

And, after 364 days of this, I’m in a quiet zone between writing and promoting. I have to wait. And, I hope it’s not too long. Once we get close to the publication date and finally get an official “Pre-Order” date from Amazon, we can kick the P.R. and promotion into high gear. Is that a motorcycle reference? Maybe, huh. I don’t know of too many other vehicles that are shifted into gear with your feet.

Overall, the sense of accomplishment is a great feeling. But I’d no sooner sent the manuscript out when it hit me, “So what do I do now?”

I don’t know how long pre-production, layout, copy editing, and the other stuff that goes into making a book will take. It will feel good to take a bit of a break before we push it back into motion to promote and sell the thing, but there’s already that sense of wonder as to how it will feel until we get closer to publication. It’s like there’s an echo in the room, and yet I only kicked my little bird out of the nest a couple hours ago. Hmmm.

Here in Woodbury, on January 5, it’s 3 degrees. And they said we’d have a high today of 2 degrees. We kicked that forecast’s butt.

Before this deepfreeze, though, we had a rarity for this part of the country during this part of the year. We got up into the low 30s and it started to sleet, which turned quickly to freezing rain. It came down gently but persistently overnight a few evenings ago, and we awoke to a coating of ice so slick and smooth it looked like a Zamboni had cleaned it. The neighbors on either side of us were out of town, and both had newspapers in the drive, so I did the neighborly thing by grabbing their papers for them.

I walked up the snowy side of the drive for one, and as I walked out a few steps to get the paper I could tell it was as slick as a hockey rink. As I stood flat-footed (best way to walk on ice) I bent over for the paper and could feel my feet moving. But, I wasn’t moving them. The neighbor’s drive is a very gentle slope, but just standing on it I started to move toward the street. It was like being on a conveyor belt. I somehow managed to steer myself back toward the snow, and was able to do that successfully, but I’ll admit that for a brief moment I wondered how it was going to end. The darker rectangle in the middle of the drive was where the paper had been. The curvy lines below it are the tracks my shoes made. Imagine if their driveway was steep!

When the freezing rain ended, the temperature dropped well below zero. Therefore, much of the ice is still exactly where it was when it hit the ground. We have sidewalks all over Woodbury that are 100% impassable and dangerous, and it’s so cold things like salt and ice-melt don’t work well or at all. And even if it does get up to 10 degrees or so, anything you melt will refreeze overnight. The roads are mostly fine, with only a few patches of ice you have to look out for, but boy-oh-boy the driveways and sidewalks are officially declared to be “a dangerous mess.”

Here at the Wilber/Doyle home, we have changes afoot. Barbara took the initiative to hire a professional interior decorator, to bring some color and pop to what is a beautiful but muted home. Our house was the model in the neighborhood, so it was painted and decorated to be “safe” for all consumer tastes. In other words, it’s mostly tan, beige, and brown.

Marsha Anderson owns Shasha Interiors, and it’s her job to get us out of our normal colorless rut to change the look around here. In the end, we’ll paint and bring in new pillows, chair fabrics, curtains, and other details. We need a pro, in this regard, because if left to our own devices we tend to be pretty boring. We need some color around here, people! And from what I saw today, in terms of swatches, that’s exactly what we’ll be getting. Should be a fun process.

Tonight, I’ll be heading out of here in a couple hours to be a big-shot Board of Directors member for our community and Home Owners Association. I’m actually on two boards here, as the Vice President for our neighborhood, St. John’s Village, while I’m also the representative for our little SJV board on the master board for the entire development. I looked at a PDF of the info packet for tonight’s meeting, and it was nearly 50 pages long. Much of it is numbers and dollars. We do have a bunch of HOA compliance issues to address, though, so that should be interesting. We have lots of rules here, to keep the development looking uniform and first-class, and when residents freelance and break the rules we have to address the issues. And then we flog them. Maybe. I mean, painting your house orange will get you flogged for sure, but changing the color of your shutters without approval will probably only end up earning you a penance of wearing a t-shirt, for a year, that says “I brought shame to my neighborhood.”

I actually really enjoy this new role on the two boards, and I like the fact that residents here are proud of how the community looks. They live here for many reasons, and it’s rare when rules are egregiously broken. I think we’ve only flogged two people so far. But I’m the new sheriff in town, so look out.

On a completely different topic, I will admit to one pastime that keeps me interested on a weekly basis. I love to scour the internet for previously unseen photos of my father, from his playing days in the big leagues. His final year as a Major League catcher was 1954, with the Red Sox. I was born in 1956, so I never saw him play. I did get to watch him coach in the big leagues for one summer, when he was the bullpen coach for the Washington Senators (remember them?) in 1970, and that was a ton of fun, but I do wish I had memories of him playing.

With that in mind, I found this photo the other day and put it on Facebook immediately. The date was August 30, 1948. Big Del Wilber played for the Cardinals. And here he is about to tag out Jackie Robinson at home plate. I had NEVER seen this one before. Very cool.

There’s a great new resource for stuff like this. It’s a website named newspapers.com and you can do all kinds of sorted searches for almost anything you’re after. I’ve even found photos and newspaper stories about me, from my baseball days, that I never knew existed. Be careful, though. It’s pretty addicting.

Trivia question: How many different Washington Senators teams were there? And what became of them? Answer at the bottom, and if you get it right your reward will be a virtual pat on the back in appreciation of your baseball knowledge.

Last night, I was messing around on social media and saw a post on Facebook by one of my former high school classmates. And I saw comments from some other guys I was not connected to, so I sent them friend invites. And that led to other guys, and more invites. By the end of the night, I was reconnected with about a dozen former classmates from St. Louis U. High, with whom I had lost touch. That’s the thing Facebook does the best.

I also spotted my boss from my days with Converse Shoes, former Kansas Jayhawks basketball star Roger Morningstar, and we connected in mere minutes. Which led me to Milt Gibson, also a former Jayhawk who was one of my Converse colleagues back then, in the mid-80s, and now we’re friends again too. A couple years ago, I found Mark Gannon on Facebook and we’ve been connected since then. He was a former Iowa Hawkeyes basketball player, and we all worked for Roger, who remains one of the best overall bosses I ever worked for in the business world. Also a great guy.

When I went on to become the GM of some indoor soccer teams, I had zero experience in terms of leading a staff and managing people. So I did the obvious. I copied Roger’s attributes and techniques as well as I could. “What would Roger do?” was a question I asked myself often.

My assistant has returned to his office post to watch me work. Whew. Not sure what I would do if Buster didn’t keep an eye on me.

Circling back to the book, there are still some important things I can (and must) keep working on. The photo section will come at the back, so I need to keep sorting those and deciding which ones are absolutely going to make the cut. I’ve got almost all of the release forms back and signed now, so we should be good there, but there are a few still in the mail and I still need a couple of copyright releases as well.

One of the copyright releases I need is for a lovely photo of my mom, circa 1963 or so. She’s standing in downtown St. Louis (you should see the cars in the background!) holding her portable KMOX reel-to-reel tape recorder in one hand and a microphone in the other. She’s ravishing, as well. The only problem is that the photo was professionally taken by KMOX and it is therefore copyrighted. Without a signed release, I can’t use it, but I’m not having much luck even finding someone at KMOX who can sign off on such a thing. I’ll keep trying until I run out of time.

There was also a photo release form I needed for another favorite photo, and I’d be wildly exaggerating if I insinuated that I thought I’d get it. I seriously doubted I’d even get a reply from the generic email I wrote by clicking on the “Contact Us” button at a company’s website. The firm was SRO Management, and they’ve represented my favorite band Rush since before their first album, when Geddy, Alex, and Neil were still in high school.

I got an email Tuesday, and within a couple of hours we’d traded enough notes and electronically exchanged forms for them to permit me to use the photo of Alan Johnson, Jeff Arend, Todd Myers, and me backstage with Geddy Lee. So how about that!

As for New Year’s Eve, I’m proud to report that we all had a great time without burning any houses down or creating the need for any restraining orders. Plus, Terry and Lynn Blake joined Barbara, her sister Kitty, and me for our sleepover at the Jacobsens. Happy New Year!!!

I’ll sign off here with the answer to the trivia question posted above. There were actually three incarnations of the Washington Senators. The original team was founded in 1891 and it played in the National League until 1899. The “new” Senators joined the American League in 1901, although from 1905 to 1907 the team name was changed to the Nationals. After the 1960 season, they moved to Bloomington, Minn. to become the Minnesota Twins, and were immediately replaced by Major League Baseball with a new expansion team, also called the Senators. The Los Angeles Angels joined the American League at the same time.

The new Senators, however, did not do well and prior to the 1972 season they moved to Arlington, Tex. to become the Texas Rangers.

The current Washington Nationals team is not connected to any Senators team, but is indeed the old Montreal Expos. So in Washington baseball history, they’ve lost three teams (one to dissolution and two to other cities) while inheriting one homeless team after MLB took over the Montreal franchise.

You’re welcome.

Bob Wilber, at your service but not becoming a different franchise. I’m here for good.