10 best MLB alternate hats

Every summer, I treat myself to a new Red Sox hat. Different style usually, and it's always some time around now that I get it. I'll be sad to see my current hat hung up, but it's time. Maybe I can break it out as an alternate, which is what the Red Sox do with it anyway. But speaking of alternate hats, I'm ALL ABOUT these new ones that were worn during the interleague series at the beginning of this week. You can find all of them here, and I've listed my top ten below.

10. Minnesota Twins. I really like the whole white-front-panel-against-navy-blue thing, and the red brim is sweet too.

9. Oakland Athletics. How can you not like an elephant balancing on a giant baseball?

8. New York Mets. It's all about the mascots representing on the hats. There's nothing particularly exciting about the Mets, so Mr. Met is pretty much the sole reason for their spot on this list.

7. Chicago Cubs. For all of the misery surrounding the Cubs, this is something that they have going for them. Love the white "C" on the hat.

6. Milwaukee Brewers. They would have been lower in the rankings if they only had their primary hat, but the old-school hat below seals the deal.

5. Arizona Diamondbacks. Might have been topping the list if they had something like their old color scheme available, but the new one will have to do.

4. Washington Nationals. I would love to own this hat, which is essentially the exact same style as the Twins' hat. The reason for the Nationals being ranked higher is that I love the "W" a lot more on this hat than the "TC" on Minnesota's.

3. Boston Red Sox. I just absolutely LOVE the white trim around the "B". Just a terrific color scheme.

2. Cincinnati Reds. The Reds have the perfect combination of color scheme and a mascot parading on the front panel. While the all-reds isn't as impressive, the black/red combo vaults this into the top two.

1. Colorado Rockies. There's something about this hat that makes it look PERFECT for Stonehill. Probably the Rockies and the baseball and the black/purple. Either way, this is an absolutely fresh hat. Would also have been fantastic with purple panels and a white (or black) rim.

10 summer goals

As my room in New Hall is about two trips to the car away from being all moved out of, I punch out one final blog post in 415. It's about looking forward to my time in Jefferson 2 this summer, my first and only experience of Courts life. Here are ten things that I want to have happen this summer:

1. Live in the Sem. Might as well keep with the theme of living in places...I've lived in O'Hara for both Orientations (034A, to be exact, both times), and have never lived in the Sem, so, you know, I wanna. Hopefully this puts more pressure on the Orientation staff to make happen, but the Sem would be sweet.

2. Blog incessantly. I have a handful of things that I've wanted to blog about, even as recently as the past week, but I just don't seem to have the time to sit down for a solid half hour or something. Maybe I could just do one of those really short blog posts like I had back in the day.

3. NHL12. I'm 7-1-0 in the 82-game season I totally plan on finishing this summer on All-Star mode. I figure if I do well enough in this season, I'll never lose NHL to any of my friends again. Which usually happens anyway, so go me.

4. Make Baseball Club happen. This was a half-serious "Hey, let's do this" thing that our Baseball Statistics class pushed on the last day we met, so I have all of the application stuff to get things rolling for the fall. Turns out we won't be an SGA-official club until 2014-15, but it'd still be cool to make moves this year.

5. Research baseball. Speaking of Baseball Statistics, I'm also planning on doing a little extension of some of the research we did as a class. It's really cool stuff that I think would be a lot more badass with a larger pile of research.

6. Get colored shorts. Colored shorts are a staple of Orientation, and I've been without them for two years. Must change that.

7. Read books. Currently, I'm just planning on reading Terry Francona's book and 1984, and that's probably all I'll get through this summer. It takes me forever to read books. Meh.

8. Quad sports. Between wiffleball (blog post coming this week), Can-Jam (I suck, and probably still will after this summer), and lots of other fun activities, many hours will be spent outside. Including the night when me and my home friends get together for...

9. SH3. SH3, or SH'13, will be the third scavenger hunt that the Watertown crew will participate in together. The first two have been awesome, and in Watertown, and I'm hoping that the third will be awesome and at Stonehill. Big things planned this summer for SH3.

10. Go hiking. As of twenty seconds ago, Vicki and I are going hiking at Blue Hills at some point this summer. I'm excited because I feel that this is something that I can have a lot of fun with. I mean, it's just walking, but it's walking among cool landscapes and scenery, or something like that. Or maybe it's just walking. Beats me.

All of a sudden I miss everyone

Now what?

When I ask that, I don't mean the whole "I'm a senior now" thing. Or rising senior, or second-year junior, or whatever. I've been preparing myself to be a senior/rising senior/second-year junior for about a month now, and while I'm sure that how I think about it now will pale in comparison to how I think about it in three months, there's something that I forgot to give brainpower to...I never really prepared myself to be without the Class of 2013. I suppose that I don't really have a choice anymore, but I wish that I had thought about this.

I haven't blogged in nine days, and that's because I've been too busy appreciating the final days of the Stonehill community as I know it - by which I mean, this particular cohort of 2,500 students. Between the first few days of summer, my brief visit at Cape Week, the final weekend, and Commencement, I really do feel a part of myself leaving with this class. For the first time, the people leaving are people that have had a direct impact on what I've come to be at Stonehill - people who have helped me to be who I am, and people who I've helped be who they are. It's an incredible thing to share with someone else, and I have the pleasure of sharing it with so many wonderful seniors who have just graduated. Graduation is a time for celebration, to take the world by storm, and to be with those who helped you get there.

Night on the Hill and the congregation between Stanger and Cushing-Martin have been snow globes of good feelings. Everyone together with the ones that they've made this journey with, making every effort to find one more reason to stay just a little longer, to remain in the snow globe as long as possible. While I too wish it could last longer, the time is now. Everything has been building up to today, to these moments, and I know that it is one of the most special days you can experience. Congratulations to the Class of 2013! It's been real, and graduation is no reason for that to stop being true.

Volume 3

It currently stands at 10:57 a.m., on Friday, May 10th, 2013. Again, I say that because that is how I started off my first and second end-of-the-Stonehill-year blog posts. I am listening to the same piece of Lost music, and sitting in approximately the same spot. The weather is as nice as it was the first two times, as well. There's some kind of symbolism in all of this, I think.

For once, for my last post at Stonehill during the school year, I'm planning on talking about Stonehill itself. One thing that I just thought of was distancing oneself from this place. It would make sense that when you know that the end is near, you would want to start distancing yourself, making the transition seem a little easier. The exact opposite happens here. One car ride home from my third (and final) summer as a Stonehill student will bring me to a summer vacation lasting some 40 hours, before I return Sunday night to begin work in Admissions. Where I'll work throughout the summer. This is what I mean when I say that people don't want to leave this place.

I could write a book about junior year, and everything that's happened between August 20-something and now. But in reality, that book would start before I moved into New Hall for my junior year. It would have started over the summer, when I was a rising junior, and even before that, when I was making plans to live here for said summer of rising junior status. What I'm getting at is that this all goes back to the beginning. As does everything. But we can divide that beginning-to-end into segments, and that's what I've (somewhat) done since my senior year of high school.

My AP Stats teacher, the One Day, One Room-famous Ms. Trenholm, told me at the end of my senior year of high school that college would be just another volume in the Life of Tardiff, or something like that. That high school was its own volume, and so too would college be. So, I went with it. Sometime during my freshman year at Stonehill I created two folders - Volume 1 and Volume 2. The former was filled with a handful of documents from high school - my college application essay, a letter to myself that I wrote in AP Psych, my poems/songs, and the PowerPoint document that I had to represent the points I allotted each person in our friends group. (No seriously, I was like that once. And still am.) Plus a few other things. Same kind of concept for Volume 2. But it really is just more of a concept, instead of an actual "here is my life in a folder on my laptop" kind of thing.

And in thinking about this idea, I've decided to close the book on Volume 2. College has been great and wonderful so far, but I actually feel like I've been here for three years. It doesn't just feel as though time has flown by and senior year is coming up and then graduation. I totally know that all of this is happening, and I'm okay with it. I'll have had my time when it comes and goes. So with this, I end the first three years of Stonehill life, and begin my final with a new volume. What will come of this? I have no idea. You get used to living a certain lifestyle, with certain people in your life, and then those people leave and other people come in and you have to figure it all out again. It gets harder each time, too. This is the first graduation ceremony that I'll be at, and I actually feel a part of me graduating with the Class of 2013. Sure, I knew people in the Class of 2012, and knew of people from '11, but it's certainly different this time. And will be much, much more different this time one year from now, where it'll be happening to me.

But such is the nature of life. We're here, we do our thing, and then we leave, and the rest of the universe moves on without us. Pleasant, no? College is a microcosm of this idea, and I'm seeing the "you leave and the universe moves on without you" part in the near future. Hell, I only have one year left here. One more volume, filled with chapters of who knows what. All I know is that it's an ending I'm looking forward to, because of all of the joy that comes with appreciating what you have. While we come and go, while our books have beginnings and endings, our stories won't stop being told, and that's how we're still a part of the universe when we finish writing our story.

It is 11:16 a.m., and still Friday, May 10th, 2013. I'm still listening to that music from Lost, and still sitting in the same spot, listening to the waterfall to my left through my headphones. For the third time, I feel a sense of completeness with the end of an end-of-the-Stonehill-year blog post. One chapter ends, and a new one begins.

Storm before the calm

Well, I asked for something to do...ask and you shall receive. Sitting at my computer, awaiting the third consecutive night of sleep with a final to care about the next day, I finally have a moment for myself. Or do I? My mind is still riddled with the three Abstract Algebra proofs I ran through multiple times, thinking about what I'll have to do tomorrow morning to prepare for the final. And then only Physics will separate me from summer, perhaps the most daunting of my finals. But first, I must progress through this wave of three finals in three days. Which is probably not as bad as other people have it, but I also get the general sense that people have finished long before I even started. This is what I signed up for as a math major, however...

The exciting part about the moment I finish this final tomorrow is that I'll have about 40 hours until my Physics final, which means some relaxation, perhaps some piano-playing, some quad lay...but most importantly, the end-of-a-Stonehill-year blog post. I already know what I want to write about, and have some ideas in my head. Nothing in print, though. I can already feel it becoming a part of me, this third-annual, final blog post. And as the beginning of The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place rings throughout my headphones, I have to fight the urge to do all of this right now. But I digress.

These past few days have been devoted mainly to caring about schoolwork, studying, and finals themselves. Which, I acknowledge, is absolutely expected during finals week, but it will be nice to experience the feelings of the end-of-the-Stonehill-year post. I'm actually very excited to have all of the positive energy running around, and can feel some of it now. (Editor's Note: And look at the excitement in the writing!) (Editor's Note: I mean, it kind of is a calming, positive energy. Some semblance of complacency with the universe, where everything feels okay in this little pocket of time. It's something that I don't get to experience as often as I'd like, so I actually am looking forward to this. Screw you, editor.)

Calm before the storm

This might be the first semester that I'm not a big fan of my finals schedule. Not that I have multiple finals on any day, not that I have a rough order of difficulty regarding finals, but just that I feel the existence of a gap between classes ending and the beginning of finals. I didn't really have class on Thursday, so I had/have four days between classes and finals. Which has kind of left me stirring. I haven't really felt any urgency to study, despite trying to get myself to feel that urgency. A couple of Bruins playoff games haven't helped, and a general sense of it being the end of the year, it being really nice out, everyone else hanging out....it's a non-conducive environment to care about finals, and I totally don't care. I know that I'll care about finals tomorrow, when the start is much closer, I'll get into the rhythm of taking an exam and starting to study for the next one, and we'll be good to go. This is just the calm before the storm.

Same goes for my blogging, too. I've been fairly lackadaisical regarding my blogging, despite having a couple ideas in the past week. I'll get to them. But for the next few days, I'm hopping on the serious-studying train, and the end-of-the-Stonehill-year blog post will come soon enough. Possibly Wednesday or Thursday, with a chance of it coming Friday. In case you were interested. Or even if you weren't.