Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

With all the turmoil in this country, I’ve been avoiding the news as much as possible. I still subscribe to a couple of newspapers, but just read the headlines, for the most part. My husband and I used to watch MSNBC quite a bit, but it upsets me, so we are not watching that much anymore. Considering their devastatingly low ratings, we are not the only ones.

Instead of the news, we are watching baseball.

My husband and I both grew up on Long Island, New York, and were Mets fans. When Florida got the Marlins baseball team, we switched allegiance to our local team. We went to many games, opening days, and my husband even got to go to game seven of the first World Series they won in 1997. After that win, the owner of the team sold off the players piecemeal, and they basically had to start rebuilding after that. They did, and they won another World Series in 2003. But then the same thing happened, and thoroughly disgusted, we gave up on the Marlins.

We didn’t watch any baseball for years. Then last year, we started watching as the Mets made it to the playoffs. Long-time Mets fans have been long-suffering Mets fans, but we grew up with the Miracle Mets! My husband even snuck into their first World Series winning game. He was a kid, and a bunch of them cut school, and some guy helped lift them over the fence – the olden days, way before security got so tight. They didn’t have seats, so they wandered the stadium, and it is one of his most cherished memories.

Because we haven’t watched baseball in so long, we didn’t realize how difficult, or rather expensive, it is to watch. Even the local team isn’t available on any local channels, unlike football, which televises all local games on local TV channels, Fox, or CBS. But baseball has streaming services, at least for the Marlins and the Mets. They are different services, so you get your local streaming service to watch the home team.

Being that we are in Florida and not in NY, and we didn’t care about the Marlins but very much cared about the Mets, we tried to find ways to watch. After a lot of research, I found about 8 games that we could watch without subscribing to another streaming service. But it was frustrating, so I finally talked my husband into signing up for the MLB app. It’s expensive, but not much more than a nice dinner out! He caved, and we’ve been watching almost every night – they play a lot of games in baseball! It makes me happy.

We even went up to Port St. Lucie for a couple of pre-season games, and that was a lot of fun. I much prefer pre-season and minor league games. It’s more relaxed, the stadiums are much smaller and more intimate, and it’s way less expensive. We had a nice weekend, saw the Mets beat the Nationals and the Marlins, and hope to go again next year.

We’ve also been watching the Florida Panthers – they are fighting their way back to hopefully another Stanley Cup, but Toronto wasn’t making it easy on them, until their last game. On the other hand, the Carolina Hurricanes did make it look easy for the Panthers, at least until game 4. Now it is looking good for the Panthers, and luckily those games are televised on stations we can watch; TBS, TNT, and ESPN so far. Stanley Cup is up next! Can they do it again??

I grew up an Islanders fan. They built the stadium when I was a kid, and one of my friends even babysat for one of the players! My stepmother’s brother had season tickets, and I got to go to a couple of games that way. My father-in-law worked security at Madison Square Garden, home of the Rangers, and my husband got to go to many games and sit in the press box. Things would get tense around my house when the Rangers and Islanders played each other! I always kid around and say the Florida Panthers saved my marriage – we became Panthers fans when they started that franchise, and while we both still root for our NY home teams, we rally around the Panthers when they are playing. We’ve gone to many games over the years, but the better they play, the more expensive the tickets become, so we’ve just been watching on TV for the past couple of years. We’re hoping they go all the way again this year.

Book News

Food News

If you are not familiar with Marcella Hazan, think of her as the Italian Julia Child. Her recipes are wonderful, especially her basic tomato sauce (3 ingredients – canned tomatoes, butter, onion) and her Bolognese sauce, which takes many hours and is incredibly rich and delicious, and especially good in lasagna. She became well known back in the 1980s with her “Engagement Chicken” recipe, which my chicken-hating husband calls “Divorce Chicken”! Anyway, I loved this article about her by Pete Wells (and can’t wait to see the new documentary about her!)

How Italian Home Cooks Make Their Pasta Taste So Good

TL;DR: It’s not necessarily the pasta water. It’s the marriage of starch, cheese and water, Eric Kim writes.

Good News

An 81-year-old waitress said she couldn’t retire, so a stranger raised over $300K for her

PSA

I thought there was some really great advice in this article, and wanted to share. Hope you find it as useful as I did.

Other News

I was so happy to go to New York for Memorial Day weekend! I haven’t seen my grandchildren in far too long, and honestly, it just kills me that we are so far away. Unless we win the lottery, we will never be able to afford to live near them in Brooklyn, NY, or anywhere close enough to make a difference. This was the first time in years that we all got to go – me, my husband, and my daughter.

For the past few years, we couldn’t leave our aging kitty home alone. He wasn’t dealing well with strangers, or even friends and family he’d known for years, and we didn’t want to stress him out. We used to leave him alone for up to 3 days with plenty of food and water, and he was content, if not happy. But the last time we tried that, he was miserable (we have cameras). He clung to me for days afterwards, and we knew that it was no longer an option.

Since Loki passed away in February, this is the first trip we’ve all taken together. Originally, my daughter and I were going to go, and my husband was going to stay home with Loki. But after he passed, I checked and miraculously, there were still seats available on our flight, and he ended up paying about $10 less than I did! I was even able to get three seats together. I figured the universe owed us that, and I was most grateful it worked out. I’m sorry to say my granddaughter was fighting a bad summer cold and wanted no part of us. On our last day there, her fever broke, and she started feeling more like herself, so we got to see Sylvie in action! I read my grandson all the books I’ve gotten for him this past year, and kudos to my son and daughter-in-law for letting him know that I did. He’s four years old now, and loves playing games – he exhausted all of us playing hide-and-seek! As always, it was too short a trip, but I’m so happy I got to see my family again!

As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe.

Thanks to The New York Times for allowing me to “gift” my readers with free access to these articles, a lovely perk for subscribers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2025 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.