The Old Ballpark

I had never seen an actual baseball game at the Yoe ballpark before.

A game being played at the ballpark in Yoe

When I walk to the grocery store, there are some monster hills to deal with. It’s not quite as steep to go up Maple Street, two blocks to the west, and then cut through the town home development to Lombard and then the grocery store. And this route takes me past the ballpark.

It had been a bit overgrown a few weeks ago, with grass growing on the infield dirt. Usually it’s empty; this is how it looked five years ago yesterday on a similar walkabout. Occasionally I’ll see a few people tossing the ball around and taking swings.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen actual teams. And umpires!

The team batting had actual uniforms!

It looked like kids, I don’t know what level or what age.

I’ve always wondered if this was the ballpark used by amateur and semi-pro teams in the county leagues before World War II, which I read about in a series of newspaper articles a few years ago. Or, if not the park, at least the site of that old ballpark. Yes, in the days when the Ma & Pa Railroad trundled through town, Yoe was home to amateur and semi-pro baseball.

It was nice to see actual baseball being played on this field.


Windows can’t do this.

Screenshot of Linux Mint, with the screen rotating in a Compiz box, a FreeRDP session open ot Diamond, a terminal, and a Conky system monitor on one of the faces of the cube

Later this year — October, November — Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 will be coming out, based on the new Debian 13 release, and I recently decided that rather than upgrade my install I’m going to do a clean install of LMDE. My plans are more complicated than that — I’m going to redo my internal storage, like replacing the NVMe with a larger drive, a computing “ship of Theseus” situation — but that will suffice.

And since I’m going to clean install LMDE, I am playing around with some things before the day comes to see if I like them.

I had installed Conky on my Linux Mint 22.x partition long ago, but I never spent any time configuring it. While looking for something else online, I found an old Linux Mint-themed Conky configuration that looked nice, so I decided to give it a drive.

There was some trial and error — all told, about two hours, off and on — of various settings in the .conkyrc file, but I figured out how to get it where I wanted it, how to increase the font size to make it readable, how to add more CPU core monitors, that sort of thing. I discovered that Conky is incredibly finicky. There was a bug in the configuration file, and it was clearly designed for a much smaller monitor. (I run a 2560×1440, and it was especially unreadable with my bad eyes.)

I just might keep it. 🙂

Published by Allyn Gibson

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over fifteen years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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