109 Days to Opening Day 2008

Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 109 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s excerpt is from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. It’s time for evening on the Nautilus. Sounds like an evening at the trailer.

The compass still showed the course to be E.N.E, the manometer indicated a pressure of five atmospheres, equivalent to twenty-five fathoms, and the electric log gave a speed of fifteen miles an hour. I expected Captain Nemo, but he did not appear. The clock marked the hour of five.

Ned Land and Conseil returned to their cabin, and I retired to my chamber. My dinner was ready. It was composed of turtle soup made of the most delicate hawksbills, of asurmullet served with puff paste (the liver of which, prepared by itself, was most delicious), and fillets of the emperor-holocanthus, the savor of which seemed to me superior even to salmon.

I passed the evening reading, writing, and thinking. Then sleep overpowered me, and I stretched myself on my couch of zostera, and slept profoundly, while the Nautilus was gliding rapidly through the current of the Black River.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.