Bike guy is back

The bike guy -- Passaic to Hoboken -- is back (well, his bike is back; he's been here, mostly, through the winter) and I picked up a tip from (watching) him -- he carries his iPod Nano and earbuds in a metal tin to protect them. Useful.

Not useful: The train's jostling as I try to write.

Out past Kingsland, just beyond the tunnel on the edge of the landfills that transition into the Meadowlands (the ecosystem, not the sports complex), work has resumed on a group of ballfields. It used to be open space of graded dirt, with a few fences and small, bunker-like concrete fortifications. I could see the baseball diamonds in the future, but Casey once asked me what that space was. That's when it occurred to me that it wasn't so obvious to everyone -- or the non-obsessed.

Now the machinery has returned, lights are installed, scoreboards are up and boxes have been built to hold the dirt around home plate and the bases -- either these fields will have grass infields or artificial turf of some kind. Fancy.