Every time I think my life cannot get weirder, it does

[dr4b]

The blonde lady is Brian Sweeney's wife, and the little girl is one of his daughters, and the three people behind them are friends of theirs from NYC (essentially those two guys have known Brian since they were all little boys). The guy in front of me is Akki, who's one of the more crazy people in the stands and also a huge Sweeney fan. Maybe. Akki's been really bitter lately because Brian's not doing so well this year. He threatened to throw his jersey over the wall today when Brian gave up a two-run homer to Tuffy Rhodes.

Anyway, the upshot is, I caught them on the way into the stadium and gave them our extra Sweeney pinbadges, and so they said "We want to come out and see what the cheering section is like!" I told them sure, and we saved some seats for them, and in the 7th inning or so they came out and it was really nuts. But they had a blast and I hope I didn't embarrass myself too much accomodating them. I think a lot of people wondered "who the heck are all those gaijin?", but at the end of the game (the Fighters won, BTW, and Brian actually got the win, though it was shaky) when we were doing post-game cheering, and the ouendan were debating which player cheers to do, Connie yells "SWEENEY!!!" and so the guys were like "Well, since Sweeney's family is in the stands with us, let's do a Sweeney cheer song!" and so we did. And afterwards a bazillion people came down and wanted to take photos with Sweeney's daughters. It was really cute, they were like "We're famous!"

Apparently his daughters used to walk onto the field with him for some of his hero interviews so a lot of people recognized them. It was kind of funny.

Sweeney's friends were like "This is the coolest thing ever. You guys are ninety times better than the Bleacher Bums in NYC could ever be. Is every game this much fun?" and I'm like "It's more fun when we win like today, but yes, it's always fun with everyone here."

The kicker is... Ojisan had managed to scramble seats together for everyone in the second row, he thought they were just Sweeney's friends. After the game I told him they were also the wife and kids and he was like "Really? I had no idea!" Haha. I wonder how he would have reacted if he'd known! Afterwards Connie wanted me to thank everyone for her so I was telling the ouendan that she was really happy, etc. I suck at switching languages, but... basically, I mostly hope I didn't expend too much ouendan karma on this. I'll have to try to catch them in Chiba and apologize, maybe.

I forget what else happened today.

Also in theory in around 7 hours I should be trying to get onto a train and making my way slowly down the countryside. It's REALLY hard to decide what to pack for a 10-day trip where I'll be on a lot of local trains and yet doing a lot of things where I'll want my camera/etc... I want to pack shorts since they're lighter to carry but my legs still look awful from bug bites. I even tried to go buy another pair of crop pants today from Yokado but they were all sold out of my size. Grrr.