dr4b: (confused)
Operation Phillies, Phamily, and Phriends continues marvelously. Today Stage Two happened, wherein Our Heroine roadtripped from Washington DC to Philadelphia with her brother and her sister-in-law. It was a rather enjoyable drive up a reminiscent highway with reasonable company, punctuated by several bathroom breaks, exclamations at the exorbitant gasoline prices, and the Beatles.

The family BBQ was pretty good too. Because of the heralded arrival of Our Heroine And Siblings, the aunt and uncle and cousins were also accompanied by the grandfather, the aunt's parents, the aunt's sister and brother-in-law and nephew, and of course, Our Heroine's Dad. Our Heroine won one bet for the day, wherein she had remarked to her brother, "Within ten minutes of our arrival at the BBQ, Dad will come say 'It's so rare I get ALL THREE OF YOU IN ONE PLACE!' and attack us with a camera." Length of time before said event occurred: approximately 3 minutes. No, really. On the other hand, there is now a pretty cool picture of all of us with Grandpa.

There was some TV-watching, as the Nationals-Phillies game was on TV, and there was a lot of food, of course. There was some basketball playing with the uncle-in-law who is 6'4" or so, and some soccer playing with the cousins; for a while there was even tossing back and forth a football with the Brother. ("I bet the last thing you ever expected to be doing during Labor Day weekend was hanging out in a backyard tossing around a football with your sister!" remarked Our Heroine.) Family conversation was also fairly reasonable and enjoyable except for one aunt's obsession with finding Our Heroine a husband, which became the running gag of the afternoon. Ah well, it gets easier to endure every time, really.

Eventually the party ended and we adjourned back to downtown Philadelphia (brother and sister-in-law were driving back to DC, so Dad drove back here in his 17-year-old non-airconditioned Dodge Daytona, with the broken window handle and that has steam come out when you put it in reverse).

I'm breaking voice more and more and herein abandon it.

I called up [profile] bk3c (one of my best friends from highschool and CMU) and he came downtown and picked me up. We went to South Street and got cheesesteaks at Jim's, and then we walked up and down the block, noting all of the stuff that's closed and/or opened recently. (Zipperhead closed. WTF?!) We did our now-traditional visit to Tower Records where we both went through CDs together and each came out with something recommended to the other. I seem to be losing this contest since last time he recommended Avenue Q, and this time he recommended Mutual Admiration Society; haven't listened to it yet, so we'll see. I recommended Great Big Sea and made him get the GBCD&DVD. I do admit that Ben is one of the few people on the planet that if he says, "Get this CD, you'll like it", I'll pretty much put down $18.99 or whatever without worrying about it. I don't think I know anyone else who has such an overlapping taste in music with me. Fact is, we spent a good half of our time today talking about Broadway musicals, and the other half of the time talking about random geeky stuff, and another half trying to catch up on people we haven't seen in forever. He informed me that our friend Josh Marcus is getting married later this month, which is just so weird (Josh is like, one of the first BBS friends I ever became good friends with in real life, back when I was like 13). Man, life was just so damn easy in highschool.

Anyway, we thought about going to a movie but after driving around downtown realized we couldn't catch anything since they all started at 10, and so we ended up going on a quest for Tastykakes instead. Tried to go to the supermarkets at 10th and South, but they were closed. At least now I know where the Whole Foods and Jamba Juice are on South. It's just SO different. I think there are like, maybe 5 buildings on South that are the same as they were when I graduated high school in 1994 and used to hang out down there every night. We eventually ended up back in my part of downtown and got Tastykakes at the Wawa around the corner at 10th and Walnut. They didn't have birch beer. They also didn't have birch beer at Jim's. I think I'll cry if I can't find any tomorrow.

Ben and I hung out talking a while and it just reminds me why we've been friends for so damn long, he's just so amazingly awesome and special. I loved hanging out with him when I was 14 and I still love hanging out with him now that I'm 28. Some things never change, I guess.
dr4b: (mariners)
Today, it was nice out, so I walked around Greenlake. I think I'm still hitting my goal of 10 miles for the week. I only hope I can keep it up once I start working.

I battled the traffic and went down to the airport hotels, and picked up my brother Danny and a friend of his from work Aaron. They were in Yakima for the week doing some stuff for work, and were flying back out of Seattle tomorrow morning. Coincidentally, tonight was a season ticket night for me at the M's, so Danny and I had made plans to hang out and go to the game. Aaron didn't want to get stuck down by the airport, so he came into Seattle with us. He wanted to go to Uwajimaya, so we did that first for a bit, and then went down to Safeco. Oddly, despite that usually my section at Safeco is full of empty seats in front of me, there weren't any unsold seats for tonight's game. So he got a third seat a few rows above us. Now, the two seats to the right of my seats are taken by these two guys who are also season ticket holders and also had the same seats last year, but I don't know the people on the left. When they hadn't shown up by the end of the first inning, we told Aaron to move down and sit with us, and he did. Then the people on the left showed up at the start of the 4th inning. How lame!

I actually spent most of the game talking to the guys who sit in the seats to my right. It occurs to me that even though I've been sitting next to them for a season and a half, I still don't even know what their names are. But at least we can boooo-urn Boone together, much to the horror of the little kids in the section who think Bret Boone is god.

Oh, and the Mariners won, 5-0. Jamie Moyer stayed in for most of the game, but he was taken out in the 8th with two down, after he walked the bases loaded. Amazingly, Jeff Nelson came in and struck out Marlon Anderson to end the inning, and he ended up getting a save after also taking down the 9th inning scorelessly.

Dobbs was optioned to Tacoma and Jose Lopez was called up. Lopez played 3B tonight, but it's possible he may threaten Boone into not sucking at 2B, if we're lucky. The Pat Borders Fan Club reports that Borders was 2-for-3 with two doubles -- the second double would have been a triple for anyone under the age of 40, even. He scored two runs. Ichiro hit a three-run homer, two, which was pretty sweet.

As far as the Mets go -- Ishii did a pretty poor pitching job. And sadly Mike Cameron wasn't playing! They did have him come out at the beginning of the game and bring the lineup card to the plate, and he got a huge ovation from the Seattle crowds. I was also sad that Kazuo Matsui wasn't playing, because I wanted to see him, but they put him in as a defensive replacement at 2B for the 8th inning, at least. He looks so weird since he cut his hair.

Oh yeah. And let me tell you that no words have sounded more odd than "Centerfielder Willie Bloomquist", but it turned out it didn't matter -- of the pop outs to the outfield, only one went to center; eight went to left field, and two went to right field. I guess it's because so many people were hitting righty against Jamie Moyer, maybe.

(I am really looking forward to seeing a Mets-Phillies game in New York, though. And I'm pretty sure the Mets will win tomorrow. Pedro Martinez has never lost a game in Safeco Field, or against the Mariners EVER for that matter, and Ryan Franklin is pitching for the Mariners. So the only question of course is whether Pedro will get a no-hitter or not.)

My brother wants me to come visit and see a Nationals game with him. I'm thinking Labor Day weekend actually looks perfect -- they're playing the Phillies, and the Mariners aren't in town here.

February 2019

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