Every Day an Adventure

Today, I looked for birch beer, and found none. I did find a sale on Tastykakes though, so I guess that was good.

I ate lunch in the food court at the Gallery and just soaked up the atmosphere. It puts me back to my roots. Seriously.

Went to Modell's. Phillies shirts were on sale. Sadly, this year's t-shirt player number design sucks butt, so I got an oldskool Billy Wagner shirt and a blue Pat Burrell shirt. Couldn't find a good Chase Utley one. I cry. The shirts were super-cheap, like $10 each.

After a little bit of a mixup, I met up with Stewart Clamen down at the Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park. We wandered around the stadium for a while. Stewart got dinner from the Bull's BBQ and I got the Bull's autograph ("My mom is going to be so jealous when she sees this!", I remarked). Mitch Williams was also at the park today, though he was going incognito (until they showed him on the big screen). We saw the Phillies game, where it was pretty much lost in the first four batters when the Astros scored four runs. The Phillies never quite caught up, because lefties own them and Andy Pettitte is a very good lefty. Final score was 4-3. There was much booing. Stewart and I chatted quite a bit, and he had this scorecard book where the first game was the opening game from the 1989 Pirates. Apparently, he doesn't go to games much. He did, however, have scoresheets from the 1991 NLCS, from back when the Pirates were good, and aside from that, it was a lot of Expos games. The 9th inning was fun and suspenseful yet again, but this time the Phillies did not come through. Billy Wagner did come out and pitch though, so I was overjoyed, and of course the people in the stands were being Phillies fans and yelling things like "Only 98 miles per hour? Billy, you SUCK! BOOOOOO!" How on earth they boo someone who comes in for an inning and strikes out three guys, I'll never know. Then again, they booed Mike Schmidt when I was a kid, too.

It was fun. Stewart and I took the express subway back to Walnut, then we walked to 9th and Chestnut together and he took PATCO the rest of the way. I got home, showed my dad my ticket with Greg Luzinski's autograph on it and he was just like "The Bull was there? No WAY!" Then he showed me a program he had signed by a bunch of the 1960 Phillies. Neat stuff.

It's 2:30am and my flight is at 8am, and I need to leave here at 5:45am. I might just not sleep and hope to catch up on the 6-hour plane flight. Sigh.

And didn't sing out at the top of my lungs or anything. Actually, I was kinda surprised that it was such a nondescript corner.

See, it was the day for making gratuitous Eddie From Ohio references, being the Fifth of July and all. So I spent the day wandering the city. I went by Book-Off, and got lunch at Oh!Raku sushi, formerly Genki sushi, the kaiten place which is too damn expensive. Went around Rockefeller Plaza; failed to get anything; was properly scared by the Build-a-Bear place.

So I went down to Noho/Soho and wandered there for a while. I went to the corner of Bleecker and Broadway and... er, well, I forget most of the lyrics right this second, and all I did was get an ice cream cone from the Mister Softee parked on the corner. It melted in approximately 1.57 minutes, ending in the cone exploding in my hands as I got to the bottom of it. I walked around the area for a while, though. The Scholastic Store is really cool and has all of this cool Harry Potter stuff, and they're also having a big HP party next week, of course. I got chai in a random streetcorner cafe (not a Starbucks! a place at Broadway and Spring) and sat around for a while, then walked more. I walked through NYU, but it really doesn't feel like a campus, which bugs me. Washington Sq. Park with the chess players is neat though.

Came back up here after that to pack, stopping by Times Square to pick up theater tickets. Then Nick and I headed down to see Avenue Q, stopping at a deli on the way for dinner -- and daaaamn was that a good sandwich.

Anyway, Avenue Q was fantastic. There's so much that doesn't come out just from listening to the soundtrack, but I'd feel sort of like I'm giving away spoilers if I really talked about a lot of it, so I won't (except for "Monsterssori School", hahahahaha). Suffice it to say, it was awesome, and Nick really laughed at it too, which is good. It was a lot of fun and I'm happy I got to see it.

Ack, I have to leave New York soon. That sucks.

Wheeee, Yankees game. Unfortunately I didn't have pre-knowledge of which way Yankee stadium faces and unfortunately I got us tickets in the upper deck on the third base side, which means we didn't have shade for the first three hours of the game. Three hours of sun and no sunscreen and no hat == extremely sunburnt Deanna and mildly sunburnt Nick.

It was a really long game, actually, and a huuuuuuge slugfest.

By the way, before nickjong can out me to everyone, I rooted for the Yankees today. I mean, I actually got up and shouted things like "LET'S GO YANKEES!" and clapped and stuff. See, the thing is, when you go to a game that is of two teams that you dislike, it's just a lot easier (and less risky) to root for the home team, I figured. So, I became a temporary Yankees fan. Don't tell Josh or Ficus, okay?

Don't worry, I didn't root for A-Rod.

Anyway, that said, it was a really entertaining game, much moreso than Sunday's Mets game, which was short and not very sweet. Today's was a long, drawn-out game involving a lot of scoring and a lot of pitcher switching (12 pitchers overall were used, and 21 runs overall were scored). The Yankees got off to a fast 6-0 lead, but then the Orioles chipped away at it for a few innings until it was 8-6, at which point the Yankees exploded for 7 runs in the 8th inning. It was crazy, and Jason Giambi hit two home runs, one in the first inning and one in that crazy 8th. One of his home runs was pretty funny -- he hit this huuuuuge blast into the outfield stands, but it was called foul -- so he gets back up and two pitches later blasts an even further one into the outfield stands, this time unmistakably fair.

Matsui hit a home run and they put "Gonezilla" on the scoreboard, along with the katakana for home run.

So apparently Quantrill and Stanton are gone. There's this new kid, Wayne Franklin, wearing Quantrill's old number, 48, so I was really confused when he was warming up. The very first batter this guy faced was super-star Brian Roberts. What a way to start off! He struck him out, though, which was promising, but unfortunately the next inning he got two runners on which brought it to 7-6 and thus charged him also with his very first blown save. Whee!

It's funny, but the worse the pitchers are, the more entertaining the game is, I think.

Anyway, this game lasted until like 5:30pm, which was ridiculously long (it started at 1). After it, Nick and I went to his sister and brother-in-law's house in New Jersey for a 4th of July BBQ with a whole bunch of his family. They had a lot of food and I probably hugely dishonored them by only eating a couple of things and then refusing everything else. Oops. We hung out for a while talking, and everyone was pretty cool, and then we went to see some fireworks. Then we braved the traffic and came back to the city.

Well, today was a pretty good day, even with the last part of it.

I went to the Mets-Phillies game in the afternoon to see Pedro Martinez pitch against Jon Lieber. I sat in a section full of Mets fans. There was this one super-newyork-lady sitting next to me who was really nice but totally talked the accent. "Heeyah, look in da binawkyooluhs, look at Michael [Piazza], ain't he gawt the best smoile? He's so gawgeous." I had specifically asked for seating under the cover, because I figured it would rain. Because I did that, it didn't rain for the whole game. And the Mets won. I spent the game pretending to be a Mets fan instead of a Phillies fan -- I was wearing plain clothes, so there was no team commitment there. I kept score, and the people in the section kept saying things like "You must be a big fan. Look at Pedro! Were you here when he almost gawt that no-hittuh?"

The highlights of the game included Todd Pratt getting himself thrown out early on (it was a 1-2 pitch and Lieber threw what honestly looked like a third strike, but the ump called it a ball, and Pratt must have said something because next thing we knew Pratt was walking off the field and Charlie Manuel was walking on to argue, and shortly after that he was also thrown off the field. Lieberthal came in to catch and the game continued. Unfortunately, shortly after that Lieber walked the bases loaded and soon enough the Mets were up 5-1. Even Pedro managed to get a single.

The funniest moment was probably late in the game. Carlos Beltran got himself walked, and then stole second base -- I'm not even sure Lieberthal tried to throw him out. On the very next pitch he stole third base! So of course the Mets fans start chanting "STEAL HOME! [clap clap] STEAL HOME! [clap clap]"

Yeah.

After the game I got Nick a birthday present of a Pedro shirt. He's such a Mets fan and he didn't have any Mets shirts. What a shame!

I went to meet up with rkane after that. I got lost trying to get to where he works, but fortunately, he had more work to do. First I got lost by going the wrong way on the subway, and then I got lost in Bloomingdales, which is attached to the subway stop by his workplace. Bloomingdales is SCARY. We stopped by Neutral Ground after that to pick up some card holders, and it was full of Magic the Gathering players, who are also scary.

Mark, however, is not scary. Mark is awesomeness, and I really wish I got to hang out with him more, but that'd require being in the same city more often, which would also require things like me coming to town sometime when he isn't leaving town the next day. We went for pizza at a place called Lombardi's, which is in or near Little Italy. It had reeeeeeeally awesome pizza. Then we walked around town for a while talking, and for lack of anywhere better to go, headed back to his and Mike's place. There's a joke about how Mark kept getting bigger and bigger TVs all through college, culminating in this gigantic screen TV that barely fit through the door when they were in Doherty. Well, Mark's TV has grown even bigger now, as it's pretty much the ENTIRE WALL of the living room, with a projector.

We ended up watching Stuck On You, that movie with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins. It was really really Farrelly-awful for a lot of it, and somewhere along the line it became entertaining. We were both shocked it got a 6.1 on IMDB, but as it went on I could sort of understand why. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it, but I enjoyed watching it and getting to comment all the times it was just like "aggh! this is so BAD!"

Mark walked me back to the subway, and we had a conversation about how real life sucks. It made me pretty sad and deep-in-thought as I was riding the subway back here, which may account for what happened next.

I took the yellow line to Times Square and went down to the platform where the red lines go. I got on a red train. I went to 116th. Normally I'd get off at 116th and Broadway and walk over here to 120th. Except, uh, I got out of the train and I was at 116th and Malcolm X Blvd. Well... I didn't remember seeing that road before but I figured maybe I had gone through a different exit. So I walked to 120th and started heading west. Except, uh... I was nowhere near any streets I had seen before. It was really confusing. I walked around for a while and started panicking since I also didn't see any cops, cabs, or white people anywhere.

I called Nick. He goes, "Uhhh... I better come pick you up. Think you can wait there for ten minutes?"

Turns out I was in the middle of Harlem wandering around alone at 1am. It was a pretty nerve-wracking ten minutes, but eventually Nick got there and got me and we got back here okay. I suppose it should be considered a testament to NYC being more safe nowadays that I was lost in Harlem alone for around 20-25 minutes total in the middle of the night and nothing happened to me.

Turns out I'd taken one of the wrong red lines. Sigh.

The other funny thing is that I had been thinking earlier in the day that I'd probably like living in NYC... now I'm sort of re-thinking that.

Incase you are wondering what I was doing all afternoon today...



(See all of my Yankees Stadium Tour pictures!)

Well, so I arrived in NYC and didn't feel like sleeping, and couldn't come up with anything in particular to do this afternoon, so I walked over to the 125th street stop and took the D train over to Yankee Stadium. I got there around noon, so too late for the noon tour, but bought a ticket to the 1pm tour. Ate lunch at McDonalds, which has a ton of Yankees stuff in it, including a 3-D mural on the wall and a painting on the ceiling. Infact, the entire neighborhood is entirely taken over by Yankees goods, it seems. All the surrounding blocks near the stadium seem to consist of Yankees memorabilia shops and sports bars, many of which are named after famous Yankee players.

I went on the tour. It was awesome. We started behind home plate in the stands, then walked out to Monument Park, where they have all the retired numbers and the monuments and stuff. The original monuments and flagpole used to actually be in the outfield, when the center field wall was 461 feet out, but now the wall is closer in and the monuments are outside it. There are plaques up on the wall honouring many Yankees players and people, including former owners, managers, announcers, etc, and there's also a 9/11 monument.

After that, we walked to the dugout. We were allowed to walk on the field, but not on the grass, just the warning track. I stopped by the left field wall and got someone to take that picture of me. The wall was so low I bet even I could jump up and get over it if I tried. It gets higher though, and by right field it's at least 5 feet taller than that left field wall is. The walls are also padded, and it's just neat to run into the wall to feel it cushion.

There was a mass photo-shooting spree while everyone had to get pictures of themselves sitting in the dugout. It was way cool. The dugouts are also really impressive -- they have these vents in the steps, so during the summer they can aircondition the dugout, and during the colder times they can heat up the benches and the air as well, if needed. The guide made the joke of "And we have this functionality in the opposing dugout too... we heat 'em up in summer and cool 'em down in winter! har har, just kidding." The view of the field from the dugout is amazing. I tried to spend a minute imagining what it would be like to be an actual baseball player sitting there during a game.

After that, we went into the clubhouse. You weren't allowed to take pictures in there, but I can tell you what I saw. First, the area behind the dugouts is an underground maze. I bet the players never go anywhere but the locker room area, because otherwise they'd get lost forever. Second, the locker room is neat. They pointed out all the things like how Bernie Williams has the biggest and best locker because he's the most senior member of the team, and how Jeter has two lockers, one for his stuff, one for his fan mail. They still have a locker in there for Thurman Munson, the Yankees catcher in the 1970's who was also a pilot and died tragically in a plane crash -- the locker is doored off and "retired" for him. We weren't allowed very far into the locker room, but in addition to the lockers, we could sort of see the shower/spa/etc area off to the left (which had the Yankees logo embossed in the glass of the mirrors), and we could see the "rec room" off in the distance, which the guide said has several big-screen TVs and tons of movies and PS2 games and whatnot and big comfy chairs, and you could also kinda see Joe Torre's office through one door. Very neat.

After that they took us up to the press box. The view from there is awesome. They told us some stories about the stadium, about the facades, and the longest home runs hit there (by Mickey Mantle and Josh Gibson, respectively). The funny thing is, the guide shared a lot of trivia all day and I swear that everything he said is something I knew already -- I guess I've picked up a lot of Yankees history along the way. We got to see where George Steinbrenner's luxury suite is, and we got to go by where the organist plays music during the game (it's a Hammond organ, if you care), and by the Voice of the Yankees's announcing station.

Then we went back down to the team store and they let us go. We did get "Yankee Stadium Tour" keychains, I guess to prove you went on the tour if you don't bring a camera. It was neat.

I took the subway back here, and got lost trying to walk back and ended up climbing Morningside Park, which suuuucked because it was so hot out and I didn't have a water bottle or anything. I was so happy to get back here... and then it started raining. Ugh. I think Nick and I are still going to go to Shea tonight anyway. Phillies! Mets! Phillies! Whee!

So yeah, I basically spent the last few hours working on my tour pictures so I'd just stay awake. I figure I'll go to sleep at a "normal" east coast time and hopefully reset my inner schedule that way, instead of napping today. Also, if you are a Yankees fan and you have not toured the stadium, you should! It's well worth the $14 just to sit in the dugout, in my opinion :) That was just a really cool experience.