Spring Break

So, last week was the kid's spring break.  But both his parents had to work, and that meant he wound up having to do so as well.  So this was last week's rundown:

Monday -- worked from home, watched a lot of TV.
Tuesday -- went to the office. While I worked, the kid was recruited to help sort pay stubs into people's mailboxes. I certainly hope he did it right; his supervisor seemed unperturbed and I heard no complaints of people's money going missing, so I assume all went well.
Wednesday --  I went to meetings; the kid cleaned out the pen drawer and supply cabinet. Sort of. He needed a bit of help in the "making neat piles" department. We did take an extended lunch that day, though, and went to see the Terra Cotta Army exhibit at the National Geographic museum.  I think the old folks found it infinitely more interesting than the kid did. Got back to office, went to more meetings while the kid played video games.
Thursday -- I edited stories while the kid sorted through old issues of magazines for saving or recycling.
Friday -- I felt so guilty that the kid had spent his whole spring break in my office that I worked from home that morning and then let him pick how he wanted to spend the afternoon.  And that is how we spent 3 hours at Chuck E. Cheese. (Though the place isn't as bad now that I can let him run off and I don't need to trail after him to some bigger kid doesn't jack his tokens. I got a lot of reading done!)

I needn't have worried, apparently. The weekend was infinitely more fun.  Saturday was covered in the previous post.

Sunday was Easter. We are not religious observers of this event, so for us the reason for the season IS the chocolate and the bunnies. And the golf.

Every year we hide baskets around the house for the kid to find, and then we hide some number of as-ant-proof-as-possible-plastic eggs outside. This year we hid 20.  The kid found 19. I couldn't figure out where the other one was, since it wasn't where I remembered hiding it. Then I saw it .... waaaayyyy across the driveway, down in the mud, where I certainly hadn't left it.
Nor had I done this to it:

I hate wildlife.  The deer eat my trees and the squirrels eat my tulips.  I hope some little bastard choked on his plastic with this one.

So that afternoon NYAB and the kid went golfing while I went for a hike, and then we all came home and ate more candy. I did some gardening while NYAB took a nap (egg hunts that start at 6:55 a.m. on Sundays are not conducive to a day of wakefulness,) and then we all snugged down to watch the Yankees-Red Sox game til we passed out one by one.

Monday was the last day of the kid's vacation. From the get-go, this was a day of disorganization and changed plans. Two months ago, Not Your Average Blogger and I looked at the calendar and assumed the kid would go back to school that day, so the grownups could have a hot date to the Nationals' opening day game.  This is as close to a religious holiday as we get. Much closer than Easter.  So we bought two tickets and arranged with a neighbor to pick him up after school and watch him til we got home.

Only, as I just indicated -- Monday was a school holiday.  Whoops. I asked the four people I knew in this state who weren't working if they'd be interested in watching the kid, and got no takers.  NYAB managed to find a ticket on StubHub at the last minute that was one section over, so we bought that.

Monday morning I got a late start in getting dressed, but I knew that would happen and had planned ahead. I knew it would be crowded, so I didn't take a purse and instead carried my camera, extra lens, sunscreen and assorted ID and money. We all wore our hats and sunglasses. I got my shoes tied in the car on the way into town. The plan was to park at my office and take a cab to the ballpark.

Well, when we got to the office, someone was in my assigned space. So I had to figure out who was supposed to know this, where we were supposed to park instead, blah blah blah. Meanwhile I'm also fielding e-mail on my BlackBerry about upcoming work schedules. So we finally get the car situation sorted out, with the bonus of having had time to stop at an ATM, and off we go in a cab to the stadium. 

Without my camera, but with my extra lens. Without the kid's sunglasses. But with three pens. Because, hey, you might need to sign something! So that is why this post is wildly devoid of art, where there would usually be at least three more photos.

So there we are, taking a cab to the game -- almost. We actually got about 4 blocks from the stadium, when we finally gave up and got out and walked because of all the street closures. Security was a mess because it was Opening Day, the president was throwing out the first pitch, there were a bazillion people, lalala. The lines were crazy and then got even crazier when security started closing lines that were too long and hustling people to lines at other gates.  And pretty much everyone was being wanded after going through the metal detector, which also backed things up.

But, we finally got in, and still had time for me to kiss the boys goodbye and stop at a gift shop to buy an Opening Day souvenir (a ball this year. Usually they have shirts or pins. Whatever.) and get to my seat just as the National Anthem was starting.

Turns out that extra ticket? Sold by a Phillies fan who was part of a group of 27 buses that came down for the game and had apparently started serving beer before sunrise.  Wow. They are a loud and rowdy bunch, y'all. They booed Ryan Zimmerman for getting some do-gooder award. They booed Obama. They booed the umpires.  Then the announcer mentioned Adrian Fenty and they were all, "Whaaa?" Who?" and booed anyway. See, I find this a bit unseemly.  I'll boo a bad play, but I won't boo people for being people. I might choose not to clap, but that's it. The up side to all this booing, however was that the people were, at least, paying attention and into the game. For the most part, anyway. The guy on my left -- who weighed about 300 pounds and was oozing into my seat -- kept dozing off and leaning farther into my space. This was OK -- I'm still small enough that I can wiggle in my seat a bit, and happily the skank on my right was hella skinny. She also seemed far more interested in keeping the beer coming, and at some point disappeared altogether in a quest for same.  But not before she'd inadvertently cheered 3 times for the Nats. Which sort of made me think maybe it was time to lay off the beer, but hey, I'm not her mother.

The plan was that in the middle of the 5th inning, we would meet in the aisle and the grownups would change seats. But the SRO space actually seemed nicer than crowding into that third seat, and I told Mr. Long-Legged 6-2 NYAB so.  Then the kid and I went down and sat in the seats originally purchased -- and wow. Nice seats.  At the end of the foul line along the first base side, three rows from the wall. NYAB said foul balls had been flying like mad for the first half of the game -- and they must have been, because the ball girl even threw one to our kid, who spent all but one inning playing his portable video game hunched on the ground in what little shade he could find. 

The seventh-inning stretch was very sweet. Longtime readers will recall that Take Me Out to the Ball Game is NYAB's and my wedding dance song, and we've danced to it at every game we've been to since. Except this one, because we were split up.  So I had just posted on Facebook that the stretch isn't as much fun without my dance partner when the kid pops out with, "I'm not stopping my game for this because you always dance with Daddy." I say, "Well, Daddy's not here. Why don't you sing with me?" He says, "I could dance with you, if you want. And we can both sing!"  So we did. It wasn't very romantic, and the kid can't lead very well, but it made my game.

Since the score was 11-1 at this point, people started filtering out.  NYAB came down 2 outs later and we all sat together for another inning before leaving in the bottom of the 8th to beat traffic and get the kid to his Boy Scout meeting. It was important we show up on time for that, since I was supposed to give a presentation on "how news gets published on the Internet" as part of their "communication" requirement.

All of which would have been fine, but my spit-and-paperclip Internet connection was verrrrry slooooww. And then I used a borrowed laptop, but had to copy over some web addresses I hadn't fully memorized which made it eeeeven slooooowwwer. This is a bad thing when you are putting on a show for six first-grade boys.

On the plus side, I think I managed to convince them all that journalism is boring and they should all find other fields of endeavour when they grow up. I considered that my good deed for the day.

This week is basically my spring break. I'm working in the mornings, but from home, and that leaves me with free afternoons. I'm spending it on stuff about as exciting as the kid spent his -- except where he did supply closets and pen drawers, I am doing yard work and laundry. Yeeha. I am grateful, however. Next week the office will be painfully short-staffed, so I'm not sure I'll see much of home.

Stay in school, kids. Grow up to be holographic geniuses.

Comments

[Mel]

all the fans of Philly teams are really awful. Like, if you go to an away game in Philly, you can expect to be beaten up if you don't go with a big enough group. They are full of rage and hate and booze.