The blog ... of TOMORROW!

This weekend I decided to finally install the Sitemeter code I signed up for like three months ago, which led to me upgrading to Blogger's new templates. Let me know if anything looks weird to you, and I'll try to fix it - I already had to poke around in the HTML to keep the end of the post from butting up against the date below it.

A day at Yankee Stadium

Last week while Mr. W and I were on vacation in New Jersey, his brother took us to a Yankees game. Can you tell from the above photo how great our seats were? No? Maybe this will help:


Why, hello, A-Rod! Call me if this thing with Madonna doesn't work out.

We were in one of those "order your food from your seats" sections. Sweet! I got a Hebrew National Deli Dog, which was listed as being a quarter pound. Have you ever heard of a quarter-pound hot dog? Anyway, it was huge, delicious, and served on a nice poppy-seed roll. I was enthralled. And it came with chips!


While I was eating my hot dog, the baby being held by the woman in the seat in front of me looked my way. I went into my usual "baby" routine - funny faces and arm waves - and he started bouncing around and reaching out for my hot dog, which was part of the show.

The woman said, "Uh-oh, he's trying to steal your hot dog!" I said, "He'd better not - this thing is good! I'll fight him for it."

Hebrew National should change their slogan from "We answer to a higher authority" to "So good, you'll fight a baby for one."

You better watch out, kid.

I felt lucky to be there for one of the last games to be played in the old Yankee Stadium. One of the big outfield ads is also a countdown of home games left, and after the fifth inning, it changed from 33 to 32.

And to top it all off, the Yankees won. (I'm not normally a Yankees fan, but when in Rome ...) So we got to exit the stadium to the sounds of Frank Sinatra.

"Start spreadin' the news ..."

Quick post-vacation note

One of the best possible ways I can think of to have your vacation mellow utterly harshed is to come home to a car with a dead battery.

Thursday open thread

Some blogs do a "Friday open thread." Inspired by Gina's need for a space to discuss my cat, I'm going to try a "Thursday open thread" instead.

Got something to say about Thursday (the cat or the day)? Put it in the comments.

Vacation!

Guess who got awesome tickets to the Yankees game?

Happy Independence Day from the American Wide Web!

The Substitute

I've known my mother long enough to know that if I come to watch one of her sporting events - heck, if I'm in the same neighborhood as one of her sporting events - I will most likely wind up being drafted to play. (This is a general hazard of knowing people who play sports: sports teams never have enough people, so you're always being asked to play. This pressure is doubled when your mom is asking you, and trebled when you're right there on the sidelines looking on.)

But that didn't occur to me when I went out to Setters this evening to watch her play sand volleyball. I showed up showered (even moisturized!) and wearing jeans and looking generally not like someone who is expecting to play sand volleyball.

This assumption worked just fine for two games.

My mom's team won both those games. They play the third game notwithstanding - but one of the team members must have forgotten, because she booked it out of there five seconds after game two ended.

So the three remaining team members were standing around, thinking their friend was in the bathroom or something, and I saw my mom gesture toward the stands where I was sitting. Her teammate looked in my direction.

I said to my dad, "She's telling them I can play."

My dad paused for a moment, then said, "No!" I don't know why he sounded so surprised - he's been drafted into coed softball games before.

Sure enough, a few minutes later, my mom came over and said, "Hey, Kel - can you play until the other girl comes back?" So I rolled up my jeans and was three points into the game before I found out that someone had seen the regular teammate peeling out of the parking lot.

Anyway, I didn't embarrass myself, we won the game, and I did have fun. But now I have to take another shower tonight, and I can't wear these jeans to work tomorrow.

Maybe I should just start showing up to watch my mom's games already wearing the right clothing to play the sport. After the game, I found out she once made my sister play softball in a skirt. ("But it was a sweat skirt!" she said.)

Hello again, Twitter

After a concerted effort to update at Twitter whenever I think of it, I've decided to add my Twitter feed back to my sidebar.

The key to Twitter, I think, is seeing it not as a mini-blog but as a communication tool for friends. Don't you want to know what your friends are doing, right this second? Well, don't you? Are you a bad friend or something?

Also, the ability to update easily via text message is attractive; it means that I'll be able to post little life updates from my vacation in New Jersey next week so you won't go insane from Kelly deprivation. (The DSM IV lists it as treatable only with the regular application of Gina, which works as a kind of Kelly methadone.)

Partners

Sometimes when I'm sitting at my desk, Thursday will climb onto the radiator. Every now and then, she'll crouch and gear herself up for a jump, I'll move my arms out of the way, and she'll skid slightly as she lands on the desk in front of my computer.

Except today, I didn't notice that she was getting ready for a jump. I felt her front paws hit my arm, then scrabble wildly for a split second before she dropped over the edge of the desk, upending the wastebasket on her way. Whoops.

It never occurred to me that I had a crucial role in this maneuver of hers. I guess when I'm at my computer, I'll just have to keep one eye on the radiator. I wouldn't want to let Thursday down.

Late dinner

In the past few months, I've been turning more and more to beans as an inexpensive, healthy source of protein. (They're tasty, too - black beans and brown rice has become one of my favorite meals.) Lately, I've been taking this frugality to an extreme by buying dried instead of canned beans. They're kind of amazing - $1.50 (at the most) gets you something like 12 servings of legumey goodness.

So late last week I cooked up a batch of chickpeas, figuring I'd make hummus or something. But then there was this party and I didn't have the time to figure out the proportions for The Ultimate Homemade Hummus, so I just bought some at Kroger a half-hour before the party. And because I was hungry, I bought way too much, so now I have a fridge full of hummus AND a full Crock-Pot's worth of chickpeas.

Luckily for me, Kris at Cheap Healthy Good uses psychic power to tap into my every culinary need. I want a schmancy dish to serve my mom for her birthday; she posts Chicken Marsala. I have 17,000 chickpeas what needs eatin'; she puts up Curried Chickpeas and Black Beans. It's eerie!

I should probably be concerned that Kris will use her powers to extract my bank account numbers from my head or something, but for the moment, I'm just happy to have something for dinner.