Pickles & Dimes

This past weekend was the last Twins regular-game series at the Dome. Coming into the weekend, with three games left to play, the Twins were two games out of first place behind the Detroit Tigers. Exciting!

On Friday, we chatted with our season ticket buddies for the past two years, bemoaning the fact that the camera guy who blocked our view all year was finally gone. Bye, outfield-blocking, sunflower-spitting visual annoyance! Now we can take pictures:

These guys were so much fun we got seats directly behind them at Target Field next year.

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I rush home from work, agonize over which Twins shirt to wear (“We won the last three times I wore this, but lost twice before that…”), watch Jason adjust his ballcap, grab the tickets and scorebook and drive into downtown. We navigate leftover rush hour traffic and confused drivers and pull into a stuffed-to-the-gills parking lot. We hold hands and dodge ticket scalpers and people who stop in the middle of the too-narrow concourses in the Dome for no reason. We smell fresh Dome dogs and mini donuts and beer. We grab pizza and subs and balance our bottles of pop that are handed to us without caps (stadium rule). We are recognized by the ticket checker at our section and admitted with a smile and nod. We greet our usual usher, nod to the guy in our row who’s been to every home game for years, wait for our baseball friends from last year to walk their adorable 2-year-old daughter to their seats across the aisle. We are accosted immediately by the fan photographer and smile broadly as we stash our food behind our backs. For three hours, there is no stress. No work, no job hunt, no vehicles needing brake work, no pets throwing up on the comforter. Just baseball and marking down the plays in the scorebook with a freshly sharpened pencil. There’s White Sox fans sitting next to us, struck silent by their team’s lack of offense. There’s the loud chatty guy behind us, trying to impress his date with baseball facts that are full of inaccuracies. “Pierzynski sure is calling a good game tonight,” he says, even though Pierzynski isn’t playing. “Greinke threw a perfect game two weeks ago,” he claims, even though it was Buehrle in his last start a week ago. A 9-year-old boy stands in the aisle and coerces the crowd to start the wave. His motivational speaker act is successful and everyone cheers. The fame goes to his head and he turns annoying, pleading and cajoling for people to do the wave for another half hour, until the good-natured crowd turns on him and starts yelling for him to sit down. A little girl with glasses gets hit by a foul ball and everyone immediately starts waving for the first aid team, which stays with her for awhile offering ice packs and bandages. A perfectly planned attack of beach balls erupts in the early innings, 40 or 50 beach balls tossed around at once from the upper deck. Our usher mutters, “Oh my GAWD,” when she sees it, and sprints out of her chair to intercept any from reaching the field, grabbing a pen from her purse to puncture the balls she captures. Three beach balls make it onto the field, where the ball boy grabs them, rips them apart and throws them under the bullpen bench. The game is close, 3-2, and the 9th inning is a nailbiter, with guys on first and third and our closer having recently blown a save. But we win and spill out of the Dome into the cool clear night. “Good game,” we say to each other as we head back to real life. “Good game.”

We are back from our 2009 Twins Roadtrip. St. Louis was awesome, full of thousands of Twins fans and well-meaning Missourians who inquired whether our (apparently to them) year-round ice-dwelling bodies could handle the 105 heat index.

It was hot (Weatherman: Looks like today will be the hottest day of the year so far!), but we coped well. We drank plenty of beverages.

We brought ice water-soaked washcloths to the games. Ahhhhhh…

And we found shade whenever we could. (This was on the stadium tour, and during a visit to the Cards’ announcer’s booth, Jason read a note left there for Bert Blyleven. I cannot take him anywhere.)

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So, um…if you’re hypothetically gargling with mouthwash and feel a sneeze coming on, if you try to suppress that sneeze, it won’t end well and you’ll feel as though your throat insides have been rearranged. And you’ll have to clean the bathroom mirror.

Conversation at the baseball game Friday night:

Me: Kubel is 3 for 3. He just needs a homerun to hit for the cycle!

Jason and guy across the aisle: Don’t say it out loud!

[Kubel strikes out.]

Jason and guy: See?!? You jinxed him.

[Twins are down 9-5 in the 7th. Kubel comes up in the 8th with 2 outs and the score 9-7. The bases are loaded. The guys give me a dangerous look.]

Me: I don’t care. He’s going to hit a homerun.

Jason: ARGH! Don’t say it!

Me: To center field.

Jason: You’re jinxing it!!!

Me: He’s gonna do it. I feel it.

[Kubel hits a grand slam between center and right field, hitting for the cycle and putting the Twins ahead for good, 11-9.]

(My voice is still hoarse from the screaming.)

Sunny is a lap cat. Whereas Abby requires some kind of barrier between her and your filthy, disgusting, humanoid lap, Sunny does not discrimate. She loves all laps, blanketed or not. She routinely hops up on my lap when I have my comforter, burrows in, casually drapes a paw on my chest and snoozes away.

Last week, Jason washed that comforter. After opening the dryer, pulling out a different blanket, taking 10 seconds to fold it, and turning back, he found this:

What up?

The highlights of my weekend: Flirting with Antonio, the cat up for adoption at Petco, taking our bikes for a spin for the first time this year, seeing our lawn turn greener by the second, washing off and putting out our patio furniture, splitting a Twix bar with Jason as we walked outside in 74-degree weather, making chicken saltimbocca for dinner.

How about you?