I've decided it's party week here on FOMW.
Today was a strange day. (Of course today was strange, you might well say. Today was a Tuesday!) Today, however, was a stranger Tuesday than usual, with good things and bad things accompanying the start of hurricane season. First, I get a text while at company prayer time that the boss would like to take me out to lunch. Okay, that'll be awkward but the food'll be good. Then there's also the business that this is the boss's birthday, so an awkward attempt at a birthday celebration interrupts usual Bible study time (after a delightful lesson on stoning to death where we are commanded NOT to look in our Bibles for help with a trivia question). I then head off to lunch (it's not just me and the boss, there are two other gentlemen present) at the Briar Club, TOTALLY out of my league, but it's a good thing I wore a nice shirt--a shirt I'd eventually get marinara sauce on during lunch. Great. The food was SO GOOD, though. Then came a rehearsal for tomorrow night's understudy performance. The rehearsal started late, though, because one of the understudies called and said he'd be late. You know the saying, "Better late than never?" This gentleman opted for "never." Things were weird and kept getting weirder, and eventually our 3-hr rehearsal becomes a 4-hr rehearsal.
Then came the ball game. A coworker had invited me along with an extra ticket her father had to tonight's Nats/Astros game. I went and caught a game that saw us take a pretty comfortable lead, choke it away with two fielding errors in the same inning, take it back, blow it with horrible pitching from our "closer," and then rally to win it on a walkoff two-run single with two strikes in the bottom of the ninth. Had we not rallied, that would have been one of the worst games I'd ever been to. Thanks to the rally, however, and a total team effort from big names like Bourn and Pence as well as bit players named Cash and Feliz and a huge game from some guy who is, for some reason, called Puma, it ended up being the most exciting ball game I've seen since the Angels came back from five runs down in the bottom of the seventh to win Game 6 of the 2002 World Series. It was a classic. It was a game of base hits, long balls, stolen bases, hit-and-runs, bunts, sac flies, good fielding, bad fielding, controversial calls, great pitching, lousy pitching, little guys coming up big time, strategies, and late-inning heroics. I can't think of a time I've seen so much packed into nine innings.
However: what the crap was up with the clips of random puppies on the jumbotron during the ninth?
