Apparently, "date" IS a dirty word

Last night I took Charlie to an Indianapolis Indians baseball game, tickets and refreshments courtesy of the rep from my printer at work (thanks Lorrie!). It was a beautiful night to be at the ball field.

Mike dropped Charlie off at my office and from there we headed to the downtown stadium. Charlie was beyond excited. He had his baseball glove with him so he could catch foul balls. (Never mind that the glove was wet because he'd left it in the yard during Wednesday's rainstorm.)

We parked and headed into the stadium. I could barely get him to the suite where our seats were located because he wanted to stop on the lower level to watch the game from under the bleachers. Once we got upstairs, Charlie gave a courtesy hello to Lorrie and then wasted no time taking a seat in the front row of the suite.

I, of course, wasted no time in getting some food, which Charlie couldn't bothered by for fear he might miss an errant ball. Before I'd gotten the tomato on my hamburger, Charlie burst in the suite again, yelling, "Mom! You just missed a double play!" The people watching the game from inside the suite were quite amused.

The whole evening was a lot of fun. I met some great people who are also clients of Lorrie's (shout out to Liz, Megan and Ashley). Charlie unknowingly entertained the crew in our suite with his impromptu hip hop/urban/breakdance moves to one of the songs played over the loudspeaker. We saw a homerun; well, I saw the running, not the actual hit because as luck would have it I was chatting when the batter swung.

The only downsides to the night were that the Indians lost the first game (not sure about the second, we left at 10pm) and that Charlie didn't catch a foul ball. That's all right, he did snag two hot dogs, about four giant cookies and who knows how much popcorn.

On the way back to the car, I put my arm around Charlie, gave him a big squeeze and said "Charlie, this was a really fun date!"

To which he replied, "Ewwww! Gross! Don't call it a date!"

"Well, what was it then?" I asked.

"It was mother-oldest-son-fun-time."

Apparently, unlike "grandma," "date" IS a dirty word, at least if you're 9 years old.

It's rain, not rocket science.

The fifth game of the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays was suspended tonight because of rain.

Pretty simple idea, right? Well, apparently the people who watch ESPN are either too dense to understand something so straightforward or have forgotten that baseball is indeed just a game because the sports network played FIVE minutes of a press conference discussing why the game was suspended.

Now, admittedly, I don't enjoy baseball. It's too slow and I'd rather not watch grown men re-arrange themselves while spitting nasty brown stuff on the ground. So, I probably don't have a proper appreciation for the fact that this could have been the deciding game of the World Series.

I only caught this press conference because I didn't bother to change the channel after the Colts mixed performance in their loss against the Tennessee Titans. Sigh...

I was happily checking my e-mail when my attention was drawn to the somber proceedings playing out in front of me on the TV. By the tone of the speaker's voice, I thought that someone had died or had at least been indicted for steroid use. But no...all the hushed discussion was about precipitation.

Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig spoke about being "nervous" in the 4th inning and about making decisions with "trepidation."

C'mon Bud. It's only baseball. It's not like you were trying to decide whether to put your ailing dog to sleep or how you were going to tell your wife that you forgot to get her a birthday present.

As if Bud didn't communicate it clearly enough, he passed the mike over to one of the umpires who spent too much time to say, essentially, "it was raining buckets." Pseudo-meteorologist #2 then handed the mike to yet a third person who at least seemed to have an understanding of how un-hard the situation was to grasp.

"That pretty much covers it," he said, going on to say that they stopped the game when the slipperiness of the ball threatened to make the game "comical."

Which is exactly what this press conference was.