America's Pastime

I was reminded last night that I really enjoy watching live pro-baseball*. We took our family to see the Boise Hawks play the Spokane Indians using the tickets the kids earned by reading lots and lots of books this summer. We got to sit on the second to the top row on the 3rd base side. (I didn't have my fear of heights make itself manifest, but Ryan sure did watching Roderic and Hyrum sit close to the end of the row -- a puny chain link fence was the only thing between them and a drop of 100+ feet.) Roderic is showing off the popcorn we got and amazingly enough, you can see the runner approaching homeplate in the background. I don't know how I lucked out with the camera! We sang, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame"...my kids don't know what Cracker Jacks are. The Hawks won 3-0. What a great night.

*During the summers of 1994, 1995 and 1996, I worked as an usher at Franklin Quest field in Salt Lake City and got paid to watch the Salt Lake Buzz play. Usually I worked in the elevator lobby and heard the play-by-play on the speakers (except for the day when OJ was being chased down the freeway in SoCal), and I'd give breaks to the other ushers and watch the game from all over the field. Rained out games were fun and double-headers were brutal. I even got to sing the National Anthem with my sisters once (we sang it so slowly because we weren't used to hearing ourselves in the speakers) and once with Keturah and 2 friends. I first used a cell phone at this job - the phone was gigantic - the ushers were given them as a promotion for guests to be able to use while at the game. I used it a couple of times to call Ryan at BYU in 1996, but I don't remember ever being asked by a patron to use it. It was while working the ball games that I learned to love to put pickles and tomatoes on Polish dogs. YUM!