Wednesday, May 11 - A baseball day

Yesterday was a baseball day for rsc and me.

First we went to an afternoon Sox game vs the Oakland. We weren't sitting in our usual seats having gotten a seats in the Roof Sky boxes (never been that high in Fenway before).


The game had some unneeded drama since we were ahead 4-1 in the top of the ninth and Keith our last-year very reliable closer came in and soon the score was 4-5. In the bottom of the ninth Jason Varitek, Hunk Captain, hit a Pesky Pole* homer with Ortiz on base and we won (the second walk-off homer in a row (the last such time was in 1935)). I guess all's well that ends well, but...

Then we went to see Take Me Out which was lots of fun. I knew about the existence of a shower scene (actually two), but I didn't know there were working showers in this scene. It was a well written/acted play with a good story and lots of funny lines. Oddly we only saw one person in the audience that we knew.

*The Pesky Pole is the pole at the end of 1st base foul line that can be seen above - it intersects with the r in Budweiser.

Jet lagging to the hotel in Pisa

rsc I came back from Tuscany and Venice last week - here is a something about the beginning of the trip.
We arrived at the Pisa airport, picked up our rental car and followed the signs to the Centro to find our hotel. It was near the tower so we figured we wouldn't have too much trouble finding it. We had a map to show where the hotel was but it didn't cover where we were driving at the time. The map didn't have street names which corresponded to the fact that some of the streets didn't have signs. We crossed the Arno, but soon we had apparently driven too far with no more Centro signs so we eventually turned around after a couple of false stabs and drove back with the intent of driving along the river to get closer to the town center. The configuration of one way streets required crossing the Arno again and then we got to a likely bridge and crossed only to find a pedestrian zone so we drove back on the other side, crossed the river, drove further south, crossed again for the 5th time and started back into town. In a bit we started seeing some hotel names including ours and followed them through many turns, going the wrong way on a one-way street for one bit (these signs were for pedestrians) and found the hotel actually finding a parking space almost in front of it - the hotel gave us a permit.

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