This past weekend, Lynn and I went down to Jersey to spend some quality time with our families. After Lynn exerted her will through a five-hour drive filled with flash storms and miles of traffic, we met up with Lynn's Grandpa Sam, Uncle Mike, and Mom and Dad in Tarrytown. We ate Portuguese and Brazilian food at Caravela in downtown Tarrytown. (I enjoyed a decent braised veal dish served with some mashed potatoes that I suspect were not authentic but which I enjoyed very much nonetheless.)
On Saturday, the six of us who went to dinner on Friday were joined by my Mom and by Wing (who had been rendered plans-less by the immovable force of a girls' (and Jeff?) spa day) at Shea Stadium to see the Mets host the Astros. Now, if you've even read just a few weeks back in my blog, you'll know that Lynn and I have not had the best of luck recently when it comes to attending Mets games in person. And with the mysterious El Duque on the mound for the Mets against the freshly-back-from-the-DL Brandon Backe, I didn't know what to expect.
As we drove into Queens a bit after noon, it became clear that the one thing that I had not expected would be the one thing I was going to be guaranteed to get: rain. Lots of rain.
We met up with Wing and headed to our seats—but say several rows higher up so that we could be covered while we watched the tarp do its best imitation of a corpse until just about twenty minutes past scheduled game time. It was then that rain subsided, the crowd let out a roar, and we were treated to the dance of the grounds crew as they uncovered the field and prepared for the game.
Once the game got underway, our misery intensified as the Astros shelled El Duque in the first inning to the tune of three runs on two home runs. But after that, something miraculous happened: El Duque settled down, and the Mets bats came alive just enough to take a one-run lead on Xavier Nady's three-run shot in the fourth inning. And even though Wing committed baseball sacrilege by leaving before the game was over (OK, he had a good excuse and had warned me beforehand, for the record), Duaner Sanchez and Billy Wagner managed to protect the lead and give the Mets the win. Oh rapture, oh joyous day.
We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening with the Marshalls, where I got a good fix of Julia time. (Julia time mostly consists of playing with a beach ball, staring at a Mets pin with glowing lights, counting to five (sometimes to ten, sometimes in Spanish) over-and-over again, and running around on the floor aimlessly. As I said on the drive back today, I wish more of my friends played the way Julia does.) We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant in Queens which apparently serves delicious pasta—I wouldn't know because I tried the porcini risotto which was mediocre at best. I should have known better when the menu spelled it "porchini."
Sunday arrived and treated me to an emotional back nine at the British Open, culminating in victory and runner-up for the two (prominent) golfers who have lost parents in recent weeks. I think it's amazing and not inaccurate to say that I can empathize with Tiger Woods about something. As he said in his victory speech following the tournament, we all have parents and for almost all of us, they mean the world to us and we miss them terribly when they're not here.
In the afternoon we visited Grandpa and Millie along with Millie's daughter Audrey and granddaughter Sarah. After a couple of hours Lynn and I said are goodbyes and got on the road back to Boston. Lynn slept most of the way and I hummed to myself and noodled on ways to implement abstract syntax tree rewriting schemes in the SPARQL engine I'm working on at work. Clearly, fun times were had by all.
You can see more pictuers from the weekend, including some pictures of Julia, a puddle, and a reservoir, in my photo album.
